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"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" is a pretty gross (and monopolistic) business practice. So that's a relatively crass way of looking at it.
by martinky24 3y ago
"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" is a pretty gross (and monopolistic) business practice. So that's a relatively crass way of looking at it.
- behnamoh 3y ago"Not acquire competitor, and have to shut down your own firm" is a more crass decision.
- randombits0 3y agoPerhaps if you need to acquire and shutdown your competitors, you should shut down your own firm, or at least pursue a different strategy. Monopolistic business strategies are crass.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoLeave out the "cr" and I agree
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoRH did great financially for many years while CentOS was around; do you have some reason to claim that it was an existential threat?
- monkeywork 3y agobecause having CentOS lead to Oracle Linux being a thing which allowed big competitor to offer what was essentially 100% compatible product to your own while undercutting your support costs. I don't think RHEL/IBM cares about the small losses on CentOS/Rocky/Alma/etc what they found was hurting them was companies like Oracle
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoI don't think that's correct; AFAIK OEL has always pulled directly from RHEL sources. That is, they were a sibling, not a downstream of CentOS. I am open to the idea that CentOS was basically collateral damage as Red Hat attempted to block Oracle, but that's not the same thing.
- monkeywork 3y agoThat's what I'm suggesting - the only way RHEL could block OEL is to also kill off CentOS as we knew it.
- dralley 3y ago>"Acquire competitor, just to shut down competitor" There was 6 years in between those two events, and by all accounts CentOS got much better post-acquisition. There is no "just" here. Originally it was considered a good idea, and (years) later they changed their minds.
- jofla_net 3y agoAgree and wish there was something that could be done against such business practices, but it is indeed difficult to regulate. Over the years I became aware that the acquire-extinguish pattern was definitely not just a coincidence, specifically i remember disney bought up some 'IP' just to litigate against some adjacently-related online fan game in the UK in order to shut it down and 'acquire' its captives, over to a similar product they already owned. Sorry I looked for the exact reference but cant find. There are countless other stories if you look though. This all came full circle when I was 'enlightening' a young relative who had just finished business school, or rather she 'learned' me. Turns out this acquire/extinguish game is like a whole 100-level course in <pick-your-business-school-of-america>. Who knew.