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> Red Hat was 26 years old in 2019, and then they were acquired by IBM. As a former Red Hat employee this was painful to read. IBM is doing a Sun Microsystems
by brozaman 4y ago
> Red Hat was 26 years old in 2019, and then they were acquired by IBM.
As a former Red Hat employee this was painful to read. IBM is doing a Sun Microsystems to it, Red Hat used to be such a great company.
- stbenjam 4y agoStill is. I’ve been at RH a long time. IBM hasn’t touched us and they are not doing what Oracle did to Sun. Not yet anyway, but Jim made a bunch of promises to us when we were acquired and they’ve kept them all.
- quickthrower2 4y agoWhy would IBM acquire and not touch it? They must have had a reason to acquire?
- bonzini 4y agoRed Hat is now worth 10% of IBM's revenue, and growing. They had 3.4 billion reasons to acquire when they acquired it in 2018, and they had roughly 6 billion reasons not to touch it last year.
- op00to 4y agoIBM "touches" Red Hat on a constant basis, needling and throwing its weight around to make way for blue ribbon 7 figure deals that never materialize.
- CameronNemo 4y agoBig list of companies to upsell to.
- op00to 4y agoThis has not been my experience AT ALL. Also, no one has mentioned Jim in years. Where is he anyway? Chewed up an spat out by the IBM machine.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 4y agoOracle rescued what they cared from Sun, everyone else including IBM, couldn't care less.
- ilyt 4y agoYup, it already started. They bought Ceph and one of first things they did is discontinuing packaging for non-rhel distros
- stryan 4y agoHow is that related to IBM? RedHat bought Ceph back in 2014.
- _chu1 4y agoIt is not nearly as bad. Oracle assassinated OpenSolaris on first sight while IBM literally pays people to develop Fedora.
- jterrys 4y agoThat's disappointing to hear. What are some noticeable changes since the acquisition?
- op00to 4y agoone thing I don't hear mentioned is a huge change in company culture. we started hiring management from cisco, and they are NOT a good personal fit. like super sexist nasty backstabbing management types. that was NOT the type of people Red Hat hired pre IBM.
- arjvik 4y agoFor one, the deprecation of CentOS
- rwmj 4y agoThat one was a mistake, but also nothing at all to do with IBM. We (Red Hat) did that to ourselves.
- arjvik 4y agoCurious for what the rationale behind the decision was?
- bonzini 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988259 It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds. I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.
- chr15p 4y agoTo be honest if the worst thing you can say about a company is they changed the distribution model of the thing they were giving you for free from point releases to rolling updates then they could be a lot worse.
- pxc 4y agoOracle basically murdered a ton of Sun open-source projects overnight. Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions?
- ilyt 4y agoThey will just make it PITA to use if you're not on Red Hat.
- op00to 4y agoThey murdered RHV, that's a good start.
- rwmj 4y agoRed Hat murdered RHV without IBM's help (sad to say).
- op00to 4y agoWas that pre IBM? If so, I stand corrected!
- bonzini 4y agoIt was after but like for CentOS Stream the writing had been on the wall long enough; both rwmj and I are in the virtualization team. There was hardly any new feature between RHV 4.3 (early 2019) and 4.4 (2020, last non-maintenance release) and there literally wasn't time for IBM to say anything about RHV 4.4, considering that feature work for 4.4 would have started before the acquisition (July 2019).
- op00to 4y agoI am sore because I had many customers who were left without a path that made sense for them. Kubevirt is the future but it would be like giving your Grandpop a hoverboard. He’ll break a hip.
- veidr 4y agoI clicked through to this thread because I want to know more about this. I'm a user (of both RHEL and Fedora, although I use RHEL via the free developer license so I am not actually a customer). I used to be a Sun user in the same way, but when Oracle bought Sun it was really, really obvious that using Sun's stuff was something we should immediately prepare to stop doing. It's a little less obvious with IBM buying Red Hat, though -- especially to a random user like me. For one, IBM isn't nestled between Halliburton, Enron, and Juul on the despicability spectrum. For two, it looks a lot like Apple buying NeXT, at least from the outside. As in old company with a lot of not-looking-so-hot-anymore tech buys the younger upstart with better tech, and the better tech seems to win. So what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad? E.g. firing the team responsible for developing X, and just milking the dead husk for short-term enterprise deals, or... ??
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- op00to 4y ago> what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad This is just the customer facing stuff. The internal politics are more painful. - Got rid of RHV, gave customers no realistic migration path - Moved an entire BU of employees from Red Hat to IBM with no choice except to GTFO if you didn't wanna become an IBM employee (storage BU) - Each area of the business is under increased oversight due to IBM beancounters thinking they know better - IBM interference in product development (IBM has a deal, so they want feature X, even though bugfix Y and Z are more important) At first it was all "yeah, you red hatters are gonna save IBM", but Red Hat is at the point where OpenShift is being milked by IBM 100%.
- Spivak 4y agoYeah it was genuinely really sad that the deal couldn’t have been “here have OpenShift for a mountain of cash, leave us alone.”