4 ms·

Almost everything you said here is complete garbage. Underperform the rest of the tech sector? No... 70+ quarters of successive double digit growth until the a

Almost everything you said here is complete garbage. Underperform the rest of the tech sector? No... 70+ quarters of successive double digit growth until the acquisition. Mismanaged the company with respect to virtualisation? You're conflating mismanaging the company with possible strategic errors in virtualisation. Destroy FOSS spirit? Absolutely the opposite. He is held in the highest esteem by every red hatter I have ever spoken to. Not only that, but he made the effort to do red hat training to learn the tech in the early days. How has he destroyed any FOSS spirit through his actions? Give an example. Everyone has macbooks now? No. Sellers generally do, I'll give you that, but technical staff are mostly using Fedora or RHEL. Flexibility has always been a huge part of the employee experience. Standard corporate welfare initiatives for liberal arts majors? You sound like an angry white man who can't stand that people other than yourself may have their disadvantage recognised nowadays. Stop feeling so threatened. Why are you so bitter?

dang 3y ago
Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without the first and last bits. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: yikes - you broke the site guidelines quite badly in several other places in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386 We have to ban accounts that post that way. If you'd please stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
dralley 3y ago
"The sector" is also a bit of an apples/oranges situation. There are very, very, very few if any pure-play open source software companies that are as successful as Red Hat.
- eraser215 3y ago
  Good point. In pure play OSS nobody has come close, for sure. My understanding is that the only other software company that had the same sustained growth trend was salesforce. Could be wrong though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
linuxftw 3y ago
[flagged]
- jzb 3y ago
  Jim did not sell the company to IBM. It was not Jim's to sell. Jim received an offer from IBM which he conveyed to the board, which put it in front of shareholders, and shareholders accepted the offer. To the tune of 99.5% of shareholders who voted (about 80% of shares cast votes...). [1] Some people were pissed about switching to Gmail. They were not anything close to a majority of users. It's fine that you don't share a positive opinion of Jim's tenure as CEO, but the commentary that shows ignorance of how public companies work, petty gripes about switching to Gmail (as if that was Jim's personal project) and grudge-holding about diversity doesn't paint you as someone to take seriously. [1] https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-shareholders-greenlight-34b-ibm-acquisition https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-sharehol...
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    I'm aware of how the acquisition took place. And 80% of shares would have been mostly institutional investors. I think we all know that Jim and the board were actively soliciting buy outs. What individual do you think pocketed the most money from that sale? That's right, Jim. He was paid handsomely to prevent a riot from breaking out after the merger. > They were not anything close to a majority of users. You're making my point for me. Jim destroyed the actual spirit of FOSS at Red Hat. It transformed into "Everything we distribute is open source, and that's all we care about." The GPL has been all but abandoned in favor of non copy-left licenses.
    - jzb 3y ago
      "I'm aware of how the acquisition took place." Are you? Because your comments don't reflect that. "We all" don't "know" that, actually. Maybe they were, but as I understand it IBM's bid was unsolicited. Do you have a citation for the claim Jim "pocketed the most money" from the sale? I am sure he made plenty, but so did the other execs, so did the shareholders -- the sale price was quite a premium on the share price. Red Hat was a public company. Too many people have magical thinking about how Red Hat's execs should've run the company according to their ideals when the reality is if Jim ran the company the way you'd have liked it would've probably triggered an investor lawsuit. If you want ideological purity to the satisfaction of your FOSS standards, then working for a public company is a path to unhappiness every time. I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.
phpisthebest 3y ago
[flagged]
- eraser215 3y ago
  Your final sentence proves just how little you understand about FOSS. Thanks for making it easy.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    I did not say Oracle was better steward of FOSS, what they did do their other FOSS projects is like what Red Hat is doing to RHEL Red Hat and Oracle are more or less the same now But when it comes to Oracle Linux, atleast they are not putting the sources behind the paywall and threatening customers with bans if they follow their GPL Rights
    - dralley 3y ago
      A) There have been no "threats" towards anyone much less customers. There was a lot of discussion taking place here and in other places about what was theoretically possible as per license agreement, but no "threats". B) Oracle cannot be described as a "steward" if their entire goal is to produce a RHEL clone using the sources provided by Red Hat. Oracle "stewards" a kernel package themselves, but that's about it. The explicit goal of their distribution is to cede the bulk of the decisionmaking to Red Hat and be "compatible". C) "The sources" are not behind a paywall. CentOS Stream is "the sources". The only difference between now and 6 months ago is that it used to be the case that the specfiles for every package in the distro were maintained in a single publicly facing git repository which made it trivial to rebuild the entire distro, whereas now you would have to create a mapping of which exactly CentOS Stream packages were used first, which is not as straightforward as having it all in one place. It is nonetheless possible to do. It's probably fair to call it an obfuscation technique, but not fair to call it closed source, because it isn't.
    - eraser215 3y ago
      [flagged]
DonHopkins 3y ago
[flagged]

dang 3y ago

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. Your comment would be fine without the first and last bits. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: yikes - you broke the site guidelines quite badly in several other places in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386 We have to ban accounts that post that way. If you'd please stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.

dralley 3y ago

"The sector" is also a bit of an apples/oranges situation. There are very, very, very few if any pure-play open source software companies that are as successful as Red Hat.

eraser215 3y ago
Good point. In pure play OSS nobody has come close, for sure. My understanding is that the only other software company that had the same sustained growth trend was salesforce. Could be wrong though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

linuxftw 3y ago

[flagged]

jzb 3y ago
Jim did not sell the company to IBM. It was not Jim's to sell. Jim received an offer from IBM which he conveyed to the board, which put it in front of shareholders, and shareholders accepted the offer. To the tune of 99.5% of shareholders who voted (about 80% of shares cast votes...). [1] Some people were pissed about switching to Gmail. They were not anything close to a majority of users. It's fine that you don't share a positive opinion of Jim's tenure as CEO, but the commentary that shows ignorance of how public companies work, petty gripes about switching to Gmail (as if that was Jim's personal project) and grudge-holding about diversity doesn't paint you as someone to take seriously. [1] https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-shareholders-greenlight-34b-ibm-acquisition https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-sharehol...
- linuxftw 3y ago
  I'm aware of how the acquisition took place. And 80% of shares would have been mostly institutional investors. I think we all know that Jim and the board were actively soliciting buy outs. What individual do you think pocketed the most money from that sale? That's right, Jim. He was paid handsomely to prevent a riot from breaking out after the merger. > They were not anything close to a majority of users. You're making my point for me. Jim destroyed the actual spirit of FOSS at Red Hat. It transformed into "Everything we distribute is open source, and that's all we care about." The GPL has been all but abandoned in favor of non copy-left licenses.
  - jzb 3y ago
    "I'm aware of how the acquisition took place." Are you? Because your comments don't reflect that. "We all" don't "know" that, actually. Maybe they were, but as I understand it IBM's bid was unsolicited. Do you have a citation for the claim Jim "pocketed the most money" from the sale? I am sure he made plenty, but so did the other execs, so did the shareholders -- the sale price was quite a premium on the share price. Red Hat was a public company. Too many people have magical thinking about how Red Hat's execs should've run the company according to their ideals when the reality is if Jim ran the company the way you'd have liked it would've probably triggered an investor lawsuit. If you want ideological purity to the satisfaction of your FOSS standards, then working for a public company is a path to unhappiness every time. I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.

phpisthebest 3y ago

[flagged]

eraser215 3y ago
Your final sentence proves just how little you understand about FOSS. Thanks for making it easy.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  I did not say Oracle was better steward of FOSS, what they did do their other FOSS projects is like what Red Hat is doing to RHEL Red Hat and Oracle are more or less the same now But when it comes to Oracle Linux, atleast they are not putting the sources behind the paywall and threatening customers with bans if they follow their GPL Rights
  - dralley 3y ago
    A) There have been no "threats" towards anyone much less customers. There was a lot of discussion taking place here and in other places about what was theoretically possible as per license agreement, but no "threats". B) Oracle cannot be described as a "steward" if their entire goal is to produce a RHEL clone using the sources provided by Red Hat. Oracle "stewards" a kernel package themselves, but that's about it. The explicit goal of their distribution is to cede the bulk of the decisionmaking to Red Hat and be "compatible". C) "The sources" are not behind a paywall. CentOS Stream is "the sources". The only difference between now and 6 months ago is that it used to be the case that the specfiles for every package in the distro were maintained in a single publicly facing git repository which made it trivial to rebuild the entire distro, whereas now you would have to create a mapping of which exactly CentOS Stream packages were used first, which is not as straightforward as having it all in one place. It is nonetheless possible to do. It's probably fair to call it an obfuscation technique, but not fair to call it closed source, because it isn't.
  - eraser215 3y ago
    [flagged]

DonHopkins 3y ago

[flagged]