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IBM Red Hat Software Businesses

IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion (bloomberg.com) 398

International Business Machines (IBM) is acquiring software maker Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion, the companies said Sunday. From a report: The purchase, announced on Sunday afternoon, is the latest competitive step among large business software companies to gain an edge in the fast-growing market for Internet-style cloud computing. In June, Microsoft acquired GitHub, a major code-sharing platform for software developers, for $7.5 billion. IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers. From a press release: This acquisition brings together the best-in-class hybrid cloud providers and will enable companies to securely move all business applications to the cloud. Companies today are already using multiple clouds. However, research shows that 80 percent of business workloads have yet to move to the cloud, held back by the proprietary nature of today's cloud market. This prevents portability of data and applications across multiple clouds, data security in a multi-cloud environment and consistent cloud management.

IBM and Red Hat will be strongly positioned to address this issue and accelerate hybrid multi-cloud adoption. Together, they will help clients create cloud-native business applications faster, drive greater portability and security of data and applications across multiple public and private clouds, all with consistent cloud management. In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation. IBM's and Red Hat's partnership has spanned 20 years, with IBM serving as an early supporter of Linux, collaborating with Red Hat to help develop and grow enterprise-grade Linux and more recently to bring enterprise Kubernetes and hybrid cloud solutions to customers. These innovations have become core technologies within IBM's $19 billion hybrid cloud business. Between them, IBM and Red Hat have contributed more to the open source community than any other organization.

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IBM To Buy Red Hat, the Top Linux Distributor, For $34 Billion

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  • Damn. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:12PM (#57550371) Homepage Journal

    I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

    • And I would have to move to Suse. Otherwise I will not get support for the EDA software.
    • Re:Damn. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:28PM (#57550509)

      I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

      Why? Is there some specific IBM behavior you object to? If so, please explain it here.

      If it’s just a dislike of corporate involvement with Linux... Red Hat was the wrong distro for you in the first place.

      • Re: Damn. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:34PM (#57550555)

        IBM license fees are predatory. Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses. IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs and critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)

        • Not noticed that for either TSM or GPFS, or Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Scale as IBM like to call them these days.

        • Re: Damn. (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:37PM (#57550865)

          IBM license fees are predatory.

          I don't know about that, none of the open source IBM software I use has any license fees, predatory or otherwise. Some are GPL but I don't count that as predatory.

          Dragon is a pretty nice OpenStack backup system I've been using in house for some time now.
          Got it off github too

          LLVM in the kernel is pretty amazing stuff for managing LVM, RAID, and other similar systems.
          Far more stable than ZFS has ever managed to reach.

          I've even played with their Watson speech-to-text stuff, which is a service offering not a software download, and even that is free as in doesn't cost money if you aren't going to be sending them a massive number of API requests every minute.

          Plus they require you to install agents on your servers for the sole purpose of calculating use and licenses.

          Simply not true, I've never had to do this. The closest "evil software" I've ever had to install to run some IBM software is Java, and that's Oracles fault not IBMs.

          IBM exploits workers by offshoring and are slow to fix bugs and critical CVEs (WAS and DB2 especially)

          So does RedHat, and many companies for that matter. If you are against off shoring, then nothing at all has changed here.

          I can't comment on "WAS" or DB2 bugs, never used them. But I guess sure, RedHat fixes CVEs damn fast and is a high bar to stand up to.

      • IBM has a history of, uh, aggressive lawsuits with respect to IP and bend companies over barrels with licensing fees and legal fees. They are valid more often than not, but having a history of corporate shakedowns doesn't make you many friends.
        Some of those patents are, well, not as sound as a lot of tech people would prefer.
      • Re:Damn. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:13PM (#57550755)
        IBM buys a company, fires all the transferred employees and hopes they can keep selling their acquired software without further development. If they were serious, they'd have improved their own Linux contribution efforts. But they literally think they can somehow keep selling software without anyone with knowledge of the software, or for transferring skills to their own employees. They literally have no interest in actual software development. It's all about sales targets.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          My advice to Red Hat engineers is to get out now. I was an engineer at a company that was acquired by IBM. I was fairly senior so I stayed on and ended up retiring from the IBM, even though I hated my last few years working there. I worked for several companies during my career, from startups to fortune 100 companies. IBM was the worst place I worked by far. Consider every bad thing you've ever heard about IBM. I've heard those things too, and the reality was much worse.

          IBM hasn't improved their Linux contr

      • Re:Damn. (Score:5, Informative)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:18PM (#57550771)

        If so, please explain it here.

        IBM Rational DOORS: Starting at $5,460.00 USD
        IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation: Starting at $164.00 USD per user per month

        And that's pricing I can find. I don't even want to know what we're paying for IBM ClearCase.

        IBM buys companies (Like Rational) and milks by exorbitant fees. They're only slightly 'better' than Oracle.

        I expect anyone that doesn't have an IBM RedHat Certification(tm) won't have the 'full warranty'. Here let us direct you to one of our training centers.

    • Or switch to suze

    • I'm going to have to switch to Ubuntu.

      Since Red Hat has only ever been good as a server operating system (and it ceased being good at that around Redhat 5), I recommend going straight to the mother of operating systems: Debian.

  • A Cloudy argument. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:16PM (#57550409) Journal

    IBM said its acquisition of Red Hat was a move to open up software development on computer clouds, in which software developers write applications that run on remote data centers.

    It's all open source. What's stopping them from developing to the Cloud, NOW?

    • Probably capital investment and lack of talent. It's not as though you can magically build a massive cloud infrastructure from the ground up in short order if you don't already have people who know what they're doing. You're going to need data centers, equipment, technicians, etc. It might take several years for everything you need to be build, delivered, and installed. Then you need to attract customers away from Red Hat, which may not be easy and while you've been building up just to reach the position wh
  • systemd (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:21PM (#57550457)

    The next version will be branded IBM(R) SystemD/2.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:26PM (#57550487)

    Henceforth, it’ll be known as “Big Blue Hat”.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by TFlan91 ( 2615727 )

      You joke... but...

      I could honestly see Trump reading a headline "IBM rebrands Red Hat to Blue Wave" and going bat-shit over it

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:56PM (#57550673)

    IBM hates the olds! All People aged 50+ will be fired and replaced with coders fresh out of blockchain bootcamps! Also, all operations will be moved to a shanty town in India, those not willing to take a pay cut and relocate will be replaced with Indians.

    • by Luthair ( 847766 )
      More likely sent off-shore to India.
      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        How long till IBM ships Poettering to India? weeks/months? Can we buy futures based on his declining health? This is great news.

  • Goodbye Redhat. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @03:57PM (#57550679)
    IBM acquisitions never go well. All companies acquired by IBM go through a process of "Blue washing", in which the heart and soul of the acquired company is ripped out, the body burnt, and the remaining ashes to be devoured and defecated by its army of clueless salesmen and consultants. It's a sad, and infuriating, repeated pattern. They no longer develop internal talent. They drive away the remaining people left over from the time when they still did develop things. They think they can just buy their way into a market or technology, somehow completely oblivious to the fact that their strategy of firing all their acquired employees/knowledge and hoping to sell software they have no interest in developing would somehow still retain customers. They literally could have just reshuffled and/or hired more developers to work on the kernel, but the fact they didn't shows they have no intention of actually contributing.
  • by radux ( 776711 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:01PM (#57550711)
    the possibilities ... OS/2 compatibility, Presentation Manager instead of Gnome/KDE, systemd for AIX?
  • Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.

    And now attention:
    Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1 ... :-)

    • by ARos ( 1314459 )

      Clearly you are not employed in tech; otherwise you wouldn't ask such a dopey question.

    • by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:29PM (#57550837)

      Oh, wait, /. is a US joint. Ok, forget about what I said.

      And now attention:
      Getting modded into earths core in 3,2,1 ... :-)

      Virtually anyone running an actual production system.

      I hope IBM keeps them pretty separate. One of the reasons RHEL is so successful is they've done a good job of maintaining a good relationship with the hobbyist crowd. They're not as cool as Ubuntu but they have a lot of fans in the community, both devs and users, and that helps them get into the server rooms.

      Probably Red Hat's biggest liability has been their size, the more Free Software aligned crowd is very nervous about big corporations. If they ever start losing the community some other distro is going to start popping up in the server room.

  • by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @04:26PM (#57550819)
    Red Hat closed Friday at $116.68 per share, looks like the buy out is for $190. Not everyone will be unhappy with this. I hope the Red Hat employees that won't like the upcoming cultural changes have stock and options, it may soften the blow a bit.
  • AIX Redux (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DougDot ( 966387 ) <dougr@parrot-farm.net> on Sunday October 28, 2018 @05:43PM (#57551189) Homepage

    Oh, good. Now IBM can turn RH into AIX while simultaneously suffocating whatever will be left of Redhat's staff with IBM's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy.

    This is what we call a lose - lose situation. Well, except for the president of Redhat, of course. Jim Whitehurst just got rich.

    • Re:AIX Redux (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @06:01PM (#57551279)

      Redhat is damn near AIX already. AIX had binary log files long before systemd.

      • by DougDot ( 966387 )

        Redhat is damn near AIX already [...]

        Yes, but now they also get IBM's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy.

        • Worse than Redhat's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy? Maybe, but it's close.

          • by DougDot ( 966387 )

            Worse than Redhat's crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracy? Maybe, but it's close.

            I used to be a Redhat dev, pre IPO, and I worked with IBM for about 15 years With, not for. Trust me: IBM has top honors here re: crushing, indifferent, incompetent bureaucracies.

  • I can think of two: Lotus Development and ROLM Telecom. Readers can probably name others. Will Red Hat be next? Depends how much they leave Red Hat alone, but I'm not betting they'll do that.
  • Now with Presentation Manager!

  • Now watch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheDarkener ( 198348 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @07:11PM (#57551657) Homepage

    Microsoft will next merge with IBM.

    Think about it. Makes sense. Microsoft couldn't purchase Redhat directly, that would make too many people upset.

    But if IBM purchases Redhat, then Microsoft purchases IBM, they get Redhat by proxy. Then they have what they want - direct control over one of the most important Linux distros in the world. That, along with Github, gives them a pretty strong position in the F/OSS ecosystem.

  • Count me as one of the people who *like* IBM. I was on board the OS/2 train for years until the company so badly mismanaged & mishandled it that they effectively surrendered to Microsoft. The software engineers at the company are top notch. I can only hope that upper management has learned a few lessons in the past twenty years.
  • The guys directly responsible for Gnome and systemd will be IBM employees very shortly. This will be interesting.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @10:25PM (#57552497)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Sunday October 28, 2018 @10:52PM (#57552571)

    So much for Redhat's fight against software patents, IBM is the biggest patent troll of them all. Traditionally goes easy on open source projects but some flipping idiot might decide at any time that monetizing patents is the new get rich quick scheme of the month.

  • Now maybe I'll be able to run Domino in 64 bit on Linux without IBM hardware.

  • First systemd.
    Then a CoC.
    Now Borged by IBM.

    They'll probably be ok for a few years. Watch for the rebranding. When they start calling it IBM Enterprise Linux, you'll know they've been throughly assimilated. Then after about five years of steady market decline, it'll just quietly disappear.

  • Gee (Score:3, Funny)

    by the_archer666 ( 565431 ) <slashdot_org@@@reauktion...de> on Monday October 29, 2018 @01:06AM (#57552987) Homepage
    Here I was, trying out some new stuff which didn't work on my Ubuntu test system. Manager looks over my shoulder and asked what it takes to get the thing running, to which I replied "we need to buy Redhat". Guess I should have added "licences".
  • by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak @ y a h o o.com> on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:03AM (#57553261) Homepage Journal

    They contributed JFS and ported DB/2. They ported Linux to their mainframes and ran the first Linux TV ads. During a superbowl, I think.

    On the other hand, their maintenance of these projects, other than their mainframe, has been limited.

  • by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @03:08AM (#57553275)
    Real news is: wow! IBM has $34b!

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