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From the press release:
IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.
Blog posting from Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst.
Red Hat announced today that they have agreed to be acquired by IBM.
"The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer. It changes everything about the cloud market," said Ginni Rometty, IBM Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer. "IBM will become the world's #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses.
"Most companies today are only 20 percent along their cloud journey, renting compute power to cut costs," she said. "The next 80 percent is about unlocking real business value and driving growth. This is the next chapter of the cloud. It requires shifting business applications to hybrid cloud, extracting more data and optimizing every part of the business, from supply chains to sales."
"Open source is the default choice for modern IT solutions, and I'm incredibly proud of the role Red Hat has played in making that a reality in the enterprise," said Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO, Red Hat. "Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience – all while preserving our unique culture and unwavering commitment to open source innovation."
[...] IBM and Red Hat also will continue to build and enhance Red Hat partnerships, including those with major cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba and more, in addition to the IBM Cloud. At the same time, Red Hat will benefit from IBM's hybrid cloud and enterprise IT scale in helping expand their open source technology portfolio to businesses globally.
"IBM is committed to being an authentic multi-cloud provider, and we will prioritize the use of Red Hat technology across multiple clouds" said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President, IBM Hybrid Cloud. "In doing so, IBM will support open source technology wherever it runs, allowing it to scale significantly within commercial settings around the world."
Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM's Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat's open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM's senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat's headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.
What does this mean for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux?
As reported on CNBC, Red Hat is to become a "distinct unit" of IBM, for whatever that's worth, according to their own press release.
Let's hope they will be allowed to continue with their upstream-first philosophy, because frankly that's what I'm most worried about -- the huge number of Red Hat employees who are major contributors to lots of open source projects, including the Linux kernel, suddenly working for IBM, which has not historically been a "nice" company...
We continue to live in "interesting times"...
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @10:39PM (17 children)
Red Hat died today.,, Soon to be like other IBM divisions... cutting staff and trying to increase profit, before being shut down. IBM has had main great products that it refuses to market, Red Hat soon will be another.
IBM should have bought Microsoft in 1980's, but failed... and the collapse continues.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @10:45PM (6 children)
There is a tiny chance that the shit (PulseAudio, NetworkManager, Systemd, GNOME3...) will stop.
OTOH, from IBM we get AIX. Hmmm.
(Score: 3, Troll) by NPC-131072 on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:56PM (5 children)
And the Holocaust [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:27AM
Ouch! One spicey motherfucker with the definative slam dunk against big tech.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Monday October 29 2018, @01:58AM (2 children)
Tried to mod you "Holy SHIT, he went THERE, DIDN'T HE" but that mod is missing for some reason.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @02:28AM (1 child)
try touché. Or touchy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @06:59PM
Touchy? What is this a Trump rally?
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday October 29 2018, @11:16PM
My own observation is large corporations become so executized where any further innovation becomes impossible, as the paychecks of those entrenched in the status quo depend on the leadership skills of not rocking the boat.
Innovators are best dealt with while their capabilities are unknown to the investors, lest the investors find out whose doing the innovation and how much they are paying for handshakes.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Apparition on Sunday October 28 2018, @10:48PM (2 children)
I am sure that IBM will lay-off everyone at Red Hat over the age of 45 and offshore their jobs to Asia. The good news is that that means Lennart Poettering only has a few years remaining at Purple Hat.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @10:57PM
What happens to a soy boy at age 45? Great experiment here. Hopefully he will be homeless before then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:09PM
Actaully, IBM tends to off-soruce to Eastern Europe now. Though I have seen in office a few from India still, but the number is dropping.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by hoeferbe on Monday October 29 2018, @02:53AM (5 children)
One opinion I heard was that since nearly all of Red Hat's products are FOSS products, one assumes IBM is not buying Red Hat for that. If IBM wanted their own GNU/Linux or other product, they'd simply fork the code. IBM must be buying Red Hat for the people and that institutional knowledge.
And since IBM is paying $34B for Red Hat -- a value worth about 27% of IBM's total assets [marketwatch.com] -- one could also conclude that IBM is betting a big chunk of `the farm` on this deal. Thus, it would be against IBM's best interests to arbitrarily cut lots of staff or make sweeping changes (like curtailing working remotely [wsj.com]) that would cause Red Hatters to leave. (A large percentage of Red Hat's work force work remotely.)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @05:27AM
You forgot brand name and customers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday October 29 2018, @01:25PM
IBMs core competency is eliminating those, so I donno about that...
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday October 29 2018, @04:36PM
No one ever went broke overestimating the avarice and stupidity of IBM management.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday October 29 2018, @09:53PM
Actually, if I'm an IBM exec with even a tiny ounce of common sense I'd buy Redhat for their FOSS product strategy. Redhat has created a very unique and successful business model forking FOSS products and shrink wrapping them as commercial products. IBM have been in their death spiral for years with their consulting gig.
However, like you I really doubt IBM is buying Redhat for their business model, more like their customer base. Redhat's business model require a healthy dose of investment in engineering as they build the shiny proprietary tools over the FOSS stuff and also active patching over older versions for their commercial customers. You really can't do that when you've gone through decades of transitioning from true engineering to "consulting" like IBM has. It'll be interesting to see if IBM assimilates Redhat into the mothership's business model or they take the advantage to keep the status quo an hedge their outdated business model. IBM as it stands today will likely be the former.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday October 29 2018, @10:24PM
You are assuming those who engineered this deal have IBM's or anyone's interests but their own short term stock payoffs in mind.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:58PM
Seems more like a match made in heaven, as both companies makes their money from support contracts.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:09PM (1 child)
Linux is shareware... you could have downloaded the source code for free. By buying the company you've now opened your doors to pink-haired CoC SJWs who will ruin your business even faster than you've been doing it yourself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @12:54AM
I'm sure big blue won't give a tiny rats ass about what a pink-haired guy in women's clothing screams at them on the street.
(Score: 2) by Revek on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:19PM
There goes Tokyo
Go, go, Godzilla
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Snotnose on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:40PM (14 children)
I know several others have already said the same thing, but this is the death of Red Hat.
CSB. Back in '94/95 I ran OS/2. It was faster than Windows, and almost everything worked under it (Falcon 3.0 voice didn't, that's the only thing I remember that didn't). Microsoft swore Win95 would be out by the end of the year, which gave IBM a good 3-4 months head start. Went to Comdex in October of 95, found the IBM booth, and asked them about OS/2. They didn't know what I was talking about. OS/2 was the prime candidate to knock the bug-ridden Windows to the curb, but the IBM employees at one of the biggest conferences of the year didn't even know what it was. IBM sent a bunch of mainframe saleslime to a consumer electronics show.
That was when I realized OS/2 was dead.
When Win95 came out it turned out OS/2 ran more programs than Win95. Didn't matter, IBM was clueless. Side note: What didn't work under Win95 but ran fine under OS/2? Competitors to Word, Excel, and other Microsoft programs.
Another CSB. Not sure if it was that show or the next year, but there were Chinese guys in the basement selling "adult" CDs. The booth was deserted, there were 2-3 people frantically applying labels to stacks of unlabeled CDs. We both bought one, cost something like $5 each. Had a good laugh and proceeded to find the booths we cared about.
Couple hours later our search for booths we cared about took us to the basement. That Chinese booth was fricken packed. Dave and I looked at each other, WTF, and carried on.
Turned out we couldn't play the movies on the CDs we bought. We were both very experienced computer guys, developing software for Linux (in 94-95). Neither of us could play our CDs. Some 10 years later I ran across that dirty disc and it was a 90 minute movie of a guy and girl fucking.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:49PM (1 child)
VLC to the rescue?
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday October 29 2018, @12:08AM
Naww, Win98 played them flawlessly. Even had the titles, chapters, previews and such. Win95? nada
I wonder if I still have that CD somewhere?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:54PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @07:03PM
COINTELPRO Security Bros
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Monday October 29 2018, @12:09AM (4 children)
This is basically true, but you're oversimplifying a bit. OS/2 had another major drawback, besides the fact that IBM for whatever reason didn't push it. It also was incompatible with most existing hardware. I had a set of disks for it I tried to install on virtually every PC I had access to and never got it to install. It wanted recent high end hardware, bus mastering video and disk controllers, and this was in the days of MCA/VESA/EISA. I had MCA machines but they were a couple of years older and didn't have high end video. I had newer machines with VESA/EISA that had the horsepower, but the drivers were lacking. So I never even got to see it run, until after Win95 had taken over at least.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday October 29 2018, @12:47AM (2 children)
Yeah, how about no. Back then a PC cost about $2500. Newest things were CD drives, graphics cards, and sound cards, all of which I had. OS/2 worked with no problem with my hardware. Only issue I had was a game's voice didn't work. Considering the incompatibilities back then (Oh, you have this CD drive? So sad, too bad, you should have bought that one). See also: video cards and sound cards.
All my hardware worked perfectly (see again Falcon 3.0 voice). I had friends running OS/2 at the time, hardware issues were a non-issue.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday October 29 2018, @01:20AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday October 29 2018, @05:53AM
My memory is that OS/2 ran fine on any PC. I had it on an IBM PS/2 (or was it an AT?) and on a clone, can't remember the name, maybe Arch or something like that, made in Freemont, CA or thereabouts.
I was really ready to take the whole company on OS/2 when I noticed exactly what you're saying, IBM didn't have a clue. I had experimented with GEM trying to move into PCs. The company then was on HP/UX and was considering moving to AS/400, ended running Netware in the servers and Windows on the PCs.
I think IBM screwed big time then, but it wasn't a compatibility issue; it was a management (or lack thereof) issue.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @05:12PM
I didn't have hardware problems with OS/2. I had install problems. The version of OS/2 I bought came with 30 or so 3.5" floppy disks. One of those 30 disks was corrupted and stopped the install progress mid-way. I contacted IBM multiple times to get a replacement disk, and 2 months later I got one. I tried to install again, and got 5 more disks through the process and hit another that was corrupted. It was incredibly frustrating. As bad as Win95 was, I got it to install quickly. IBM killed OS/2 in many, many different ways. Sad.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 29 2018, @12:10AM (1 child)
Wow. A whole 90 minutes of fucking? high five to that dude.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday October 29 2018, @10:29PM
You had to have something to do back then while your software compiled/installed...
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday October 29 2018, @12:55AM (2 children)
The OS/2 deal breaker for me was that it couldn't run Telix or any BBS software (ran fine in DOS).
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 1) by RobC207 on Monday October 29 2018, @11:06PM (1 child)
Okay woah. I ran a 12 line BBS on Wildcat! on the OS/2 using three 386s over a Lantastic network so I don't know what you're talking about.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday October 29 2018, @11:20PM
My mistake. I'm curious what terminal program you used on OS/2.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 28 2018, @11:54PM (20 children)
Linux development takes a lot of corporate money. It has to; there's no way things would have come this far this fast without it (though we may also presume systemd, pulseaudio, gnome3, and a whole host of other sins wouldn't have been committed...).
There is a very good chance that someone, I know not who, is trying to destroy Linux, and probably the BSDs as well. I can't help but wonder if these corporate takeovers and the longer-term insertion of anti-patterns are an attempt to destroy F/OSS in general. It may be time for a fork, and soon.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @12:09AM (1 child)
Isn't it suspicious that systemd, pulseaudio and gnome3 were all written by the same guy?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Subsentient on Monday October 29 2018, @01:48AM
Well, in defense of pulseaudio, I've been using it on Fedora for a while now, and I've actually come to prefer it, because the mixer lets you do things that ALSA either cannot do or requires 100 lines of obscure configuration to do. Systemd, on the other hand, is dog shit. That's why I wrote Epoch.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 29 2018, @12:38AM (5 children)
The good news is that the licensing of both Linux and the BSDs makes forking a very easy thing to do. Even if we had to go back to pre-systemd releases, there would still be a functional operating system there, albeit one with some challenges and a bunch of missing features. But the key part about all of this is that we wouldn't be starting from nothing like Linus did.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:30AM (4 children)
Devuan already did that for you.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Blymie on Monday October 29 2018, @08:28AM (2 children)
Debian does that for you too, at least for servers... none of my servers run systemd (my desktop doesn't either, but I did have to recompile two debian packages). I'm not currently managing anything large, so we're talking about 500 servers or so, over baremetal and VMs.
In order to use sysvinit on Debian stable, do a bare install (otherwise you'll have to purge lots of systemd stuff) and:
apt-get install sysvinit sysvinit-utils
reboot
apt-get remove systemd
After.. to ensure you don't accidentally pull systemd in again (some things have recommends, etc):
# this is the only systemd package that is required, so we up its priority first...
Package: libsystemd0
Pin: release stretch
Pin-Priority: 700
# exclude the rest
Package: systemd
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: *systemd*
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: systemd:i386
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
Package: systemd:amd64
Pin: release *
Pin-Priority: -1
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 30 2018, @03:48PM (1 child)
That works, but there now are Debian packages that depend on a functioning systemd.
Devuan has been tracking them down one by one and removing these dependencies.
(Score: 1) by Blymie on Wednesday October 31 2018, @10:07AM
So far, I haven't run into one related to a server. A desktop, yes.. as I mentioned, I've had to recompile two packages to get a functional desktop.
Of course I run sawfish + kpanel + konsole from trinity, which greatly helps with desktop + systemd depends.
Devuan seems OK, but ... well, we'll see what happens. My concerns are devuan is an unknown (currently) to me and many. It's not easy to sell 'new, I've never ever ever heard of this before" to a client, or boss/manager.
Meanwhile, I can retain debian, it's infrastructure (updates, debian devs, bug reports, etc) with the above small changes. Sadly, I'll probably adopt systemd eventually.
Right now, it's more about "it's too new!". I don't really want to adopt systemd until the changelog is reduced to almost zero changes per year. This is an init system, stable + no changes = best.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday October 29 2018, @03:54PM
Which is great, but I'm trying to assuage the fears of the Lennart-conspiracy-theory crowd.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Monday October 29 2018, @12:39AM (7 children)
I'm not too bothered about this.
At least it's IBM buying Redhat, they're so inept that if their goal really is to kill Linux, Linux will probably get stronger.
The only company who might mess a buyout like this worse than IBM would be HP.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:22AM (1 child)
but I shudder at the thought that they really want to help
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 30 2018, @03:50PM
About a decade or so ago, I heard that IBM was spending about a billion dollars a year on Linux-related development.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @03:25AM (3 children)
I remember when redhat formed. It was a late comer, and IMO technically inferior in every way to the existing distributions. But, they had tons of money behind them. IBM was redhats's largest investor, at the time.
Redhat was really a shitty company* so if IBM kills them, it may be a good thing.
* Redhat released CVS head of gcc as if it were the next release, so they could be "first" to market. Fucked with gcc team's reputations, and wasted tons of their time. GCC skipped the version number that redhat faked.
Redhat created fake standards that made their crappy distro the only compliant version. Morons at bigcorps believed this shit.
Redhat refused to accept patches for a data corruption bug in ReiserFS (before the murderfs stuff happened). They didn't give a fuck about their customer's losing their data.
Redhat broke the fuck out of KDE in an attempt to integrate it better with their own stuff. KDE team ended up wasting their time fixing redhat's mess in an effort to protect their own reputations.
Redhat: systemd cancer seems like a microsoft-esq embrace, extend, extinguish move. TBD...
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Monday October 29 2018, @08:59AM
Don't forget the RPM database corruption bug that existed for 23 months due to the maintainer being... well see for yourself: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=119185 [redhat.com]
If a customer reported a bug of that severity to me, and I refused to investigate or acknowledge the problem, I'd have surely been fired pretty quickly. But it took nearly two years, during which any system could have severe corruption, before any action was taken. I don't even understand the point of view of the maintainer here; even at the end of that ticket, they never articulated their rationale or justified their actions, despite the cause of the bug and the severity of the consequences.
RedHat seem to have very poor checks and balances in place, and allow individual primadonnas to ride roughshod over their users and fellow employees. The RPM maintainer was not an isolated incident. Look at Drepper, Poettering, and numerous others. In most companies, their bad attitude would not have been tolerated. And it's not like the attitude is necessary or conducive to creativity and quality.
Over the last decade or so, RedHat increasingly swallowed up dozens of core Linux projects which were previously written and maintained by volunteers. While I can understand their need to have some control over their own destiny and fix bugs in a timely manner, I do thing that the increasing corporate control has some downsides, particularly when it's all concentrated in one place. If IBM rationalise a lot of RedHat's activity, and divest themselves of all these small tools (like util-linux) and even stuff like systemd, I think that would be good for the longer term health of the Linux and wider open/free software ecosystems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:56PM (1 child)
Note also that in recent years RH has been getting into bed with the MI complex. Complete with a retired general on the board.
RH has also been a big believer in SELinux, a NSA derived security sub-system for the kernel that is likely to have given many a sysadmin (more) gray hairs.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 29 2018, @06:26PM
That's not new. It's probably only increased because Linux has become more important.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 29 2018, @01:28PM
The ultimate red pill would be IBM realizing they're inept and using that ineptitude intentionally to save Linux.
How do you destroy something cancerous like systemd if you have no realistic options other than billions of dollars?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Apparition on Monday October 29 2018, @02:51AM (3 children)
I would say start all over again with Redox OS [redox-os.org]. It's a Unix-like microkernel operating system written in Rust. It learns from the past 25 years of open source development by using a more modern and more safe programming language that is almost as fast as C and C++, and the benefits of using a microkernel vastly outweigh the benefits of sticking with a monolithic kernel today. In the '90s, monolithic kernels made sense. Today, nearing 2020, not so much.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday October 29 2018, @01:10PM
Redox OS has a long way to go to become usable. Its installation notes [redox-os.org] acknowledge that "Redox isn't currently going to replace your existing OS [...] There is no USB HID driver, so a USB keyboard or mouse will not work."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:52PM (1 child)
Rust the language may have some interesting elements, but rust the ecosystem can go die in a fire. The world need less language-specific package managers, not more.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @09:12AM
and less SJWs
(Score: 2) by black6host on Monday October 29 2018, @12:02AM
Not so long ago I don't think many would have believed that Linux could have been monetized so. Well, not so long ago if you're my age :)
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday October 29 2018, @01:34AM (3 children)
I was talking on it just a few minutes ago.
Could one of you folks call it at (971) 386-3996 so I can hear it ringing? The US country code is 1.
Thanks!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday October 29 2018, @02:12AM (2 children)
It just now occurred to me I could have called it with Skype, but I didn't need to.
I'm very much a creature of habit, if I put something somewhere other than where I usually put it, then it's lost.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @08:25AM (1 child)
Dude... if the table goes badly... and the last thing I read from you is "help me find my phone"...
Fine, there, I just spent half an hour or more on warplife. Post the transcript of that call where you got off social assistance. I bet it's informative and entertaining, and I'd love to hear you dealing with an annoyance live, even post-facto.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 30 2018, @01:43PM
They sent me a cd with a wav file. I still have it but I don't know where it is
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @01:40AM (1 child)
The way Red Hat behaved, IBM ownership might actually be beneficiial for Linux and Free (R) software. Getting rid of Poettering and its ilk certainly would be net positive.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @02:44AM
Bingo, we have a winner. You used the key word, "free". tfa is full of "Open source" which isn't the same thing.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday October 29 2018, @01:51AM (1 child)
I don't have a lot of experience with IBM products, and I don't know what to think of them. I do know, that despite all the shit code they've generated in the last decade, that I do like Red Hat.
I'm scared for Red Hat, and Fedora. Especially Fedora, because I really love Fedora.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 29 2018, @06:30PM
Anything GPL will remain GPL. That said, much software could be privatized, or otherwise have new editions controlled, via a tailored GPLv4 license. So watch the FSF.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @02:21AM
Bend the fuck over, bitches. We also offer this bucket of vasselin for the low low price of $999.95.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Monday October 29 2018, @05:09AM (1 child)
The IBM press release [ibm.com] says little, of course, except to repeat the buzzwords "hybrid cloud" and "multi-cloud" in nearly every single paragraph.
The IBM managers that used to see the advantage of Free and Open Source Software have long since retired. The current batch is all about software patents. Both IBM and Red Hat were founders of the Open Innovation Network back in 2005, if I understand correctly, so it will be very important to watch how they move on that since IBM's enthusiasm for patents and software patents [uspto.gov] goes back ages. They currently have around 120,000 patents [uspto.gov]. Most are legitimate but a noticably large fraction are software patents. Worse, IBM pushes more and more in the direction of software patents [techrights.org], with major lobbying activities going on.
Some of the comments above remind us of the blow systemd and pulse audio have been to the technology and its surrounding community. systemd in particular looks like Red Hat picking up the decommoditization tactic that M$ has been attempting [gnu.org] for going on 20 years the day after tomorrow, Wednesday. In the 1970s and 1980s, IBM was famous for both hardware and software vendor lock-in and other anti-comptetive tactics. IBM uses these tactics so much that the US DOJ made them choose between their hardware or software monopolies. They chose hardware and found a vendor for the software, which Bill's mom landed for him and launched M$ as a monopoly. Bill, and thus all of M$, learned at IBM's feet. Many of the bad tactics that are almost synonymous with M$ actually originated at IBM. Even now, decades later, there is still a little cleanup left to do. I'd say this is not a good acquisition for us, but we'll only be able to see which way things turn only 6 to 12 months from now.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday October 29 2018, @06:33PM
The "Open Inventions Network" is, IIUC, only open for member companies. There was some noise in the early days about allowing community use of their patents for a nominal membership fee, but I haven't heard about that in nearly a decade, so it probably never got implemented. But if you're serious, check it out.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29 2018, @08:14AM (1 child)
That really made my day!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 29 2018, @09:44PM
Thanks. After thinking about it some more, "big-purp" is funnier to say.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by rickatech on Monday October 29 2018, @08:41AM
Amazon Linux, and upcoming Amazon Linux 2 are essential free forks of RedHat Linux. Expect only legacy companies that avoid running in the cloud are really affected by this. CentOS, Fedora are great, maybe Apache or Mozilla should fork and take Redhat’s place. Never really understood why Linux for profit companies make sense, Linux is comminty open source project, and is best run. by appropriate non profits.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Monday October 29 2018, @10:45AM
Raptor been working on porting Chrome to PPC64LE (Power) but they're a small crew and had issues getting their patches upstreamed ( https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raptor-Chrome-JIT-PPC64LE-Work [phoronix.com] ). Now that IBM owns Red Hat, they'd want to sell iron and try porting the JS JITs for backend servers and such.
Hopefully, from there to "Why isn't gnome and my browser running? We could sell more iron and licenses if we could run Red Hat Enterprise properly... Threadripper sells well enough..." won't be long to follow.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 30 2018, @12:16AM
This will usher in the era of the linux desktop.