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IBM Red Hat Software

IBM Closes Its $34 Billion Acquisition of Red Hat (cnbc.com) 95

Posted by msmash from the big-fish-small-fish dept.
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.
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IBM Closes Its $34 Billion Acquisition of Red Hat More

IBM Closes Its $34 Billion Acquisition of Red Hat

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  • Does this mean CentOS days are numbered?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wiggles ( 30088 )

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        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

        • 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)

          by Vlad_the_Inhaler ( 32958 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @04:06PM (#58897616)

          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.

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)

      by cayenne8 ( 626475 )

      Does this mean CentOS days are numbered?

      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).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <slashdot.worf@net> on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @03:12PM (#58897234)

        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 worked we use CentOS. I expect very large corporations where they absolutely need the support.

        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.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by PCM2 ( 4486 )

          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

    • 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)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @01:44PM (#58896494) Journal

    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.

    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    34 billion dollars for a bunch of FOSS... Somebody should've told them they could just download an ISO for free.

  • Great for competition! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @02:26PM (#58896886)

    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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      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)

        by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @02:52PM (#58897064)

        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.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dwpro ( 520418 )

          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$?

        • You know what they say:
          Linux ain't done,
          till Bash won't run!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          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?

    • SuSE Enterprise? I never ran it but it's that or God forsaken Oracle which I can only imagine as worse

  • ...that they're becoming Big Blue Hat?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, knowing IBM, everything will get much more expensive now, and somewhat worse in quality.

  • Since Red Hat / Linux is free & thus brings in load of trillions I'm sure IBM will recuperate pretty soon. what's next? a story about a man cooking fish in gasoline? I'm all ears honeypots.

  • I worked at IBM and Redhat before the merger (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Tuesday July 09, 2019 @03:37PM (#58897412)
    IBM is huge (300k or so employees). It's like a medium sized city. If it was a city, it'd be a Bangalore or Pune, not Poughkeepsie or Redwood Shores. It's got slums (IBM Global Services) and it's got an uptown (IBM Watson Research Center). It's got weird suburbs with their own chip fabs. However, the overall priorities when I was at IBM seemed to be split between offshoring absolutely everything and every related to Americans, meaning either vast numbers of H1B or just simply offshoring straight to India. IBM is literally a third world shithole with a few traitorous turncoat business weasels still trying to arbitrage everything they can *out* of America as their ticket to the big bonus. Redhat was a different place altogether. It's full of "experts" of which about 10% actually know as much as they believe they know (the dumbasses at IBM were content to act dumb). It's pretty hilarious, really, especially when talking to Red Hat "Sales Engineers" (cue laugh track). Redhat basically started going downhill with the advent of "RHEL" and RHAS (for those with a decent memory). The original Redhat distro (up to version 9, IIRC) was a lot more manageable and sane. It didn't have a lot of the features you see in Red Hat today (LVM2, Systemd, Docker, Corosync, XFS, etc..). However, the upside was that it was far more simple and less cluttered with "great ideas" from 20-somethings who joined the Fedora project but missed the Unix clue-boat because they were busy learning to pee. So even the cool features are badly integrated into RHEL. Redhat as a company had a lot more younger folks working there, but also had a lot more unskilled and unaware assholes working there (yes, even compared with IBM). I guess I could say that at least most of the technical folks at Red Hat spoke clear English. These days I still support older Unix systems as well as modern Linux machines. RHEL7 was a much more problematic release than any before it and our support numbers prove it dramatically. I just renewed my RHCE last month, and Red Hat's training is still a scam (they try to insert obscure questions on their tests to trip up people who don't want to take their expensive classes) but I passed anyway (with a big fuck you to RH Training folks). Now that RHEL8 is out, I can say without any hesitation that Systemd and other "great ideas" from the Fedora retard concentration camp, uhh, I mean "project" have ruined Red Hat as a distribution and the IBM merger will do them in on the business side of things. I see a lot of growth for other distros lately and I think it's due to Red Hat fatigue. One of the ones I keep seeing grow more and more often is MontaVista (an embedded distro). They seem to be stealing a lot of RH's embedded biz. The company I'm at now supports multiple distros and that's one of them. I see it displacing RHEL in quite a few companies along with other (far superior if you ask me) competitors like FreeBSD. Redhat has turned into a very uncool shitty corporate distro powered by a mob of systemd-loving-assholes from Fedora. You remember Fedora, right? The guys who think Gnome 3 is awesome, DBUS configuration is fun, and dropping Xorg and XDMCP for Wayland is a great move.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I think it's pretty easy to see why you're not longer employed.

      • Uhm, I left both companies on my own steam, I'm still working, and I've never been unemployed more than a week, asshat.

        • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by afxgrin ( 208686 )

      What's your opinion on systemd?

      • I think the dust has settled and it's clear. It's caused a massive schism in the Linux community (try mentioning it at a meetup, UUG, or convention sometime if you don't believe it). It has decreased [mitre.org] the overall stability and security of the Linux ecosystem for those who still participate in a Systemd distro. For example observe the rate of security bugs with init in the last 20 years versus Systemd in the last five years (especially the most severe bugs for both). The results are clear: Systemd has a worse

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        > 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.

        • Well, I can answer that because I work with an assload of just those type of folks. They can get American clear English RHCE-or-above-level real-live support for RHEL6 from at least a dozen consultancies which turn out (if you do your homework) to be far superior to RH because they offer shorter SLAs, dispatched direct lines to the engineers, and is generally cheaper than RH by 10%-20%. Those kind of gigs generally roll the customer over into CentOS to stay legal (RH requires all copies be under subscriptio

        • Well I suppose you could always get with the times and learn it.

    • 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

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