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It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll
by solatic 8y ago
It's like Vader asked Luke to join him in defeating the Emperor (Microsoft) and ruling the galaxy as father and son - and instead of the audience hearing "I'll never join you!!", we hear "sure, let's team up."
The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. WTF just happened? If you asked me a month ago to put down serious money in Vegas on this never happening, I'd have happily done so. What on Earth were they thinking?
IBM is basically taking it's failing Kubernetes distribution, saying "why lose when we can just buy the winners?", and went ahead and bought Red Hat and OpenShift instead. A year from now, we'll start to see heavy IBM integrations into OpenShift, radically increased licensing fees for RHEL to squeeze every penny out of enterprises which bought RHEL specifically because they need the support guarantees because they can't migrate away quickly, and every other Red Hat project - Ansible, Cockpit, Fedora, CentOS, etc., will get torn to pieces by IBM bean counters.
Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit.
- bboreham 8y ago> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Might be going out on a limb here, but maybe that’s why they bought the stock, so they could sell out at a profit?
- M_Bakhtiari 8y ago> The cognitive dissonance is so strong here. Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?
- mindslight 8y agoWell, at least my shares of DEBN just shot up.
- le-mark 8y agoWhich went up because.... it's now seen as an acquisition target as well? Edit; ah sorry I didn't know...
- icebraining 8y agoI think mindslight is joking; Debian is not a company, it can't be bought.
- raesene9 8y agopublic companies are beholden to their shareholders. Enough shareholders liked the premium they were being offered... It's not good, but it's the peril of most public quoted companies.
- skybrian 8y agoPublic companies can have multiple classes of stock with different voting rights. Private company can be sold.
- raesene9 8y agoSure they can, but most public companies (absent places like Facebook, which IIRC has a setup which favours Zuckerberg heavily) are more susceptible to being forced to sell whether they want to or not. Private companies (especially one's who aren't beholden to VCs or similar) have the option to say no, regardless of how much money they're offered.
- perfunctory 8y agoI always find this language kind of interesting. Companies are inanimate entities, they can't want or not want something. When you say "they want to" or "have the option to" who do you really mean?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- brennebeck 8y agoPretty sure the gp is referring to employees and top management, rather than shareholders. I.e. the actual daily functioning portion of the company.
- bloopernova 8y agoI share the sentiment. Gawd. Freaking. Dammit. I've been using RHEL-derived systems for like almost 20 years. This actually feels like a betrayal of the Open Source community. Any bets on whether Fedora and CentOS will exist in November 2019?
- jhabdas 8y agoSee you in RHEL.
- ianai 8y agoWhere’s the history of IBM buying and sun setting companies? I don’t have the same prejudice towards IBM that I do for Oracle. But I’m not in a position to know. I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
- ranieuwe 8y agoSPSS comes to mind.
- ianai 8y agoCan you expand?
- alexott 8y agoISS?
- shmerl 8y agoThey can cancel many projects that RedHat do as a general giving back to Linux. IBM wouldn't care.
- Ice_cream_suit 8y agoRational Rose, Lotus
- 8y ago
- PaulHoule 8y agoI think it is more like Frontier buying phone lines from Verizon so they could temporarily reduce their free-fall in revenue. Two or three years from now IBM will be the next GE.
- jacques_chester 8y ago> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. The Red Hat board were offered a massive premium on an already generously-priced stock. If they hadn't sold there probably would've been lawsuits left and right.
- cmurf 8y agoThe deal is subject to shareholder approval. I think based on that approval, you'll be able to estimate how right or wrong you are about lawsuits had the board rejected the offer. RHT is $20 billion in market cap as of Friday, and the offer is $34 billion.
- devoply 8y agoYeah, 10 years down the line RHEL is pretty much guaranteed dead. Probably say goodbye to Fedora as well.
- bpye 8y agoThis is sad, Fedora has been my favourite distribution for a little while. Red Hat have been a good community player and it is a big loss for them to be gobbled up by IBM. What is the best alternative to Fedora and CentOS?
- paulcarroty 8y agoToo early to say what will happens with Fedora and other RH products.
- curt15 8y agoDebian is solidly community based. Ubuntu depends on Debian in order to add its own value on top.
- awill 8y agoThe obvious alternative would be Ubuntu. The LTS releases are alternatives to RHEL/CentOS. The others are Fedora alternatives. However, Red Hat is _far_ more than RHEL. They actually build a ton of OSS that's used in RHEL and elsewhere. Ubuntu does little more than repackage Debian. That's not a criticism. They package well, and they know how to polish. But there's no replacement for Red Hat as a company.
- thewizardofaus 8y agoIt's so weird because as a long time fedora user I absolutely detest Ubuntu. Can't stand how bloated it's become.
- int_19h 8y agoTry vanilla Debian. I really don't get the fascination with Ubuntu - modern Debian does all the same things, and in many cases it does it better (saner defaults, less opinionated). And if one really needs a "one click out of the box" desktop distro, then Mint.
- beatgammit 8y agoAs soon as I heard this news, I was looking to invest in SUSE until I found out they were just bought by a private equity firm earlier this year. What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?
- kazen44 8y agono, but most cloud providers are not opensourcing their contributions to linux.
- cthalupa 8y agoIs that really true? The big three cloud providers all have commits to the Linux kernel: ~/linux master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206 ~/linux master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825 ~/linux master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283
- dirkgently 8y agoGood on Google. Besides the kernel contributions, Google has a long list of open source projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured For all the hates Google gets on HN, they have been at the forefront of supporting OSS.
- palunon 8y agoGoogle develops Android. It's in their best interest that their changes to the kernel get mainlined... The internal APIs of the kernel tend to change a lot, and Linus doesn't really care about out of tree breakage.
- chupasaurus 8y ago
- awill 8y agoThis announcement made me really sad. Red Hat was a company I admired. I guess the only silver lining is that the buyer wasn't Oracle.
- btown 8y agoObligatory link to one of the best rants ever presented against Oracle as an acquirer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m "Do not fall into the trap... of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... If you put your hand inside a lawnmower, it will get chopped off. The lawnmower doesn't care... The lawnmower doesn't want to kill open source. The lawnmower just can't think about open source. The lawnmower can't have empathy."
- RandomTisk 8y agoDitto, I can almost guarantee I'll be in a meeting in the week or two where my directors will want to discuss the possibility of moving off of Redhat, at least as a contingency plan.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoOr Microsoft (who, after all, <heart>s Linux).
- OpenBSD-reich 8y agoHopefully this will cause an uptick in Gentoo (and OpenBSD)!
- binaryapparatus 8y agoYup, since I switched to FreeBSD year or more ago it makes watching news like this much less stressful.
- acct1771 8y agoCurious why Free>Open, for your usecase, as I'd like to learn more about them.
- binaryapparatus 8y agoVery simple reason, zfs, checksums and scrub. I would love to use open but I was already bitten by bit rot on ext4 on linux.
- techntoke 8y agoAnd Arch Linux.
- binaryapparatus 8y agoI love arch, I was using it for over 10 years in a row, but it uses systemd now 'owned' by IBM.
- techntoke 8y agoMay be worth looking at: https://artixlinux.org/ https://artixlinux.org/ There is also Gentoo, Alpine, and Void.
- alsadi 8y agoDefeting aws not ms. And projects like ansible and cloud formation / manage iq are the weapons
- newnewpdro 8y ago> Red Hat shareholders just sold out. Goddamnit. RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected? Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval: > The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the latter half of 2019. So you really should be complaining that RedHat's board of directors just sold out, and that's their fiduciary duty.
- stephen_g 8y agoSelling out is not necessarily the “duty” of the board of directors. It could definitely be in the interest of shareholders to stay independent.
- ternaryoperator 8y agoAgreed. The board's fiduciary duty is to do what's best for the stockholders.