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A dying company trying to extend their “squeeze your base” policy to another vendor. I think they overpaid for RedHat. After a particularly painful audit at my
by mathattack 7y ago
A dying company trying to extend their “squeeze your base” policy to another vendor. I think they overpaid for RedHat. After a particularly painful audit at my Fortune 500, we kicked out RedHat. We spend more time talking to IBMs auditors than we do to their Salespeople and engineers. This merger seems like the modern version of HP and Compaq. The only winners are the shareholders who bolt early. Customers, employees and late shareholders are all losers.
- riffraff 7y agoForgive my ignorance,but what is an IBM auditor?
- sharpneli 7y agohttps://ibmaudits.com/ibm_faq/ https://ibmaudits.com/ibm_faq/ Read and despair. tl;dr: They dig around to see you’re paying the correct license fees. They’re common and expensive enough that law firms offer special counseling explicitly for that.
- garmaine 7y agoWtf. Ok thanks for posting. I will never use any RedHat product ever again.
- freehunter 7y agoThe alternative is paying for the software you're using. If you don't want to pay for for-pay software, there's plenty of no-cost Linux distros available.
- philjohn 7y agoThe problem with these audits is that the exact licensing conditions can be vague, or the audit points to something that is in compliance, but might not be (e.g. you're licensed for 8 cores, but your replacement servers have 12 cores, you still only need the 8 cores so you disable 4 cores in the bios ... well, they will say, for all we know you only disabled those cores when we came to do the audit ... so now you owe us the money for 4 extra cores at full list price, going back 18 months).
- davidmr 7y agoThe IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional. This may be outdated, but they used to use these stupid “processor units” that had some loose correlation to CPU performance. If a perfectly well-intentioned systems person moved licensed software to some new server that had half the cores, but was on a newer generation CPU, and didn’t think to ask the lawyers about it, you could get tagged for huge bucks. I will never buy IBM software ever again if I can go to any reasonable length to avoid it. RHATs licensing seems not to be moving to the IBM model yet, but I’m frightened.
- NullPrefix 7y ago> “processor units” Graphical processor(ing?) unit. How many (cuda) cores are we talking about? /s
- abraae 7y ago> The IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional. This is the company who popularised "This page intentionally left blank". Obtuseness is very much part of their toolkit.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago> This is the company who popularised "This page intentionally left blank". That was an objectively good move though.
- RHSeeger 7y agoIt appears that 1. The audits can take considerable time and resources to complete (effectively, an extra cost) 2. The audits can be wrong, which sounds like a nightmare to deal with ([1]) As such, avoiding Redhat even if you are "paying for the software you're using" may still seem like a good idea. ---- [1] Answer in the FAQ about incorrect audits > First, it is vital to carefully review the audit findings in detail. IBM's customers often do not receive all the license credit they are entitlted to, and IBM typically will agree to modify its initial demands if there is a mistake in the calucations. Sometimes, IBM’s compliance teams often do not have a complete file of all license agreements that an audited company may have signed. In many cases, the negotiated terms of a license agreement can include alternative counting rules or other variables that change the way license requirements are determined for certain products. If the auditors are unaware of those terms, then the calculated audit discrepancies likely will be inflated and erroneous.
- mathattack 7y agoNot so simple. The skus change over time, and you have to dig into contracts 10+ years old to prove you paid for perpetual licenses for products which they renamed.
- ianlevesque 7y agoCentOS
- JetSpiegel 7y agoIf RedHat doesn't eat IBM from the inside, it will go down in flames, and take CentOS with it. Without Red Hat, CentOS doesn't seem to have enough community support to keep going (I might be wrong). It's not even like Ubuntu, where you can quickly jump ship to Debian.
- yipbub 7y agoRedhat still operates independently from IBM. Redhat also uses automated license enforcement instead of audits.
- garmaine 7y agoFor how long?
- yipbub 7y agoThe day it stops is the day the important 60% + of people walk out. I theorize that IBM taking the same approach that a modern company does with an open source company. They're probably doing community management. There is no profit to be gained from seizing Redhat's sales operations that I can think of.
- orionblastar 7y agoI worked at a branch of Emerson Electric. We did an inventory of hardware and software and I went from one machine to another running the BSA software and entering each PC into a database. We had IBM OS/2 2.0 as well as DOS Windows 3.1 this was the early 90s. Any software that did not have a license for we had to buy them in bulk from 800 Software to meet auditors specs. It seemed that this was before activation and on floppy disks people had shared. It paid off because we got a discount on bulk licenses and met auditor inspections. I was a PC Specialist back then.
- kgwgk 7y agoThe person who comes to check that you’re using their products according to the licensing agreements and what you’re paying for, I imagine.
- mathattack 7y agoAnd the burden is on you to prove that you’re not using it. (And then their Watson salespeople wonder why you won’t take their calls)
- josh_fyi 7y agoIBM products have no license-checking built in, on purpose. They want you to make more copies than your negotiated license agreement allows. Then, when the auditor comes in, they charge you the sky-high list price, backdating it as well.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoWhat if... you don’t let them inside?
- cronix 7y agoMost likely they'd be violating their contract.
- buttcoinslol 7y agoIBM would take you to court for breach of contract.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- PeterisP 7y agoAh, reminds me of Oracle.
- ineedasername 7y agoYeah, thought I heard Oracle's install media let's you install just about anything, regardless of license, for the same reasons.
- Karunamon 7y agoA common conspiracy theory floated at a previous dayjob was that Oracle does no license checking because you're not going to get far into the operation and maintenance without Oracle DBAs/engineers around anyways. After seeing how clunky some of the tooling is (sqlplus is downright byzantine for no good reason), I have to wonder...
- Aloha 7y agoI disagree that IBM is dying, not aggressively growing, but not dying.
- manigandham 7y agoBased on what?
- kgwgk 7y agoLate shareholders didn’t lose anything. (Assuming you mean RedHat’s shareholders, because if you mean IBM’s then the reference to customers and employees makes less sense.)
- mathattack 7y agoI mean anyone still holding post-merger.
- kgwgk 7y agoI see. For the time being the IBM stock is holding well. In the long term it may be hard to see if the acquisition was a good idea or not (given that the outlook for IBM alone was not so bright anyway) but I think I share your skeptiscism.
- nn3 7y agoJust curious, what are you replacing RedHat with?