IBM Closes Its $34 Billion Acquisition of Red Hat (cnbc.com) 95
IBM closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, the companies announced Tuesday. From a report: The deal was originally announced in October, when the companies said IBM would buy all shares in Red Hat for $190 each in cash. The acquisition of Red Hat, an open-source, enterprise software maker, marks the close of IBM's largest deal ever. It's one of the biggest in U.S. tech history. Excluding the AOL-Time Warner merger, it follows the $67 billion deal between Dell and EMC in 2016 and JDS Uniphase's $41 billion acquisition of optical-component supplier SDL in 2000. Under the deal, Red Hat will now be a unit of IBM's hybrid cloud division, according to the original announcement. The companies said Red Hat's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, would join IBM's senior management team and report to CEO Ginni Rometty. IBM previously said it hoped its acquisition of Red Hat will help it do more work in the cloud, one of its four key growth drivers, which are also social, mobile and analytics. The company lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business. IBM has seen three consecutive quarters of declining year-over-year revenue. But some analysts are hopeful about the Red Hat deal's opportunity to bring in new business.
RIP CentOS? (Score:2)
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They started independent of Red Hat - I imagine they can continue. I don't see IBM closing off their source repositories - it would kill the golden goose.
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So hopefully IBM knows not to screw around too much, however if they had a mind to...
Redhat severely limited that independence:
https://www.redhat.com/en/abou... [redhat.com]
I don't think in order to constrain it or anything, but because they have had an Ubuntu problem, their 'pay-for' edition not having a somewhat-blessed 'free-for' equivalent has been a rough point for RedHat v. Canonical
As corporate involvement in open source has grown, the percentage of a linux distro that requires the source be divulged has dwindled
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I for one welcome our Purple Hat overlords!
All hail the Purple Helmet^H^H^H^H^H^H Hat!!
Re:RIP CentOS? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have my doubts on this one.
This reminds me of when Compaq took DEC over, although the roles are reversed here. The two companies were totally different in the way they did things.
I have no direct experience of the culture at Red Hat but IBM is totally hide-bound with everyone being slaves to "The Process". IBM looked to me like a government department rather than a commercial enterprise. If Red Hat is forced to adopt this model, either prices will have to go way up or the department is going to be making horrendous losses. Prices going way up is probably not a serious option, a lot of customers will then jump ship.
As I said, I have no idea how Red Hat does things now.
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CentOS is killing their golden egg goose! They don't make money when a customer doesn't pay for redhat enterprise. Many customers buy a license for support for 1 server and then CentOS the rest. IBM will audit the shit and ban this as plan b if they don't kill the project. SuSE Enterprise or FreeBSD without SystemD might be better platforms to switch to unless your organization is loaded with cash.
I never used SuSE so I have no idea how good it is as that is more of a European thing.
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I doubt it....
But what it DOES potentially mean, is that Red Hat Linux's days are numbered.
IBM buying something usually means the death of what was previously a good product.
The only company that I believe is worse and buying great products and then killing them with their own crap added on, etc...is CA (Computer Associates).
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Considering they brought in over a million dollars in 2018, it would seem your data point is irrelevant.
Re: Please terminate systemd, PulseAudio, GNOME 3 (Score:1, Interesting)
Everything you listed is a regression, in my opinion.
Containers are a regression. They are just a workaround imposed by the fear of using statically linked binaries. The onerous GPL and LGPL licences don't help with this problem.
PulseAudio is a regression, given the many problem reports from people whose computers no longer play sound!
GNOME 3 is a regression. It tries to force a tablet-centric UI model on desktop and laptop users. It's especially dumb because the tablet fad died out years ago, yet GNOME 3 s
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Containers are great for development work. I even think they are fine in server world as well since its just VMs again but moreso. They are stupid in end user machines. Applications should not ship as containers, its extremely wasteful and just another manifestation of lazy programming. Can't be arsed to rework your code to behave in a modern environment with a secure configuration? That's ok, just package it in a stripped down VM where it runs as root on an old unpatched kernel. Or even better let it share
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You are aware that click2run apps like office365 use appv underneath as a lightweight app level virtualization
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I don't really see how IBM could do this even if they wanted to. RHEL is all OSS code, and CentoOS already takes the source code and removes all RHEL logos, or anything else Redhat owns. I think much/most of it is GPL, so they can't just not release it or they're breaking the license agreement.
IBM would be pretty stupid to try to kill CentOS. It's basically a free product that IBM doesn't have to pay for that's an entry into their product. I'm not _exactly_ sure who uses RHEL, since everywhere I've work
Re:RIP CentOS? (Score:5, Insightful)
You use RHEL when you need a supported product. There are business applications where your choice of OS is either Windows or RHEL. Sure it will run on CentOS, but the application vendor will likely blame it on an unsupported environment. And since the applications are what people use, a RHEL license is a minor cost. so you buy RHEL.
I've seen the choice IT managers make. If they're a windows shop, they will buy a Windows server for it. If they're a Linux shop, they will buy RHEL. And if they're a big company, they'd probably buy a big RHEL site license .
If all you're doing is using it as a Linux distribution, well, CentOS is better. But if you're using it to host business applications that demand RHEL, you use RHEL. And you use the version they say as well - I believe even very old versions stay supported because there are applications that demand it.
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You use RHEL when you need a supported product.
Exactly. It might be regulatory compliance or it might just be corporate policy (you answer to the board of directors). You're probably a large enterprise and you have the money to pay for it.
I once asked Wim Coekaerts who the market for Oracle Linux was. (Oracle maintains a Linux distro that's basically RHEL sources with various patches applied.) He said, "Oracle customers." Says it all, really. You're not getting much more than CentOS will give you, but you've got requirements. Sourcing it from Oracle, ra
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Does this mean CentOS days are numbered?
No. NOW is NaN. Besides, they're only a familiar.
"I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!"
Well played, RedHat (Score:3, Insightful)
So this is what infecting the Linux ecosystem with systemD is worth. A lot of control, proprietary services, and a very special place at the table.
For the record: fuck systemD and Pottering.
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So this is what infecting the Linux ecosystem with systemD is worth.
You don't understand. This isn't systemd's fault. It's Trump's. This post may sound stupid but it makes far more sense than what you just wrote.
34 billion dollars for a bunch of FOSS... (Score:1)
34 billion dollars for a bunch of FOSS... Somebody should've told them they could just download an ISO for free.
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That's funny, I have been re-binging the Bab5 series. Great stuff! Interesting parallels to what's been happening here for the last few years.
Unfortunately, we can't rely on the Minbari or Vorlons to help out just yet. :(
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He based it on parallels from history. There were parallels of Clark to the Clinton Admin, the Bush Admin, Obama Admin, and Trump. There will always be parallels. That's one of the powers of the show.
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Most of history is cycles. We are people and we have the same motivations. The means and methods change a bit
Great for competition! (Score:4, Interesting)
I know everyone that's a capitalist agrees that the acquisition of the field leader by a megacorp is a great way to encourage competitors to join in an compete, right? Hello? Nobody?
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Do we really need yet another competing Linux distribution at this point? As it is, fighting with the different dependency issues and package manager formats for the Debian/Ubuntu and Redhat/Fedora based distributions is painful enough.
Re:Great for competition! (Score:4, Insightful)
We do. The problem is a huge influx of people that worked on Windows and Windows-type software and now falsely believe they have a clue. The number of bad ideas that made it into distros has sharply risen in the last few years.
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So it's somehow Microsoft's fault that the OSS gatekeepers aren't keeping some mythical software quality alive. Is there anything you can't blame on M$?
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It is MS's fault that they foster an environment that is mediocre in every aspect where it is not worse.
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Of course Windows Server doesn't have SystemD. Just saying :-)
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Linux ain't done,
till Bash won't run!
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I thought the market was supposed to fix that too. Someone makes a bad product, someone else will make a better one and everyone will switch.
Didn't everyone move to BSD and Denuvian?
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If you're running linux and you're somehow inescapably tied to RHEL you're doing it wrong.
If Redhat catches a bad case of suck under IBM, then so be it. Move on to forks or other distros or other vendors.
And this is the correct answer whenever some complains about too many choices in Linux.
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Easier said than done when your hardware and software isn't certified to run on anything but Redhat or Oracle and last I checked Amazon E3 only had both of those versions or it's own distro if your infrastructure uses it for back up.
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SuSE Enterprise? I never ran it but it's that or God forsaken Oracle which I can only imagine as worse
So does this mean... (Score:2)
...that they're becoming Big Blue Hat?
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Well, knowing IBM, everything will get much more expensive now, and somewhat worse in quality.
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vedder (Score:2)
I worked at IBM and Redhat before the merger (Score:5, Interesting)
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I think it's pretty easy to see why you're not longer employed.
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Yeah we can see the "steam" that is powering you. Take a chill pill mate, life isn't as bad as you think, and neither are any of the things mentioned in your post.
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I was going to post something similar but you basically covered every point I was going to. RHEL 6 was the last good RedHat release. It's still being installed all over the place by people who want to avoid SystemD. When it comes time to move to a new system there are other alternatives (FreeBSD is my first pick as well, mainly because of native ZFS).
I can say IBM offshoring is the reason why, as TFA states IBM has been losing money. People don't want to pay $100/hr for a 19 year old Indian amateur engineer
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> RHEL 6 was the last good RedHat release. It's still being installed all over the place by people who want to avoid SystemD
--Why would you install RHEL 6 when support for it is ending in 2020? The relative lack of non-systemd .rpm-based distributions aside, there should be alternatives.
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Well I suppose you could always get with the times and learn it.
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Xorg and x11 is shit! Why is it revered? It took up to 16 Meg's of ram back when PC's had ,8 Meg's and halved frame rates and couldn't support true type fonts or opengl?! Shit Mesa and true type fonts servers were hacked work arounds back in the day! It's a security nightmare too