
IBM acquires Red Hat - nopriorarrests
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-hybrid-cloud-provider
======
giis
I went to IBM(India) interview sometime in 2011, after leaving GlusterFS (Red
Hat). Interview went well, during final call with management. I was asked to
stop working on Open Source during weekends or off-hours even though the IBM
project and my Open Source work has nothing in common.

I said, "I thought, IBM support Open Source right?" his response, "Yes, but
that's another team"

I decided to call-off the interview after that.

~~~
MyNameIsFred
What wouldn't be the 5th time I've heard such stories, but I don't think it's
in any way specific to IBM. Employers like that want any OT you do to be
dedicated to THEIR endeavor, not somebody else's...even your own.

If you're able and willing to code in your off-time, you should be doing it
for the good of the Company. /s

~~~
mcv
It's a terrible and completely unreasonable stance for an employer. You get
the hours you pay for. You don't get to own people's free time.

~~~
brazzy
One relatively benign reason behind such policies is that the employer wants
your free time to actually be free time that helps your recover, not a second
job that leaves you exhausted and fighting burnout and sleep deprivation.

~~~
esotericn
This happens because the "first job" doesn't pay enough (so doesn't allow for
long-term free time), or has hours that are too long to begin with (so doesn't
allow for short-term free time).

------
pookeh
Having worked at IBM for 10 years, this is what I have come to know how IBM
operates top-down:

1\. To make significant profits, we need to sell services on top of our
software products (this is essentially GBS and their "strong" sales people)

2\. To make very good profits, we need to make highly customizable software
(for example AI and BI offerings).

3\. To make even more profit we need to make sure the software is tuned to the
hardware we make.

If one of those weakens the entire IBM portfolio and profits weaken
dramatically.

Here's problems in last 7 years tho: 1\. People moving to the cloud so the
hardware business flatlines. 2\. Because people moved to the cloud they found
replacements to IBM software. 3\. At the end of the day IBM is forced to
deliver professional services on top of other companies' software and hardware
(and services employees are not cheap).

At some point the IBM execs must have had an epiphany that their AI offerings
don't sell because they don't have a platform that sells other commodity cloud
services on top of which AI components can be sold as high-priced addons.

So thus IBM decided to do what it does best --- take control of the entire
stack.

With this acquisition IBM has the potential to become a next gen. cloud
vendor. For example IBM has been trying to sell Bluemix as a hybrid PaaS/IaaS
but haven't been very successful. The engineering team in Bluemix is weak and
one way to really up the ante is getting access to top talent in the industry
to do this (CoreOS team, Openshift.io team, linux kernel devs, distributed
storage devs).

~~~
k_bx
What's not clear here is that why would one company, which is dong pretty
well, better every year, would want to be sold to another company, which
doesn't look well (from your own description), instead of just continuing
growing and eventually "winning" the cloud market by themselves? Is that just
because top Red Hat people wanted to cash out more quickly?

~~~
rdsubhas
Maybe because IBM would have provided a superior price, and RedHat is a public
company answerable to shareholders.

Let's take reality, RedHat is still a small player compared to Amazon,
Microsoft or Google. They don't have the bandwidth to compete on all the
additional hosted services offerings. By partnering with IBM, they get access
to IBMs entire suite of enterprise customers and hosted products, making them
a serious competitor to the 3 big players instead of being a "me too, cloud".
They could make it big together, looking optimistically. But it's on IBM to
not screw this up.

~~~
module0000
>> Maybe because IBM would have provided a superior price, and RedHat is a
public company answerable to shareholders.

I think a lot of readers probably don't understand what that line means. Even
if the C-suite at RedHat did _not_ want to do this, they have no choice.
Shareholders can riot and oust you(executives) for not taking what they
consider to be the "best deal"(and this is one heck of a deal). Long story
short, even if you don't want to sell - once the price is high enough, the
shareholders will force you.

~~~
k_bx
This makes a lot of sense, thank you!

------
sz4kerto
Guys, this is not just, or mainly not RH Linux. :(

\- kernel development

\- Ansible

\- JBoss (I know HN hates Java, especially Java EE, but it was and is an
important factor in enterprise OSS adoption)

\- OpenShift

\- Ceph, Gluster

All these are in danger, not just RHEL. I don't know about any other company
that is large, successful, focuses on the enterprise and absolutely behind
OSS. Canonical is way behind Red Hat in terms of revenue (1/20).

Sad.

~~~
Conan_Kudo
I don't know of any other OSS company that does _exclusively_ OSS.

Canonical, for example, has a number of proprietary solutions built around
their core OSS stuff, so they function as an open core business. And they're
not doing anywhere close to as well as Red Hat does.

~~~
TylerJewell
WSO2 - an open source integration software company - is exclusively OSS. We
will do $50M in sales this year with 80% of that subscriptions for on-premises
open source software. We are the 6th largest OSS company by revenues. We'll
probably jump up to 5th next year because of the RedHat acquisition of IBM.

~~~
basch
big typo on your home page "by using our our open source"

~~~
TylerJewell
Thanks - forwarded onto marketing.

------
jhallenworld
When I worked for IBM (via acquisition), I wanted to fix bugs in Cygwin (owned
by Red Hat). Red Hat does not accept patches unless you get permission from
your current employer. I could not get anybody in IBM to sign Red Hat's
permission slip. Nobody would sign because it's all risk, no reward from IBM's
point of view.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I have the same problem in academia, being in a non-CS department, I'm
required to notify the University's Center for Technology & Venture
Commercialization about assigning my copyright over software to another entity
(like the FSF), but so far I have been unsuccessful at getting them to sign
the letter the FSF wants, despite the code I would be contributing being
completely outside of my work at the University and so therefore theoretically
outside of their purview. I suppose the moral is that all large organisations
converge towards bureaucratic processes that waste the time of high$/hour
employees and attempt to hinder all not immediately commercialisable progress.

~~~
chongli
Wait, so your university owns copyright on all your work by default?! That's a
bummer if true. Outrageous, actually.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
My contract requires that anything I develop using University resources, which
in practice means potentially anything in my areas of specialisation, the
University has some claim on.

It's not entirely unreasonable - imagine someone in Biochemistry developing
some drug using University labs etc. and then turning around and selling the
formula to a private lab.

But it's the petty bureaucratisation which is infuriating. (And usually the
people making the decisions aren't practically qualified.)

~~~
anilakar
While I was working as an assistant researcher three years ago, my contract
also considered all research-derived knowledge uni property. In this case,
pretty much anything tangentially related to HTTP performance enhancements
would have been claimable by them.

~~~
consp
It the software is GPL, and you use it for your company/university to do work
with, that is a very dubious claim and more likely falsifiable in court.

~~~
evancox100
GPL is a license applied to a work by the copyright owner after (or at the
time of) creation. It has nothing to do with authorship of the work and who
owns the copyright.

To elaborate, even if GP developed code as part of a GPL project, the
copyright owner could prevent him/her from distributing that code to anyone
else, whether that distribution occurs under the GPL or any other license.

------
KaiserPro
So, I have mixed feelings.

I don't think in the short term this will be a problem. However IBM has lost
it's way. its a very large unwieldy organisation that doesn't change very
fast.

It also has an awful lot of lifers, who would flounder horribly outside the
soft warm IBM shell.

But, there are some brilliant engineers and technologies that are inside IBM.
The ones I know are about are to do with GPFS, which is a shining beacon
compared to ceph and gluster.

A clever organisation _could_ mix GPFS, the vast experience with scheduling
and resource allocation, and second to none documentation (have you read a Red
book? they are marvels of readability.) to make a spectacular platform. One
that unlike K8s would be easy to use, understand, tune, script for and run.

They won't be able to execute it properly, but they have the potential.

~~~
rodgerd
> GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster.

Solves an entirely different problem.

~~~
bsg75
Is there a short summary of which problems are solved by which filesystem?

~~~
rodgerd
On the interwebs? No idea. Mine would be:

GPFS is excellent as a clustered filesystem backing a number of servers that
need high-throughput, low latency, coherent storage. It's block-oriented.

Ceph is a SAN replacement: can saturate 100 GBps switches with massive
parallel throughput. Object based, can also serve up block and (recently, with
limits) cooked filesystem.

Gluster is a distributed filesystem - easy to set up and configure, some
performance limitations, file rather than object or block oriented.

~~~
pinewurst
GPFS is very much file oriented - there's iSCSI target support but I'd be
surprised if anyone really used it.

Ceph can provide block (mostly used for VMs), object and file targets, in that
order of maturity.

Gluster is sort of a metafilesystem, aggregating some number of underlying
filesystems - file being the operative word.

~~~
rodgerd
I'm referring to the FS primitives. GPFS presents a POSIX FS, but it's
primitive is blocks. Ceph is an object primitive (RADOS) and can present it a
number of ways. And Gluster is based around files as primitives, which gives
some interesting strengths and weaknesses.

------
mrkstu
If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red
Hat executives start running the combined company.

That is the one path to a real future for IBM instead of its slow decline into
complete irrelevance.

~~~
jarym
RH are good at a LOT of things but sales remains a bit of a weak point
compared to Oracle and to a lesser degree IBM.

Hopefully the RH guys can bring back a focus on technology to IBM while IBM
figure out how to sell it to customers.

PS: so will it be called Blue Hat?

~~~
janc_
Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best.
Are you sure you want to use that as an example?

~~~
phkahler
...promising everything and delivering half of that at best...

I work for a company driven by sales people. It sucks. They keep promising
things we don't have and complaining that engineering can't deliver. IMHO a
good sales person should be able to sell what we have. Any jackass can make
empty promises.

~~~
bunderbunder
Sales people typically do exactly what they're paid to do - no more, no less.
You can shout at them 'til you're blue in the face about overpromising, but,
if you've got their pay structure set up such that they can earn more
commission by making wild promises, then they're going to keep on making wild
promises.

------
ethbro
IBM the company is like an iceberg.

The R&D and open source contributions are the tip. And the other 90% is
services revenue.

And most people's experience with IBM services isn't positive.

~~~
SwellJoe
IBM is, as far a I can tell, the best example of a "mixed bag" in tech. I have
heard both great and terrible things about IBM from customers, employees,
developers on Open Source projects, etc. They are a huge organization, and one
that seems more divided than many.

It may be more useful to view IBM as a collection of fiefdoms rather than a
single, focused, entity. Yes, the money all goes into one pot at the end of
the day, but there's large variance across organizations within IBM.

That said, from what I can tell OSS that goes into the IBM machine doesn't
usually come out the other side improved. I worry for the health of
CentOS/RHEL/Fedora under IBM's leadership. My desktop and server OS of choice,
with a few brief forays into other territories along the way, has been from
Red Hat for 23 years. I'd hate to lose Fedora or CentOS, or see them stagnate.
Red Hat has been among the most steadfast in their support of Open Source
software, as well...so, there's a real risk of the kernel, Gnome, and other
OSS core infrastructure suffering, because Red Hat is a major contributor to
those projects.

I don't think it'll be sudden. It usually takes years for projects to become
clearly worse for having come under IBM's purview. Red Hat is large itself,
and will probably take years to be fully assimilated and homogenized into
IBM's lukewarm culture of mere competence with regard to their Open Source
contributions.

~~~
ethbro
On acquisitions, I can offer the anecdote of a friend working at a startup IBM
purchased.

Things started with "IBM loves you, and pledges to stay hands off and help you
do what you're already doing", continued to "We're going to replace a few
management positions with folks from IBM" and "We're changing some benefits,
titles, and procedures to better align with The IBM Way", and finally ended up
with "You aren't meeting your sales targets, so we're going to overhaul your
leadership."

Admittedly, this was a much smaller company than Red Hat. But they were
profitable before being bought and had a respected product and growth.

~~~
threeseed
I really don't understand the point of this anecdote.

This is standard practice for almost every acquisition. If the startup didn't
want to be part of the IBM way of doing things they shouldn't have agreed to
be acquired by IBM.

In fact the rare situation was the Facebook "acquire but treat more like an
independent subsidiary" model. And even that didn't last all that long.

~~~
bunderbunder
> If the startup didn't want to be part of the IBM way of doing things they
> shouldn't have agreed to be acquired by IBM.

In this situation, I don't think it makes sense to think of an organization as
a single, monolithic entity. In this context, the only sane way to think about
Red Hat is as over 12,000 employees, plus I-don't-know-how-many shareholders.

Only a very small number of those "agreed to be acquired by IBM". Probably
less than 0.1% of them. They are probably also going to be the ones who are
going to be the least affected by how IBM operates internally. They've now got
FU money, so, as soon as whatever retention agreements they may or may not
have signed expire, they'll be prancing out the door.

Everyone else probably knows very little about it - the linked press release
indicates that this is probably a surprise for about 12,000 Red Hat employees,
most of whom won't be getting any additional details until tomorrow's all
hands meeting.

~~~
manquer
management and the board agreed to the deal. Companies are not democracies ,
while it is nice to have grassroots approval , it is a top down process. the
very nature of these transactions make it impossible to disclose until it is
done.

Ultimately in a decision like this the board has only one entity to consider
-shareholders , if they believe the deal will create more value to
shareholders they should consider it

Value maybe subjective Of course shareholders could be against for ideological
reasons and prefer not take the money, that doesn't seem to be the case here.

~~~
knightofmars
While I agree with you that decisions of this nature are made top-down, the
value in RedHat is its employees (as RedHat sells support for Open Source
software). If a mass exodus occurs because of this acquisition, RedHat will no
longer be providing value to the shareholders and will become a long running
debt with no future in the black on IBM's books. It is quite possible that IBM
will fail at properly handling RedHat after the acquisition due to entrenched
business culture that is incapable of grasping the cultural change required to
support a business model such as the one that RedHat employs. Business often
appears as a bedfellow with economics with regards to ignoring the "human
factor".

------
dang
There were several threads about this. We merged them into the one that was
posted first.

We changed the url to the most readable and least press-releasey. The others
were:

[https://twitter.com/EdHammondNY/status/1056604618015285248](https://twitter.com/EdHammondNY/status/1056604618015285248)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-
sa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-said-to-near-
deal-to-acquire-software-maker-red-hat)

[https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-
acquire-r...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-
hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-
cloud-provider)

~~~
mrep
In my opinion: Either invest in developing hacker news support for updated
news comment threads better (my recommendation is to split each thread by the
original article/time in a megathread and use the newest title for the base
merged thread and sort the sub-threads by time or stop merging these threads
because it makes it so freaking confusing as the comments are based on totally
different contexts and yet they are all intermingled.

Prime other example being the tesla going private thread which I think is this
one but I'm not sure because the threads are so hacked together or duped I
cannot find a hacker news link to the original tweet [0].

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17709799)

~~~
dang
This happens whenever a story is changing rapidly. It doesn't have to do with
merging the threads—it has to do with different comments dating from when
different information was available. In this case the initial story was "might
acquire" and then turned into "has acquired". The threads weren't neatly
partitioned before we merged them; people just post to whichever discussion
they happen to see.

When a story has been changing while the comments have been accumulating, HN
readers are smart enough to figure it out, and I'm not sure adding new
software would help much.

~~~
mrep
The threads were neatly partitioned because they were all based on an initial
source of information (the source article), but it was then merged into one
mega-thread contained conflicting sources and thus it makes it confusing since
all the comments which were based on different sources are now intermingled.

~~~
mrep
Also, auto-hiding my original comment? All I am trying to do is give some
personal feedback in how you guys can improve your website and your response
is to try and censor me? Let the other hacker news readers decide by voting
considering that that is literally one of your companies essential startup
advice: "For any company, software or otherwise, this means that in order to
make something people want: you must launch something, talk to your users to
see if it serves their needs, and then take their feedback and iterate" [0].

[0]: [https://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-essential-startup-
advice/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/ycs-essential-startup-advice/)

~~~
Cogito
Not to disagree with you, because I understand your point of view, but for me
the hiding doesn't come across as censoring so much as marking as "off topic,
meta discussion".

People who care about that kind of thing click through and read it, otherwise
it lets people skip over to read comments about the article.

------
jarym
Ay ay ay... if this is true then everything from RH is gonna get fatter,
slower and more expensive.

Add a bit of WebSphere here, a bit of Domino there and voila. It'll then be
ready for 'resource action' (aka layoffs).

Jokes aside, RH is an engineer-focussed business - IBM is an accountant-
focussed business. There's just NO way these two cultures are going to work
well together.

~~~
techntoke
RH has been a sales-based organization.

------
solatic
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.

~~~
bloopernova
I 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?

~~~
ianai
Where’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.

~~~
Ice_cream_suit
Rational Rose, Lotus

~~~
ianai
Can you expand?

------
filereaper
I'm surprised at the amount of backlash here.

IBM's had the Linux Technology Center (LTC) for a long time and has been
contributing to the community. All the platforms Z, POWER etc... support Linux
as a first class citizen and plenty of other ecosystems are also supported
(i.e GCC, OpenJDK, etc...)

Maybe its time to re-evaluate the old biases? The old incumbents like
Microsoft have warmed up to OSS, not sure why Big-Blue is getting this much
flak.

~~~
cenal
Microsoft has been doing a lot to rebuild itself as a cloud provider.

IBM has been doing a lot to go out of business.

Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman and helping lead the company even from
the sidelines.

IBM is a floating raft of failed leadership.

Microsoft isn't trusted fully by the community but they are making inroads
under their new CEO.

IBM has been firing its most senior people in an effort to slow its cash burn
and to hire younger folks. IBM also claims it's also to bring on folks with
more relevant skills to emerging technologies. I think there is a lawsuit
about this.

Anyway, IBM has done nothing in recent years to show they are a true
contender.

If the Redhat team is able to pull a Next here and assume leadership roles
inside of IBM this could be stellar. Big Blue's formidable sales team and
reputation with a great product line overseen by passionate people would be
powerful.

If the IBM existing leadership team emerges as the winners here it will likely
continue to fade into irrelevance.

~~~
greenyoda
> Microsoft's first CEO is still chairman

Bill Gates is no longer the chairman of Microsoft. He stepped down in 2014 to
concentrate on the Gates Foundation.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)
(see "Key people" in the sidebar)

~~~
rdiddly
He does still have a regular (i.e. not the chairmanship) board seat though,
"non-independent" like Nadella.

------
kartan
IBM has been historically a Linux contributor. Eclipse, their open source IDE,
opened the other to Java and other programming languages in the OS. And Power
processors supported Linux early on. From that perspective to purchase Red Hat
makes sense. It makes even more sense as the announcement states that they are
trying to create a bigger cloud provider to compete with Amazon Web Services,
Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

My main concern is the reduction on variety. All big businesses are buying
layer after layer of different markets reducing the number of options that one
can choose.

* [https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/](https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/)

* [https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-r...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-cloud-provider)

~~~
onetimemanytime
>> _IBM has been historically a Linux contributor._

Maybe, but IBM has been historically a for profit enterprise, required to
appease investors every quarter (or the CEO goes, stock crashes etc.)

They may have contributed to projects to then sell services, but make no
mistake, IBM has their own interests at heart, not yours.

~~~
this_user
You do realise that a lot of Linux kernel development is being done by for
profit enterprises, don't you? None of these companies are doing this out of
the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a vested interest. Linux
is at the heart of possibly the majority of modern IT infrastructure.

Besides,IBM/RH are by not even the largest contributors. Intel does more than
both of them combined, and then you have other heavyweights like Google who
have an interest (notably through Android) in keeping the project going. Even
if IBM were to pull out for some reason, there are more than enough others who
could pick up the slack.

~~~
rayiner
Not just "a lot." Over 90% of contributions come from developers who are hired
by companies to contribute to the Linux kernel:
[https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-
kernel](https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel). Intel and Redhat
each contribute more than all the individual contributors put together.

------
wereHamster
Is this event comparable to when Oracle bought Sun? Should we expect IBM to
rip RH apart and alienate all existing customers?

~~~
pinewurst
It's worse, IMHO. IBM treats their customers as prey just like Oracle plus
they treat their own people worse. I know people who've had the IBM licensing
ninja squad show up at their door for surprise validation with a big bill as a
result.

~~~
KaiserPro
I have extensive dealings with both.

Oracle are actually malicious. IBM are just incompetent.

If you can find a good account manager inside IBM for your needs, then there
is a chance that you'll be able to get on well. Otherwise you'll have to do
what I did which is say publicly shame the head of department on a public
platform, with their superiors listening in.

Oracle however, have no shame.

~~~
kazen44
I seriously wonder who is still left at oracle who actually cares about
technology and pushing it forward, instead of using it as a tool to squeeze
money.

Most competent Sun people have left oracle and are onto greener pastures.

~~~
parasubvert
Core database engineering is still strong at Oracle.

------
eyalm
Cloud native/kubernetes race is just exploding.

RH strategy was mostly focused around OpenShift lately, which makes complete
sense. Kubernetes is the next datacenter OS, just as ESX (and virtualization
in general) was in the past 15 years and it's going to drive a radical shift
in the enterprise IT world in the coming years. IBM (as an active member of
the kubernetes community) see that huge opportunity and are doubling down on
their efforts.

Any bets on the next player in this space to be acquired by an IT behemoth?
Docker and Rancher both come to mind.

~~~
raesene9
Docker just took more funding, so it'll likely be a while, but yeah I'd say
they're very likely to get acquired in the medium - long term.

Rancher haven't raised in a couple of years, so might be more prone to
acquisition in the short term.

In general it lseems likely that as containerization has taken off over the
last couple of years , larger players who missed the boat will be looking to
make acquisitions to become more relevant in that space.

~~~
xorcist
Rancher desperately needs to find a niche.

Docker seems to be determined to strike it out on their own. The implications
of Kubernetes takes time to materialize, and they might well sell too late.

------
kache_
New IBM hire, software developer. So far; I've taken part of 3 separate events
where I was essentially sat through a presentation on why I should file
patents (so they could farm IP off of me and my peers). IBM is a pathological
company, and definitely not good news for open source.

~~~
Reason077
_”sat through a presentation on why I should file patents”_

Some years ago, I worked for Red Hat. I remember them saying the same thing
about patents. There was even some kind of reward scheme if you filed one with
your name on it.

(in hindsight, I guess I should have held on to those employee stock options!)

~~~
puzzle
You usually can't hold on to options for longer than three months after you
leave a company, right? You'd have had to exercise them.

~~~
Reason077
Right. What I should have said was “should have hung onto the stock that I got
from exercising the employee stock options”.

------
AdmiralAsshat
There cannot be a single Red Hat employee outside of RH's board of directors
that thinks this would be a good move for Red Hat.

~~~
andrewstuart2
As a Red Hat employee (opinions my own, not Red Hat's, etc) and though not
involved in any discussions like this, I can see some potential for it being a
good move. There's a _lot_ of work being done to a) move things from mainframe
to distributed and b) help people squeeze the last bits of utility out of
their mainframes. That requires knowledge on both sides of the house.

The world is going to open-source distributed systems built on commodity
hardware, which Red Hat has done a great job of building a business model
around. For old established companies, though, the migration is a lot of work,
and there are _definitely_ still plenty of large companies who have
purchased/leased mainframes for long periods of time, and would like to
modernize, but also can't afford to throw everything away and rebuild from
scratch. There's a lot of work being done already between the two companies to
run Go, Docker, Kubernetes, etc, on mainframe, and for companies with
mainframe resources, being able to get a little more utility out of those sunk
costs is very attractive, and something Red Hat's expertise has (and would
continue to, presumably) help accomplish.

That being said, I'm pretty surprised at the news, and I'll be watching
closely to see how things go.

~~~
btown
This is the most positive comment I've seen in this thread. To the extent that
the ensuing development effort finds bugs in container orchestration systems,
creates new features, creates new abilities to manage services on "hybrid"
private-cloud-plus-mainframe systems, helps to modernize old-school businesses
that run infrastructure the global economy relies upon... this could actually
be a very good thing for open source and future investment therein. Skepticism
is healthy and warranted, but this could be a good match.

------
bdavis__
RedHat can be replicated. Not cheap, and it will take a few years. What do I
mean? Well, IBM will slaughter this goose very quickly. Customers will
experience vendor hate to a high degree. But, RH is based on open source. A
replacement, open source friendly, can fork RHEL at any time.

~~~
Kye
Ubuntu looked like it was taking over last time I paid attention. Every new
cloud thing touted its pre-configured Ubuntu images, for example. Even
Microsoft started with Ubuntu with WSL.

Maybe that's why a still multi-billion dollar company decided to cash out even
as Linux seems to be making inroads. People used Red Hat for the same reason
they used IBM: it was corporate, understood corporate needs, and knew how to
serve them. Now it seems like corporations are offloading IT to AWS and
friends with Ubuntu.

Everyone talks about what Canonical did for the desktop while missing what
they did for friendly apt-based Linux on the server with SLAs and LTSes and
support contracts from a company that speaks corporation.

And if all the paying customers switch to Debian-based distributions...

The writing is on the wall.

~~~
rvense
Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn't it?

~~~
jacques_chester
Working for a competing company (Pivotal), I can say that yes, Red Hat does
more than RHEL.

------
technofiend
Well, fuck. I spent the last couple of years completely revamping my UNIX
support group. I got rid of all the weak SAs and used a mix of in person and
online vendor training plus internal challenges to elevate everyone's skills.
We were able to completely repurpose the "Level 3" UNIX engineering group
because all the "Level 2" guys no longer needed to escalate to Level 3 for
anything.

Critical to that was buying RedHat Learning Subscription and pushing my top
guys through RedHat's Certified Architect program. But I'm skeptical but we'd
have the same leverage to obtain similar learning discounts from IBM.

Honestly as my org gets more comfortable with pure open source solutions it
may be time to just consider Fedora instead, particularly as our workloads are
moving from bare metal to VMs to containers it arguably means less and less
where the app is hosted anyway.

In the end it may mean RHEL going the way of Solaris as ever dearer license
fees combined with a drop in support quality undermines their value
proposition.

But I guess that's a problem for the next guy; my org transformation is done
so I took a job doing provisioning using Terraform.

------
zapita
This was to be expected. Red Hat had no future as an independent company.
Their flagship product RHEL still dominates their revenue 20 years later...
But they have already saturated the enterprise Linux server market, and that
market is in decline. All attempts to diversify have failed. Openshift and
Ansible have potential, but compared to the decline of their core business,
it’s too little too late. The current CEO is a peacetime CEO: he managed a
successful business competently in fair wheather, but is not fit to navigate
the rough seas ahead. This allows him to leave on a victory (“the largest
software acquisition ever!”) and go on a book tour or something. Meanwhile IBM
can delude themselves a few more years until they’ve finished milking Red
Hat’s products for easy growth. Then they will have to face the reality of
their situation: they have no real answer to Big Cloud eating their lunch. For
now, though, they can pretend this is it.

~~~
83sjeodeke
Do you think Ubuntu has a future as an independent company?

~~~
zapita
I don’t understand your question, sorry. Can you explain what you mean?

~~~
bpye
I think the implication is that Canonical are in the same, shrinking market.
Whilst I assume Ubuntu Server has a smaller market share (though I have no
figured to back this up), are they not going to end up in the same spot where
they can't really progress?

~~~
zapita
Well, Canonical was never a successful business in the first place. Red Hat on
the other hand has revenue in the billions... which is huge! It’s just not
growing fast enough to keep up with the competition from cloud providers and
others. Canonical hasn’t even graduated to that sort of first-class problem
(and I doubt they ever will).

------
rafaelturk
This is a massive cash expenditure. IBM's biggest bet to be back into the
cloud game. Given the amount of cash involved this might be IBM's last card,
at least from an M&A perspective, so this deal needs to work.

RedHat is much smaller than IBM, however far better managed with a clear
product roadmap, lean sales and customer support. In a good scenario a reverse
takeover will take place and RedHat management will take control and lead new
IBM to a better future, however this is very unlikely.

IMO: This is great for RedHat shareholders, terrible for the new IBM co...

~~~
pinewurst
There are strong rumors that IBM will be selling/spinning off its services
group so perhaps that’s the funding justification?

~~~
jacques_chester
If this kind of a split were happening it would be more accurate to describe
it as the services group spinning off its product department.

~~~
pinewurst
That's an interesting thought, though Red Hat has a significant services group
too, so they'd still have one afterward.

------
jpdb
I'm a fan of Red Hat. I am a Red Hat Certified Engineer and contemplating
working towards the architect certification. When I heard they aquired the
company behind Ansible a few years ago I was excited.

If this deal goes through I'll be super disappointed.

------
tilt_error
At a former employer, we were heavily invested in Purify, Quantify et al. When
taken over by IBM, the license management cost at our side increased an order
of magnitude -- not for the products per se but by the administration of the
licenses.

Even though we loved the products, we found it was increasingly not worth it.
'Killed by license management', has a nice ring to it :)

------
hardwaresofton
Thanks to CoreOS and all the other teams under RedHat who have done amazing
work up until now. To be fair I've used (and enjoyed/been impressed by) your
software for free so obviously I'm not owed anything but I'm gonna be looking
for alternatives.

I'm suuuuuuuuuper glad I jumped off of CoreOS Container Linux earlier after
the acquisition by RedHat and subsequent bundling into Project Atomic. I
avoided OpenShift all together for other reasons, mostly complexity. Now I can
watch from a relatively relaxed standpoint and start figuring out how to make
sure no IBM sneaks into my stack, _if_ they start tanking products. As others
have noted, this is more than RHEL. Keep in mind:

\- Ansible is GPLv3

\- CephFS is GPLv2 w/ some mix of BSD and others

I assume licenses will serve as a canary for when things start shifting. I
might even be so bold as to predict some variation of the LICENSE + PATENTS.md
clause.

~~~
bonzini
Red Hat does not have CLAs, not does it own all the copyright, on either
Ansible or Ceph. It cannot change their licenses unilaterally, that can only
happen with permissive (non-copyleft) terms.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Yes, this is true _right now_ , but does not mean it will be true in the
future -- I meant to imply that Ansible was the safest, due to it's GPLv3
licensing (from what I understand GPLv2 is more permissive).

My second point was that I expect those terms to change depending on how IBM
moves forward, and movement on that front (from the current state of things)
should act as a canary.

~~~
bonzini
_Anything_ that does not have a CLA and is copyleft is safe. That's pretty
much the definition of copyleft; IBM cannot do anything about it, and they
know.

------
pinewurst
Hoping this is false! IBM is the worst of acquirers and they treat their
people like utter garbage, especially the more experienced ones.

If there's any truth to this, it means those in charge have basically given up
- assuming growth is capped and/or that the big return of a buyout premium
would counter recent stock pricing setbacks.

(Update: now officially announced!)

~~~
pinewurst
Now official! It's at $190/share vs Friday's $116.68 close

[https://www.redhat.com](https://www.redhat.com)

~~~
abrowne
[https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-
acquire-r...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-
hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-
cloud-provider)

"\- IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast
technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community

\- Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team"

~~~
ISL
Do truth-in-advertising laws apply if IBM were to change course from a stated
goal?

~~~
gnufreex
Well no, but no law needed here. You see, this is part of the deal with Jim
Whitehurst and rest of Red Hat management, otherwise, Jim would not pitch this
to shareholders as a good deal. It would be a hostile takeover, which can
fail, or lead at the end of IBM buying just a shell of the company.

So to back up their intentions, IBM probably had to give golden parachutes to
Jim, Paul, and rest of Red Hat top execs, and probably huge golden parachutes
ones at that. Jim is becoming part of IBM uper management and keeps leading
the Red Hat business unit. If Gini starts some crazy moves to endanger Red
Hat's well being as an entity inside IBM (as in IBM-fying the company), she
will get at odds with Jim and RH upper management. So she can fire them all
and pay up bilions in golden parachutes, at which point they will probably
found a Green Hat company and hire away all Red Hat employees... or Gini can
keep her word in the deal and leave Red Hat a separate business unit within
IBM, one that grows revenues and profits, unlike most IBM business units. And
IBM is a meritocracy, if Red Hat continues good performance, expect Red Hat
execs taking top position, including next CEO role. In other words, I expect
IBM to be Redhatized, and not other way around.

------
Zolomon
Nice spearfishing from [0]Mozilla:

"Hey @RedHat employees - if working for @IBM isn't your idea of a good time,
Mozilla has a bunch of interesting roles we're actively hiring for:
[https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/?team=Engineering"](https://careers.mozilla.org/listings/?team=Engineering")

[0]
[https://twitter.com/mike_conley/status/1056693061038825472?s...](https://twitter.com/mike_conley/status/1056693061038825472?s=21)

------
ezoe
Actually Red Hat is exactly like IBM. Huge and slow.

I know the contribution to FOSS from Red Hat is great and all, but their
product, RHEL, was a cancer for a modern software development.

Just easier to maintain for sysadmins doesn't make enough excuse for really
long release cycle and the worst of all is they keep supporting the old
products.

The result is a nightmare development environment for all the programmers who
has to workaround the old bugs that was fixed years ago in the upstream but
not fixed in the RHEL packages, but they have to use the RHEL packaged
software for stupid sysadmin reasons.

~~~
pfranz
What's the alternative? All of the places I've worked that used Red Hat never
explicitly looked at the Red Hat support timeline. They looked at their
business, the software they used, the features they needed, and based their
upgrade cycles around that. They'd only upgrade the major versions of their
primary software when a project would benefit and skipped major updates that
were problematic. At my current job they're only now upgrading from a 2016
piece of software to 2018, they're also straddling Cent 6.7 and Cent 7.2 and
only making moderate progress.

Usually the reason for updating the OS is because new software doesn't run,
there's a major feature needed, or supporting the old OS is too much trouble.

But it's not like it's any different on the Windows side. XP stuck around
forever. At my previous job they had Win7 on workstations with little to no
intention of updating to Win10. On the server side it was all over the place
including Windows Server 2003.

~~~
shaklee3
Ubuntu seems like a good replacement. We use it, and I greatly appreciate that
the compiler is not stuck on barely getting C++11 support.

~~~
pfranz
The problem isn't that RedHat's release cycle was too long, it's that
companies want support for 5 year release cycles. Most places I've been don't
even look at testing a major version of a new OS for at least year. There are
just too many variables between hardware, drivers, and software and little to
no benefit in staying bleeding edge.

Let's say there was a new feature. It might be an improvement in almost every
regard, but how it behaves at the limits or when left unattended might not
play well with every other piece in the system. Part of it might be changing
user/business expectations, or changing the pieces around, but that can
literally take years.

A few wrinkles I've heard about, but haven't directly dealt with is that
RHEL7/systemd is too polite about unmounting disks on shutdown which means it
will just hang. This is a huge problem for remote workstations that don't have
IPMI. Another issue I've heard about is issues with a bunch of our diskless
servers don't play well with it. Having to migrate and troubleshoot core
issues like these every 2 years is just unfeasible.

As you point out, just working at a place where everything is 10 years old is
frustrating, too. Last week I was trying to build VLC, which requires C++11
and had issues. At previous jobs I pushed really hard for a new enough kernel
to evaluate Docker and have spent a lot of time selling people on Git.

------
bb88
Having been a linux user for 20 years now, I'm not worried.

Mostly because in the OS market there is enough competition that didn't exist
back in the 1990's when RedHat was founded around the Linux kernel. And we
continue to have valid choices in the Linux market.

And as we move forward into Kubernetes, we're looking at lightweight OS's to
host a single purpose microservice. Most companies don't really need the full
features that a full-service Linux OS offers anymore.

Another example of this trend is the declining use of Sendmail and it's
alternatives. There are much better ways of handling email now than using
Sendmail. Yes, it too was popular in the 1990's, and while people still use
it, it's more likely for startups to use something like gmail for employee
email, because it's just painless.

~~~
raesene9
ofc you realise that one of the major contributors to the Kubernetes ecosystem
is Redhat.

So IBM now control key elements of k8s setups like etcd (a CoreOS project,
ergo a Redhat Project, ergo an IBM project)

~~~
manigandham
At the same time, K8S team has been rapidly standardizing everything and
turning it into a very modular system. etcd is pretty much a "done" project,
but if it ever goes bad, it can easily be replaced.

------
devwastaken
Red hat has been owned by corporate execs, it's not owned by developers. Made
2.9 billion in 2017. Once that kind of money flows the big offers come from
the oligarchs. There is no integrity in corporate business. If they get a big
offer, they're going to sell. IBM in a proper world of business shouldn't
exist, but patents keep them alive. We will need a new replacement to red hat,
but I'm afraid the hyper reliance and patenting IBM will enforce will make
this impossible.

------
tannhaeuser
Am I the only one cautiously optimistic about this merger? RH has dominated
Linux development for too long anyway, pushing systemd, namespaces, procfs and
other crap, and making RHEL an overcomplicated jack-of-all-trades O/S which
would only run with the specific gcc, glibc, and RH-specific kernel patches
and build tools anyway (which is kind of the point of RHEL, and of IBM as well
- PTF466735 anyone?). RH now being IBM will make people turn to Debian and
derivatives such as Ubuntu and Devuan. The press release on redhat.com talks
almost exclusively about "the cloud", but "the cloud" is, and always has been,
antithetical to Unix (Unix being about site autonomy and simple tools working
together). Why would indie devs and idealists want to contribute their efforts
to enslaving people in "the cloud" anyway? "Cloud" stuff is also at odds with
user freedom, and only seeks to make software runnable over shitty web
frontends for undue profit and privacy invasion, when F/OSS software has been
out there in abundance for over a decade. I hope we'll also see some love for
the BSDs, and a renewed shared understanding that only POSIX and other
standards guarantee long-term autonomy to both individuals and corporations
alike.

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
> "the cloud" is, and always has been, antithetical to Unix (Unix being about
> site autonomy and simple tools working together)

Does the physical hardware being on the actual premises or not really have
anything to do with "site autonomy" or the granularity of the toolchains?

In fact, can you even buy any viable physical hardware to run on your site
that's not already a virtualised "cloud" with the real host OS firmly in the
control of your corporate overlords, e.g. Intel ME and AMD PSP?

~~~
dijit
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that the cloud is not simply
'server hosting' because, if that was the case we'd still be calling them
VPS'.

"The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed
services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed
SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.

However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with
AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?

~~~
M_Bakhtiari
> "The cloud" is a set of APIs for provisioning but also a bunch of managed
> services that surround your instances, pub/sub, DNS, load balancers, managed
> SQL. All of this is almost designed to be a vendor lock-in.

A lot of it is, but I strongly disagree that all of it is. Many of these are
perfectly interchangeable with the exact same software (FOSS DBMS, web server,
load balancer, etc.) running on a competitor's managed service, VPS or on your
own premises. As for the services that aren't, I do think the IT architects
and managers who agree to use them are absolutely crazy and ought to be fired.
If all of them are fired, cloud providers would be forced to provide
interoperable provisioning APIs and services or perish.

> However, disregarding the vendor lock-in: How does my OS integrating with
> AWS's APIs help my on-prem services?

I suppose it doesn't, but why should it? If you think they bloat up your local
installation, maybe you can just not install the kernel
modules/daemons/libraries in question.

------
sytse
RedHat does a great job of being a trusted advisor for companies. Their people
are often embedded at customers and are the first stop to ask for advise on
anything related to Linux.

Recently RedHat was transitioning from selling the VM based RHEL to the cloud
native OpenShift. They used the relationship they had with customers already
using RHEL to 'up-sell' them to OpenShift.

IBM already had a SaaS offering for Kubernetes in
[https://www.ibm.com/cloud/container-
service](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/container-service) and RedHat adds a strong
self-managed offering for Kubernetes in the form of OpenShift.

IBMs revenue comes from consulting but a lot of their profit comes from
software [https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-
consu...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-split-between-IT-and-consulting-
revenue-for-IBM) They are also a trusted advisor and are great at closing
large and complex purchases. This move will allow IBM to sell more software
products and therefore increase their margins.

I have a lot of respect for RedHats policy to open source all the software
they sell. I expect that policy to continue.

------
mandeepj
> Second quarter total revenue of $823 million, up 14% year-over-year, or 14%
> in constant currency

ARR around $3.3 billion. I think they have sold the company very cheap.

Source - [https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-
repor...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-reports-
second-quarter-results-fiscal-year-2019)

~~~
liftbigweights
I wouldn't have sold also, but IBM paid an 80% premium. Not exactly cheap.

------
lima
I admire Red Hat as a company for their principled and uncompromising stance
on open source. I contribute to many Red Hat open source projects and even
promote their products, because they share my values. Their success directly
contributes to the open source ecosystem in many ways, and they have a history
of doing the right thing (tm).

I'm not sure how I feel about doing the same thing for IBM.

This is either very good news, or very bad. If Red Hat can truly remain
independent and preserve their culture and values, they can achieve a lot more
with IBM's money, and hopefully change IBM for the better.

If the culture changes for the worse, it's the end. Many, _many_ people work
at Red Hat because of the culture, not the pay (which is average), not to
mention community contributors. This is particularly true for their top-tier
engineers.

Red Hat's leadership is acutely aware of this, so I'm optimistic.

I can only imagine the discussions going on on their internal mailing lists.
Friends of mine who are RH employees have fun stories to tell about epic
discussions about much more inconsequential decisions :-)

------
jordigh
I grieve the most that this will really weaken the argument for commercial
free software. We could always say, look at Red Hat, they don't sell a drop of
non-free software. It's possible to be free and commercial!

I doubt Red Hat will continue to operate this way, especially if they are
receiving money from IBM's other ventures. I hope there's room for another Red
Hat in this world.

~~~
colordrops
Red Hat used to sell non-free software using the freemium model with Redhat
Enterprise. Is that no longer the case?

~~~
jordigh
No, RHEL isn't freemium. They sold you access to the source code. You also
have the right to redistribute RHEL, which is how CentOS happened.

I understand they did threaten to terminate support if you redistributed, but
they couldn't stop you from doing so if you so chose.

~~~
dingaling
They also require a support contract to view their bug tracker.

------
paulbjensen
Redhat website confirmed it.
[https://www.redhat.com/en](https://www.redhat.com/en)

~~~
jt2190
Editors: This really should be the top link. Additionally, there's more detail
in the email sent to RedHat employees, published here:

[https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-
leading-...](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-
hybrid-cloud-provider)

Edit: Notably, from Jim Whitehurst's email:

> ... When the transaction closes, as I noted above, [Red Hat] will be a
> distinct unit within IBM and I will report directly to [IBM chair,
> president, and CEO] Ginni [Rometty].

~~~
dang
That URL looks like the best one so far, so we'll use it. Thanks!

------
ChuckMcM
Assuming RedHat was in a 'sell or die' situation[1] I'm glad it was IBM that
stepped in rather than Oracle.

[1] I have no reason to believe that it was a dire situation at RedHat, I make
the observation that companies that are meeting their goals and doing what
they want, don't generally get acquired just because.

~~~
jacques_chester
If it was a sell-or-die situation IBM wouldn't have offered such a hefty
markup over the market price and they would have used less cash and more
shares to pay for it.

I think it's been obvious to everyone for a year or two that _someone_ was
going to buy Red Hat; I feel that no small part of their share price rising
over the last 18 months has priced in that expectation.

Like everyone else I am mostly pleased that they didn't get bought by Oracle.

Disclosure: I work for a competing company, Pivotal, so feel free to treat my
observations as motivated by ... I dunno, actually. I'm looking for a cool
French word here but "ennui" isn't quite fitting.

------
gcb0
The articles (and Stalman interviews) happening recently pointed to this
situation. Open Source, as adopted currently, is a flawed model that valors
corporate protection more than end-user freedom.

github is now sourceforge. redhat is now suse Linux. etc.

all the little benefits you got having an apache or bsd license over gpl will
start to bite you now. Case in point: every major company has a opensource
executive whose only job is to make sure all projects are using closed-source-
permissive licenses.

~~~
kartan
> Open Source, as adopted currently, is a flawed model that valors corporate
> protection more than end-user freedom.

I see your point, and I mostly agree.

I would like to differentiate between Open Source organizations - like Linux
Foundation, Apache Foundation or Mozilla Foundation - and mixed organizations
like Oracle (owns MySQL), RedHat (owns too many to list), etc.

The first ones represent the pure Open Source approach. Were the software and
how it better serves humanity is their main concerns. The second ones are just
business that see in Open Source and gratis (free as in beer) software a way
to get a bigger user base and to kill any possibility of competitors from the
bottom as new entries cannot compete as easily with products that you do not
need to pay for.

Real Open Source foundations are fundamental for a functional global software
industry. The other ones bring value, but they use Open Source projects as a
weapon against competitors, not as something for the good of its users. And
that ones are the ones that value corporate protection more than end-user
freedom.

~~~
gcb0
most projects on those incubators are there to die a slow death after being
abandoned by the group you call "open source corporations"

~~~
vorg
> to die a slow death

The operative word is here _slow_. Software is taken to the ASL by its backers
so they can extract as much benefit as possible for as long as possible. They
get an ASL Vice-Presidency position which they tout on their CV's. No upgrades
to new major versions, just the current version milked via consulting and
conferences.

------
gtycomb
I use Fedora Linux on my laptop. What does this mean for the Fedora Project?
Any thoughts on an alternate OS with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora? It
takes about 1 GB to boot up Fedora 27 now.

And what's the future for CentOS?

~~~
iaml
NixOS maybe? Don't know about memory footprint, but as a fellow fedora laptop
user, I find this distro the most appealing to switch to (arch being the other
option, but too high maintenance for my taste).

~~~
bpye
NixOS is interesting but certainly not the easiest migration, it's a very
different way of administering your system. That said, this might be what I
chose to do now.

~~~
randie63
[https://getsol.us/download/](https://getsol.us/download/) Long time arch
user. Now using Solus for the last 9 months and I love it.

------
mirekrusin
Good news for Canonical/Ubuntu I guess? I wonder how Linux distro popularity
will plot out in next few months.

~~~
hawski
Now I wonder who will buy Canonical. If/when Shuttleworth will be tired of
running it I assume it also will happen. Maybe Microsoft to continue their
open-source hat-trick.

------
jmspring
If this happens, I see older engineers targeted by IBM as they have done over
the for "cost savings" as part of the acquisition.

------
Tehchops
RIP Red Hat Linux.

Can't think of any company I'd want less to be a steward of CentOS upstream.

Looks like Ubuntu is about to get much more serious consideration for
production workloads.

~~~
SteveNuts
> Can't think of any company I'd want less to be a steward of CentOS upstream

Oracle

~~~
Tehchops
> Oracle

Fair point.

------
mhsabbagh
First Microsoft buying GitHub and now IBM buying Red Hat.

I wonder how the next year will be for Linux and open source in general, looks
like we are going to have a lot of drama.

------
cmurf
Remember when NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money? If there's meaningful Red
Hat leadership being put at the helm at IBM as part of the deal, it might not
be hideous news. But if it's the usual acquisition, well I cannot imagine more
incompatible cultures than IBM and Red Hat, integration seems very unlikely.

------
patrickaljord
Hoping they will stick to this:

"IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast
technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community Red Hat
to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team"

I guess this was an important part of the deal, otherwise it wouldn't make
much sense.

~~~
reikonomusha
“Y buys X for it to operate distinctly within Y.” usually doesn’t mean much.
It doesn’t imply independence.

------
mindcrime
R.I.P. Red Hat.

------
chopete
There is a saying in the enterprise software business.

You are a Walmart or becoming one. There is no middle ground.

The enterprise executives do not have the luxury of time or risk appetite to
keep doing multi-dollars deals and review MSAs.

In that respective, IBM just extended their life by another 10-15 years. It is
a brilliant move by IBM.

No serious enterprise uses an operating system or any piece of enterprise
software without costly support and maintenance.

Once they are in, the support and maintenance agreements disappear only if the
purchaser goes out of business.

------
alsadi
Many comments mistaken redhat as an OS company? They are not. IBM did not buy
redhat to get RHEL.

They bought it for the hybrid cloud as clearly stated.

Redhat has openstack platform, cloud formation/manage iq, openshift, ansible,
ceph, glusterfs, codeenvy (behind eclipse che),... Etc

------
lnsp
I am worried about the future of the numerous Open Source projects. I mean,
why did they sell RedHat? The bet on OpenShift does not seem to pay off then.
I always saw RedHat as the "enterprisy" OSS company that helps moving all
these Java monoliths to the cloud. Even more problematic is the influence this
aquisition has on the landscape of OSS in the cloud space, especially since
CoreOS, RHEL and CentOS are now run by IBM.

------
utnick
Wow this would be a very expensive purchase for IBM , redhat is currently
worth about 20% of IBM's market cap

------
Aloha
IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of
recently.

~~~
rodgerd
Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

~~~
zie
To some degree they have opened the Power9, which is hardware. For hardware
it's like leaps and bounds more open than anything else out there that can
compete with it.

RISC-V is more open, but the hardware isn't necessarily open, and it's not yet
really competing at the same scale as Power9 does... yet. There is hope :)

~~~
throwaway2048
Their open power initiative is really no more "open source" than say Intel's
processors, with the possible exception of Management Engine shenanigans from
Intel.

~~~
zie
[https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation](https://github.com/OpenPOWERFoundation)
and [https://github.com/open-power](https://github.com/open-power)

It's a lot more open than Intel's. You can get the hardware chip blueprints if
you join the foundation.

But the firmware is all Apache 2 licensed.

------
anonymous192836
(Don't want to use my regular id for this)

We were transitioning from an old IBM app stack to a Red Hat stack. I was
spending a lot of time trying to make this happen.

This news makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time - it is so ironic.

------
randiantech
The only remaining question to know is how many layers of shit, unnecessary
complexity will IBM add on top of the preexisting shit, unneccesary layers
already added by Red Hat on their products.

~~~
voodooranger
simple software that’s easy to use is anathema to companies like red hat. to
the extent you can keep software simple, you won’t need red hat, pivotal, etc.
these support companies have every incentive to make you dependent on them.
think about that next time you reach for one of the technologies they peddle.

------
xienze
Wow, if this is true, my condolences. I was a former IBMer and Red Hat folks,
your world is about to be turned upside down.

------
OddMerlin
This is terrible news. I hope its not true.

------
throw2016
IBM like Redhat is a long time contributor and both are commercial companies
driven by profits and shareholders so this does not change things.

However no one can deny Redhat has a disproportional influence in pushing its
interests that may not always be in the community's best interests. These now
move to IBM.

The bigger problem is the growing tilt of open source towards corporate
interests so much so that dependence on individual companies passes without
notice or scrutiny.

This is perhaps not the end result that motivated the initial community of
open source contributors over the last 20 years and if we do not find ways to
motivate the next generation open source will likely become a shell of itself,
propped up by paid contributors and self interest.

------
redwood
The real story here is that cloud is killing them both.

~~~
adventured
Where do you see any of that represented in Red Hat's business performance?
Their growth has been strong the last five years and shows no sign of high
stress or decline being imminent. They're tracking to solidly double their
sales over four years from the end of fiscal 2015.

~~~
donedealomg
you should read the latest earnings statements, growth was declined and a huge
miss of estimates

hence the IBM merge, Redhat probably felt they couldn't do it anymore on their
own

------
xte
Talking about procrastination I see a big problem for us user of FOSS desktop:
RH need to be on GNU/Linux desktop just to play a SUN-like role. IBM have no
need for that.

So after Ubuntu ditch desktop and actual "Gnome disaster" I think things will
go even worse, leaving us with no more generic GNU/Linux desktop for end-
users, pushing us again on a small tech/geek niche, witch in turn push end-
users, many "power users" included, to the cloud-mobile world so delete the
last bastion of digital freedom we have. On desktop we have _our_ system, we
control our files, we decide when and how to upgrade, what to install or
uninstall. On mobile vendor choose for us and we are powerless.

------
classichasclass
For those of us running Red Hat or Fedora on IBM POWER, though (I run Fedora
28 on a Talos II), this is probably a good sign of future commitment.
Hopefully they don't screw up Fedora maintaining the enterprise side.

~~~
akhilcacharya
Out of curiosity what sort of workloads are you running on a Talos II?

~~~
classichasclass
Just using it as a big workstation. Firefox, Krita, LibreOffice. The software
has improved to the point where it can realistically be a daily driver (that
can also compile Firefox at -j24 on this octocore SMT-4 machine in about a
half hour).

~~~
akhilcacharya
Interesting. I wouldn’t have expected those tasks to require an expensive
machine though?

------
jhallenworld
A big loser here is Microsoft. IBM has basically just purchased Linux at the
time when Microsoft has finally embraced it.

~~~
techntoke
Nah, they'll end up picking up Canonical. I'm guessing this acquisition was
preemptive.

------
chasd00
Every aquisition I've been a part of immediately resulted in a massive brain
drain as everyone who made the aquired company great jumps ship. I wonder if
Redhat's competitors are licking their chops.

------
starefossen
This affects on so many open source projects in addition to RHEL. ANSIBLE,
Ceph, OpenShift, Linux kernel, JBoss as well as everything Red Hat acquired
from CoreOS.

~~~
haolez
I hope CoreOS succeeds regardless. It has built a very nice ecosystem around
it.

------
billwear
Honestly? I think IBM isn’t as relevant as they’d like to be, so they’re
buying a Nike. They haven’t thought about the details, or worked out the long
term. It could still go either way, but RH will chamge some over time. The
real problem will probably be the perception, largely thanks to Oracle and
it’s behavior with Sun. Does make you wonder if open source is a sustainable
business model in the ultra-long-term.

------
jlgaddis
I haven't made it through all of the comments on this thread yet but, in case
it hasn't been mentioned, HN'ers who are using AWS may be interested in
knowing that, Amazon Linux (i.e., the official Amazon Linux AMIs) also appears
to mostly be a clone of RHEL.

I can't be certain as I've just barely played with it but, from first
appearances, it sure seemed _very_ similar to RHEL and CentOS!

I don't know if AWS is starting with RHEL and rebuilding everything from
source and "re-branding" it like CentOS does or if they're _starting_ with
CentOS and then rebuilding and rebranding that -- or perhaps I'm completely
incorrect and they aren't doing anything of the sort -- but any future changes
or decisions (by IBM/Red Hat) that impact the development or future existence
of CentOS could very well affect the future of Amazon Linux as well.

That's certainly something to think about if you use the Amazon Linux
distribution, just like I -- and, I imagine, a ton of other CentOS users -- am
wondering right now about the future of CentOS.

The good thing is that IBM is old and slow and any decisions that might affect
the future existence of CentOS will likely take a few years to actually be
realized. By that I mean that I don't think we'll see 7.x affected by this
acquisition -- or probably even the first couple of point releases of CentOS 8
-- but, at this point, it's anybody's guess whether 8 will live out its
normal/expected lifetime and still be around 10 years after release.

As a side note, recently I've been thinking that an announcement of the
release of 8.0 should be arriving any day now. I'm kinda curious if this
acquisition has affected (delayed) the release of 8.0 in any way.

~~~
jlgaddis
> release of 8.0

"beta of 8.0" is what I meant.

------
majewsky
Good thing we're using CoreOS instead of Red Hat.

 _/ me looks at the CoreOS article on Wikipedia_

Fuck.

~~~
wging
relevant line:

> The CoreOS corporation was purchased by Red Hat in January 2018 for a
> purchase price of $250 million.[71]

------
tradesmanhelix
$50 says someone like Microsoft or Google responds to this by buying
Canonical.

~~~
int_19h
At this point, Microsoft might as well do its own Debian-based distro. What
would they need from Canonical, really? Experienced people? I suspect it'd be
much cheaper to pull a Hejlsberg with them.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _What would they need from Canonical, really?_

Staff, existing customer relationships and credibility.

------
thinkingemote
Has Richard Stallman responded yet? I'd be interested to see if any of the
legends of Linux have commented and what they have to say.

~~~
teddyh
RMS is usually eminently practical and pragmatic. Since this has not caused
any practical change _yet_ , there is nothing to comment on – it’s all
speculation, and RMS usually does not speculate.

------
ausjke
The only positive side I can think of is that, Microsoft did not buy RH before
IBM does.

This is a threat to OSS, sadly.

Maybe Google or Amazon will buy Canonical soon?

~~~
lghh
I don't want Google or Amazon anywhere near Canonical.

~~~
notyourwork
Why?

~~~
actuator
I don't know about Google but Amazon should definitely not come near
Canonical. Amazon is the worst among FAANG & Microsoft towards Open Source.
Look at what they have given back to the community.

------
j1vms
One word: SCO.

It's amazing if you consider _how_ differently this sort of acquisition would
have been viewed, way back during the SCO v. IBM [0] era.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp).

------
Ice_cream_suit
IBM have a consistent, decades long history of acquiring superb firms and then
mismanaging them into marketplace irrelevance.

------
cyphar
My main worry is that this will end up like the Novell acquisition of SUSE. 10
years on and there is still scar tissue running through SUSE and openSUSE.
Lots of bad blood was stirred up (and in many ways this is what cause the drop
in interest in SUSE). IBM has hardly had the best history when it comes to
treating its acquisitions (or its employees for that matter).

On the other hand, I know quite a few folks who work for IBM and do great free
software work. I want to think that RedHat would be treated like OzLabs -- a
fairly isolated group that gets to continue working on all of the free
software work they have always done.

Here's hoping it works out. The survival of RedHat (or any large free software
company) is very important to the longevity of the projects that we all depend
on.

[I work at SUSE, though I wasn't around during the Novell years I have heard
plenty of horror stories. And I've used GroupWise.]

------
bepotts
God help us.

Will there be any independent open source/open source friendly company that
isn't controlled by some corporate giant?

~~~
mhsabbagh
Probably if things go wrong, every community will just fork the code and move
on.

~~~
outbackcoder
The problem being that forked projects rarely get much traction. Look at
Devuan. Only the very hard core Debian fanboys moved over. Sure, it's nice not
having systemd, but the project will never have the user base and developer
support that its parent project enjoys. Maybe, though, with RH being bought
out, people will take a second look. I've always favoured Debian over RH for
servers, as the upgrade path is dead simple and almost always works. RH/CentOS
is a tough row to hoe in this regard comparitively.

------
gigatexal
Here's my take since we're all weighing in and are all in different levels of
shock: IBM needs Redhat to stay relevant. The way I think about it is in a few
ways. 1) IBM's stock price has been tanking because I think they're not
investing in new products but just cutting expenditures to meet stupid Wall-
Street targets. But with the introduction of RedHat they get new "blood" as it
were. Who knows, what if they make the CEO of RedHat the CEO of IBM a la Satya
Nadella and Microsoft?

They have said that RedHat would remain an independent part of IBM as part of
their cloud push. Let's take them at their word unless they prove us wrong.
Also, if nothing else, this could give RedHat even more money to make
ambitious bets -- perhaps we might see Power9 systems running Fedora soon?

In the end I think this is, on the whole, a good thing. Now, does MS buy
Canonical?

~~~
joebolte
What do you mean “a la Satya Nadella and Microsoft”? He didn’t join MSFT
through an acquisition. Did you mean Jobs/NeXT/Apple?

~~~
gigatexal
The analogy isn’t 1:1 but I think the core of MS and what he was doing in the
cloud division might as well had him an outsider. MS was still highly Windows
first all others second under Ballmer. Under Nadella he bet the future of the
company on cloud and it’s been the right choice. What if they do the same with
a changing of the guard — not immediately but eventually?

------
timvisee
Interesting to see no comments praising this at all. I wonder what happened to
RedHat for them to make this decision.

~~~
zokier
50% premium on stock price, or $10B+ of extra money

------
EwanG
This feels like Sears buying KMart - One ailing firm buying another in the
hopes that scale will fix everything...

~~~
enitihas
I think KMart bought Sears and then renamed itself as Sears.

------
sparkling
Wow. Not good for Red Hat in the long-term. Feels like the Sun takeover by
Oracle a few years ago. Maybe they can maintain their efficient internal
structures, but i have the feeling they will get caught in IBM internal power
struggles and politics and lose their hands-on problem solving power.

------
trimbo
I look forward to IBM marketing taking over.

"yum, powered by Watson"

~~~
filereaper
"dnf, powered by Watson"

~~~
tannhaeuser
System/D, powered by Tivoli Cluster Manager

------
crb002
This will only work out if IBM beefs up it's data centers to clone AWS
(Lambda, Batch, S3, RDS, SQS, Fargate), gobbles Netifly, then puts mainframe
DB2 in the cloud next to commodity servers. Also needs to open the ZOS
toolchain and get a modern syntax and tooling around COBOL.

~~~
delfinom
Tried IBM cloud when it was "released".

50% of the portal pages were failing due to their own cross origin policies.

Only a idiot would touch such an incompetent cloud system.

~~~
bengalister
I worked for a company that used bluemix PAAS (cloudfoundry based back in
2016). We were early adopters(customers), the service was not really stable at
that time (but we were not in production yet) but it improved and ended up
quite stable before we left for different reasons. I think I preferred (cost
aside) their PAAS offering to some competitors like AWS beanstalk.

------
Jedd
Will this warrant an Our Incredible Journey [1] entry?

Not technically an exit, I guess, at least not for most of the staff that
start to work for Big Blue in a month.

[1]
[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

~~~
Apocryphon
I figured bringing up that Tumblr will get flagged or at least downvoted, but
it is amusing to ponder what would be the biggest, most high-profile
acquisition in tech to merit an entry. Doubly funny when the firms involved
aren't Silicon Valley startups but old enterprises.

~~~
Jedd
I guess any publicly traded company is by definition at risk of being bought
(or merged in this case) without notice or even much public speculation -- but
this one feels particularly surprising as I'd been assuming much of Red Hat's
value for its customers was its corporate-friendly support arrangements
_combined with_ its apparent independence from the traditionally-perceived
excessively-corporate heavyweights.

The arguably customer-hostile licensing changes at Red Hat over the last few
years are possibly an indicator of a shift in company culture.

On the other side, I've actually felt positively towards IBM since the 1990's
when they started to commit heavily to a lot of free software efforts.

------
TomasD
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they
buy you."

------
marknadal
This reminds me of an article[1] I wrote predicting shifting trends in Open
Source development, in particular of core infrastructure tools.

There is a huge ripe opportunity for a new company/non-profit to step in and
set precedence on the future of developer tools. People don't "Dream Big"
anymore, and having the biggest OSS companies absorbed by the most proprietary
of companies is a perfect example of hope being lost. I hope we can revert
this trend, who wants to help?

1\. [https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-
par...](https://hackernoon.com/the-implications-of-rethinkdb-and-parse-
shutdowns-c076460058f7)

------
dhimes
I would feel a lot better about this if their other recently acquired
properties showed a better user experience, especially weather underground and
the weather channel.

I'm not an IBM hater by any means. My FIL was a beemer; I have a good friend
who is still one, along with various others I've known through my life. I cut
my teeth on IBM mainframes, and my nostalgia for things like xterm stem from
that.

But their recent track record is troubling. To an outsider it seems like they
haven't formed a cohesive corporate strategy, and they've been making things
up quarter to quarter.

I don't feel good about this, I'm sorry to say. I hope I'm wrong.

------
kurczynski
I am so sad about this. There is nothing good that I see coming out of this,
but I hope that's just my bias. Red Hat has been a huge contributed to Linux
and open source for years, I want to keep my Fedora!!

~~~
ulkesh
I completely agree. I feel the same about MS buying Github, too. We are seeing
so much consolidation in so many markets, the only true outcome will be that
it will be a worse environment for the rest of us.

------
mxuribe
So...how does this - if at all - impact linux (running smoothly) on thinkpads?
From what i hear, beyond the normal open source contributors, numerous redhat
engineers contribute towards fundamental device drivers for the thinpad
platform of laptops...which, as i undestand it, why linux distros run soooo
smoothly on for example my thinkpad t420. Perhaps my thought is selfish, but i
love me some thinkpads - specifically because they run linux sooo nicely. So,
will ibm force these guys to focus on other stuff? Or, am i worried for
nothing?

~~~
kazen44
only time will tell i guess.

Thinkpads are still nice machines to run not only linux on, but also openBSD.
(most, if not all openBSD dev's run thinkpads as their development machines).

~~~
mxuribe
Hmmm, i didn't know that about the openBSD devs. Good to know. I'll have to
take good ol' openBSD for a little test drive on my thinkpad. Cheers!

------
honestlyidk
That blog post from cormier scares me. Its so cheerleading and the use of "we"
like any one besides the employees at RedHat get a piece of that buyout.
"Opensource is here to stay." ... Im not holding my breath. But I am bullish
on the possibilities. If IBM doesnt F this up I hope they realize that people
dont have negative feelings about them like Amazon and Google. People want a
tech company that is more tech and less politics. IBM dont do anything special
just have a simple payment structure with a product that works.

------
nickysielicki
I really don't understand this. Redhat has been very profitable lately, what
do they stand to gain from this? Why do they need cash so badly, what are they
investing in?

Their success is so dependent on having management that understands how unique
their business model is, I just can't understand why they'd be so desperate
for cash that they'd risk screwing that up. Even if you have confidence that
it's going to be fine for the next 5 years, what about 15 years from now?
They've signed their soul away.

~~~
blihp
They don't _need_ the cash, they _want_ the cash. What management and
shareholders stand to gain from it is cashing out. That's the way business
works. Not saying it's the way things should be, just the way they are.

------
thrower123
I don't really understand how IBM keeps rolling along, as they outsource more
and more of their workers and kill off entire divisions of their best-known
products. They don't really make software anymore, they don't really make
hardware. Their cloud offerings are an also-ran behind Oracle. They have a
massively overhyped, marketing-driven AI division. Mostly they seem to do the
awful kind of IT consulting that the other H1B sweatshops engage in, but
perhaps at a slightly more prestigious level.

------
nilsocket
I hope all companies using opensource software would contribute back either by
returning some percent of their profit or in-terms of work-force.

It's like many companies take, but doesn't give back.

------
stephenr
I kind of wonder how many of the people here bemoaning this buyout, also buy
into the vc model, where the ultimate 'goal' for most startups is a buyout by
a bigger company.

------
headgasket
Left CentOS about 4 years ago for Ubuntu, never looked back. Debian is a
better system, Ubuntu is a very nice consistent distro. You should check out
Proxmox, also debian based, very nice alternative for containers in small-
medium deploys. Cheers and open-source on! EDIT: AGAIN down voted for no good
reason! Is this automatic? How does this work? Cheerio, will log off for
another six months, if anybody can suggest another real hacker's forum I'd be
very grateful! TIA

------
partycoder
Red Hat has contributed so much to open source projects. Even if you don't use
their distribution, their contributions are present in countless initiatives
and projects.

------
MrStonedOne
Time for an increased focus on productivity and deadlines and shareholder
return until all talent leaves from burn out.

Good news for any tech company looking for talent in the next few years.

------
kernal1974
When I was at IBM my laptop ran RedHat enterprise. Was the brightest spot in
working for a miserable company like IBM. I miss that now that I am forced to
use Windows 7.

------
downrightmike
Fuck. RH seemed like a good company, and for it to go into a slow wasting
death at IBM is a bummer.

------
55555
Can someone help me understand... What exactly do IBM and Oracle do? I assume
they are mostly hired to build software and do
software/hardware/networking/database services. How much of their business is
government contracts? Everyone here is talking about how nobody enjoys hiring
them but they are billion-dollar companies... I have never worked in the
public sector nor at a conglomerate so I am unable to comprehend this.

~~~
kazen44
nobody got fired for buying IBM/Oracle/SAP.

usually, IBM is used for very large enterprise projects and it is usually done
at a "high level". (aka, architecture et al, not direct implementation).

IBM is a slow, corporate monster, but it is very good at doing high, exec
level consulting.

------
trasz
Time to update the FreeBSD Handbook, I suppose:

[https://reviews.freebsd.org/D17745](https://reviews.freebsd.org/D17745)

------
downrightmike
Dupe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321937)

------
ironfootnz
They failed at PC. They failed at Cloud They failed with Watson They failed
with Bluemix They ...... with Redhat.

In game theory, there are two types of players: Finite and Infinite. They are
in the long run for sure and definitely they don't have pure strategy just a
mixed one that doesn't go anywhere but stay where is it, until there's no one
else playing the game anymore. IBM stands for ( I Bullshit Millions)

------
The_rationalist
HELP, I have a big question : The buyout will go to the shareholders, that is
a deterministic ~30% net benefit. (the offer being ~30% > than the market cap)
So WHY shouldn't us the readers of the news, buy shares right now, before the
market react ?

And we can even imagine a Web crawler software that detect that entreprise X
announce to buy entreprise Y && the offer being > to the market cap, then auto
buy ?

~~~
adambyrtek
It's already too late to buy "before the market reacts". This is public
information now, so it will be priced into the market price once the stock
market opens.

~~~
The_rationalist
Yes but my question would be, not everyone will buy at market opening T+1, but
more some hours after ? Is This still impossible because of bots ? Tomorow
empiricism will answer me.

------
amjadcsu
IBM had power and if anyone remembers it was also part of cell architecture
team along with sony and Toshiba. I worked with yellow dog linux the official
linux distro for sony ps3 . IBM at that point was still pushing for Red hat
instead of investing in yellow dog which was powerpc centric. Red hat fedora
later dropped support for powerpc. So in all IBM hardware failed and now it is
trying to go is way?

------
chris_wot
Oh shit. This is one of the worst things I can imagine.

~~~
IronBacon
Well, I can easily imagine something worse, like for example Oracle buying
it... ^__^;

~~~
chris_wot
Or EMC...

~~~
IronBacon
If we are talking about the storage company, I honestly have no opinion about
it, but like you I'm somewhat scared of this acquisition. I wasn't aware that
RedHat was looking for a buyer, I thought they were profitable and without
debts...

------
altmind
This is terrible news, I really hope this deal does not go through, get
blocked by shareholders or by anti-trust laws.

I also remember that IBM is not doing good - profits are decreasing and their
software and services division fail to produce any innovation for the last
years.

Did IBM need to buy whole RH to strengthen their cloud offering? Couldnt they
just partnered with RH cloud division, leaving RH Core team independent?

------
inscrutable
I can see independent software vendors like Heptio and Canonical being the
main beneficiary of this deal.

IBM can sweat the old large companies but they have no credible cloud offering
and this doesn't change that. Converting on-prem to kubernetes and using a
proper cloud like Google, AWS or Microsoft without also paying steep margin to
IBM would seem to be more attractive.

------
Rampoina
Welp, just as I got hired to work at Red Hat. :(

~~~
techntoke
RH has been full of corporate drones for a while. You'll fit right in after
the acquisition.

~~~
Rampoina
Well, thank you for the uncalled-for insult!

~~~
techntoke
I'll think otherwise the day I can log into LinkedIn and see something besides
RH employees sharing the same advertisements without any discussion.

------
avip
Can anyone walk me through the reasoning behind all this IBM hatred? What's
going on? I thought they just sell mainframes.

~~~
whoisjuan
Try to use something made by IBM and then tell us if you like it.

~~~
rubin55
1\. DB2 is a damn good database imho. 2\. And J9 was the fastest JVM when I
benchmarked it about a year ago using jmh. 3\. And I think Websphere Liberty
is a damn fine app server also. 4\. I really like Power based CPUs. 5\. Talos
is made possible because of the open approach that IBM had in creating the
power platform. 6\. I think loopback is pretty cool also.

~~~
nineteen999
Agreed about DB2, although I don't believe the innovation there is as strong
as at once was. We run it on Redhat so this might actually bode well for us.
Until it comes time to renew our Redhat licenses at least...

------
shmerl
No, IBM isn't going to be good for Linux. RedHat as an independent company
supported a lot of efforts to make Linux better overall, including reverse
engineering hardware drivers, which most companies won't care about in the
least. I don't trust IBM to continue that, so it will be a major setback to
Linux efforts.

------
setquk
Judging by IBM’s history over the last 20 years I suspect this is akin to
putting Satan at the wheel and giving him a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Several layers of abstraction down the line I get the feeling this will hurt
us ansible and centos users now they have been pulled under the umbrella.

What happened to companies standing tall and alone?

------
mindfulplay
They will put the Watson marketing department and the salespeople to work and
cut off any meaningful tech. Sigh.

~~~
billfruit
Seriously the amount of Watson hype IBM is spinning is astounding. Recently
went to a vendors sales presentation on IBM Rhapsody, and they are touting
some sort of rudimentary interactive agent, as powered by 'Watson'.

------
pjmlp
So basically we are getting the consolidation of companies that bother to
spend money on FOSS.

This is what happens when everyone expects to use the work of others for free
without paying a dime.

Eventually the companies go looking for buyers with deep enough pockets to
support them.

Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Facebook,..., take your pick.

------
Quequau
I have to wonder if folks aren't making more of this news that is really
there. I mean besides a lot money changing hands and the usual process of IBM
taking on a lot of employees and eventually laying many of them off.

Could anyone venture to predict how this might effect the wider Linux
ecosystem?

------
GDV
Hi all, I'm a reporter with Bloomberg. I'm keen to track the acquisition and
how it's being received, especially from the Red Hat end. If you're an
employee and would like to chat, please reach out. I can keep it completely
anonymous. gerritdevynck@protonmail.com

Thank you!

------
franga2000
So, with SUSE getting sold to some equity firm and Red Hat being bought by
Oracle's slightly less evil twin brother, is Canonical really the only
"independent" Linux OS vendor left? And here I thought this was going to be
The Year of The Linux Desktop™...

------
pmden
We're in the middle of a rollout of CoreOS. We'll finish the deployment, but
won't be going in on any of the differentiators like locksmith. If only to
make our possible migration to either (1) Debian or (2) The inevitable fork of
Container Linux easier.

------
RandomTisk
Kind of surreal news honestly, my interest in this is about like I would
imagine if I was going to a Monster Truck show and found out several drivers
would be absolutely plastered the whole time: I'm pretty sure something very
bad is going to happen.

------
foobarbazetc
Nooooooooooo.

------
irrational
We have been preparing to move from Windows to RHEL. We are pretty far along
in the process, but there is still time to switch distros. This is primarily
for database and web servers. Does anyone have any recommendations on a
different distro?

------
jraph
I see that Linus retiring from kernel development for a few days has indeed
massive consequences.

Also see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281465](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18281465)

------
gdsdfe
This is a cloud play ... But they're like late by a decade, hmm interesting
times!

------
wangyjx
IBM's market cap is a little more than 100B so far. It costs more than 30B to
acquire RH, that means IBM realize that if it doesn't do something useful, it
will sink.

RH maybe the only one that's worth of purchasing and IBM can afford.

------
starpilot
_tips Fedora_

------
throwaway713
Welp, there goes any chance Research Triangle Park ever had of being a major
tech hub.

~~~
jnbiche
It already is a major tech hub (top 10 in the nation, pretty close to top 5).
But I agree that this isn't a good sign for RTP.

------
virtualwhys
This is an HN black-bar-worthy event (given the OSS implications).

\-- longtime CentOS/Fedora user

------
sys_64738
What will happen to the parts of IBM and Red Hat which overlap? If there is
competing tech which adds to IBM's bottom line then chances are that is what
IBM will keep. It will be interesting to know what those areas are.

~~~
zokier
> It will be interesting to know what those areas are.

JBoss vs WAS will be a major thing where they are most directly competing.
Java, especially in its EE incarnation, is not so hot on HN but massively
important in the enterprise.

------
mathattack
As a Corp buyer of both, it seems like one dinosaur buying another. When IBM
(Or CA or Oracle or any other old school firm) buys another company, it almost
always results in underinvestment in product and worse support.

------
gred
I haven't felt this way since March 25th, 2014.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469115)

------
binaryapparatus
Red Hat already had too much grip on Linux, it will be interesting how this
all plays when IBM steps in.

In other shocking news Poeterring now works for IBM? Can we blame IBM for
systemd in the future?

------
ir193
It's not about IBM at all. We have AWS/Azure/GCP out there. IBM and Red Hat?
That reminds me Intel+samsung or Nokia+Qt when there are already
Android/iOS/WP.

------
pinewurst
Wondering how this is going to affect their recruiting pipeline. I submitted
an application myself last week but now have absolutely no interest in being a
guest at this feast.

------
nilsocket
I hope all companies using opensource software would contribute back either by
returning some percent of their profits or in-terms of work-force.

Many companies take, but doesn't give back.

------
alanzhong
I probably can understand the motivation from IBM side. Most big/great
companies have a long term vision and strategy. I did not get Redhat, is it
good to join IBM?

------
bitL
What has just happened??

Was there some behind-the-door takeover, from a friend to a friend? Or a
pressure from investors like MS with Nokia? It just doesn't make any other
sense...

------
trhway
RH fell behind the times. Their paradigm of a stable though an older kernel
was suitable for the times when kernel wasn't that stable and things in the
industry were developed slower than today. I work in a big enterprise space
and usually we do Ubuntu if we can and SUSE Enterprise if we can't :), i
recently tried Docker/Kubernetes on a recent RHEL - looking at the kernel
version i already didn't expect the stuff to work and of course it didnt work
(no complete namespaces features support). Their push for their own custom
software platform instead is a good match for IBM.

~~~
cozzyd
You know you can run your own kernel, right?

~~~
trhway
Good luck IT-blessing kernel changes at BigCo-s. And what would be the purpose
of a BigCo buying RHEL if one has to mock around with kernel afterwards?
Anyway though, the RH not being a cloud player that has been making it
obsolete too.

------
Alexander_
I think Microsoft should buy Ubuntu now, and we are all set.

~~~
setquk
Please don't give anyone any ideas.

------
barbecue_sauce
Hopeful outcome of this, provided IBM realizes it is the student in this
situation:

IBM's historical reputation coupled with Red Hat's proven success and products
creates a serious competitor to Microsoft at the small-to-medium enterprise
level. As Red Hat gains share, other corporate Linux flavors ride the rising
tide, and Linux finally captures the long tail.

Further out, Microsoft transitions to being a device company a-la Apple. Bill
Gates comes back to save the floundering company but insists that each device
offer mechanized vaccinations, leading to skyrocketing prices and general
shunning from the populace, which has gradually devolved into rabid anti-
vaccination fervor. Microsoft fails, and is ultimately embraced, extended, and
extinguished by IBM/Red Hat.

------
webwanderings
They should have taken over docker. Instead, they went old fashioned. Fine.
But this probably doesn’t scare competition away (MS, AWS, Google).

------
gregf
Just glad I jumped ship to FreeBSD a year ago. Sad that Ansible is involved in
this though. We were just considering switching from Chef.

------
senozhatsky
I am living in an alternate Universe now?

    
    
      - Linus is super polite here;
      - RedHat is IBM here;
      - IBM is still bad, tho.
    

-ss

P.S. Sad news.

------
ironfootnz
They failed with watson, They failed with Bluemix They .... with Redhat.

I don't think that's a good move from Redhat perspective.

------
simonebrunozzi
My 0.02:

IBM:Oracle=RH:Sun

(question from a non-native English speaker: is the above interpreted as IBM
is to Oracle as RH is to Sun ?)

Bad times are coming for open source.

~~~
bpye
IBM is to RedHat what Oracle was to Sun

------
mk89
I still fail to see how this will help Red Hat achieve "even more", as they
claim in the statement. Sad day!

------
jaimex2
Well Canonical - if you were waiting for the right moment to push hard and
take Red Hat's business this is it.

------
smooc
So now everyone will be wearing blue pyjamas and talk about Watson while not
delivering anything.

Seriously.

Can anyone explain why this would be good?

------
ddavis
Terrible news for scientific computing :(

------
wyoh
I am extremely worried for Fedora. I don't see IBM allowing RH to support us
with servers and employees.

------
chrisper
Does this mean they will turn the super good red hat documentation in IBM
style super useless documentation?

------
tomohawk
Hmmm - even less happy about systemd and all the other red had stuff that's
been pumped into linux.

------
worldvoyageur
I dunno. IBM was pretty generous with the operating system when they invented
the PC in the first place.

------
_emacsomancer_
Maybe IBM can re-acquire ThinkPad from Lenovo too. Red Hat traditionally uses
ThinkPads internally.

~~~
techntoke
Red Hat employees traditionally use Macs and Windows PCs.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
Is this really the case? I had always heard that part of the reason ThinkPads
have such good Linux support is their use internally at Red Hat (who pushed
the relevant code upstream).

~~~
techntoke
Yes it really is. There are some people internally that use Fedora, but even
they are becoming more rare. Canonical on the otherhand requires their
employees use their distro.

I personally run Arch and haven't had issues on any hardware that I've tested,
and it has the benefit of staying current with the latest stable kernel and
software, so it doesn't have to backport fixes and features.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
My understanding (via the Ubuntu podcast) is that Canonical allows people
(outside of core desktop team) to use at least non-Ubuntu distros.

~~~
techntoke
This could be a more recent change, but while I was working there in 2015 it
was part of the hiring process to use your own laptop with Ubuntu, and that is
how they would test compatibility with multiple devices. Heck, if I could run
Arch Linux, I'd consider going back.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
This is all third hand information on my part, but I would guess that
Canonical's shift towards server and away from desktop could be related.

------
B1FF_PSUVM
Oh boy, am I going to have a field day ribbing my Fedora-sporting friends
about their IBM PCs ...

------
Yhippa
In retrospect I'm surprised this didn't happen a long time ago. Good lucky RH
brothers.

------
rdiddly
I had to mentally check the calendar to see if it was April 1. (Sadly, it is
not.)

------
calibas
How easy is it to switch to Ubuntu instead of upgrading my web server to
CentOS 7?

------
crb002
Colocation of mainframe and commodity compute is huge if they can pull it off.

------
netmonk
can someone explain to me what will happen tomorow at market opening ?
Currently redhat is quoted 114$, IBM announced they will buy all share at
190$. will it be tradable tomorow morning at market opening ?

------
gowthamgts12
Oh my god

------
geff82
Hearing this, nothong else than a big f word comes out of my mouth.

------
dreyfiz
What the expletive! (Awesome, really didn’t see it coming though!)

------
watertom
IBM is where Unisys was in 1990, this is not positive for Red Hat.

------
nilsocket
It Red hat and later canonical were bought by some companies.

This is going to be a big setback to open-source software as both compaines
contribute a lot to Linux distroes.

Smaller companies will find it hard to rely or choose a distribution.

If IBM acquires Red hat, I hope they leave it alone.

------
pasbesoin
Bad news.

Sure, there are ways you could argue it could work well.

But, IBM would have to change.

Good luck with that.

------
mindentropy
I am having a feeling that Dell might buy Canonical soon.

------
tawy39
Just started a new job at Red Hat around a year ago. I kept thinking "this is
too good to be true".

It was. Good luck everyone, massive layoffs, salary cuts, and destruction of
benefits coming soon I bet.

------
balozi
RH + IBM is like making a bad thing much much worse.

------
ChicagoDave
Like ten years after they should have done this.

------
setheron
Who do people dislike more : Oracle or IBM?

------
aphextron
Does this have regulatory approval already?

------
markznyc
why so many people want to work on their own project when whey work at IBM, I
bet the job must be so boring there

------
mangecoeur
Tomorrow: Microsoft acquires canonical :P

~~~
anticensor
The week after: Ubuntu LTS ditched, Ubuntu gets forced updates;
[https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows](https://github.com/Microsoft/Windows)
returns 200 OK, containing Windows 10 source code :)

------
burtonator
Proud to be part of Americas 5 companies!

------
exabrial
Can the shareholders block this somehow?

~~~
tialaramex
For a large public corporation usually a clear majority of shares are held as
pure investment by big institutional investors like pension companies. Their
goal is to turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money without
too much risk. So they have no reason to block this sort of deal.

Moreover, such companies are often desperate to minimise overheads on
operations. Once upon a time they'd employ dozens of specialists, now they're
relying on computer models as much as possible to reduce costs and don't much
care about what's actually driving the price changes that the model is looking
at.

Boards at big companies actually now know this. Suppose you're the board of a
big corp and you'd like $10M each even though you didn't do a good job? Just
write up paperwork saying you propose that you get paid $10M extra each
because of diddly-dee, put it up for a vote by shareholders with a
recommendation that they vote "Yes". A few smaller shareholders are paying
attention, they'll vote "No". The big institutions are entirely on auto-pilot,
and will follow your "Yes" recommendation, your vote passes, you now get $10M
with no effort. Giving the board a pile of money for no reason might bankrupt
the company. Not your problem, the shareholders voted for it.

For the pension company making your shareholders $10 and then asking for $1 to
cover overheads from actual specialists (10%) is seen as worse than making
your shareholders $8 and then asking for 10¢ to cover overheads from a few
pencil pushers (1.25%) even though in the first scenario the shareholder kept
$9 and in the second they only got $7.90. Nobody wants to pay 10%. The result
was foreseeable but it's hard to say if it could have been prevented.

The Red Hat board will recommend shareholders accept the offer. Big
institutions will (and in this case in my opinion quite rightly) automatically
agree and so it doesn't matter what a handful of small private shareholders
do.

------
karussell
Good bye last true open source company!

------
moomin
Big BlueHat

------
exabrial
Please no.

------
whydoineedthis
oohhh..maybe we can finally get some laptop drivers written for linux!

~~~
TechieKid
Assuming you are thinking of Thinkpads, IBM hasn't owned that since 2006.

------
kalefranz
At least it’s not Oracle.

------
xtat
Good news for Debian :)

------
MrStonedOne
Oracle2.0.

Good news for fedora thou

~~~
jammygit
What is your reasoning? In the other HN news thread, there were some people
specifically worried about Fedora after the acquisition

------
justinclift
Ugh. Terrible news. Better than by MS or Oracle though. Just.

------
marenkay
I had to check twice if I hibernated and it was April 1st.

TL;DR IBM just bought a controlling interest in almost every Linux based
system on the planet, and thus all the big companies making money with Open
Source.

------
inscrutable
This is fine.

------
amrx431
RIP Red Hat.

------
noja
.

------
0xFFFF0000
Oh, no!

------
MrStonedOne
Big if true

>bloomberg.com

 _if_ true

~~~
bsg75
Reuters is reporting the same

~~~
SteveNuts
Now official - [https://www.redhat.com/en](https://www.redhat.com/en)

------
alishan-l
Another one bites the dust

------
GautamGoel
Welp, there goes Fedora!

------
spiritcat
fork?

------
claydavisss
RedHat had a good reputation as a place to work. Meanwhile, when I worked at
IBM my health insurance contribution for a family of four was $1k a month

~~~
pinewurst
Plus the wonderful 401k match once a year plus the "colocation" scandal etc,
etc.

------
ianai
The history of the “free economy” is one of concentration of market power.
Good reference is Galbraith’s “1929 the great crash”

~~~
cosinetau
I feel you're right, which is why I'm surprised by the seemingly negative
response to this news, and the overwhelmingly positive response from
GitHub+Microsoft.

Some of the same conflicts of interest exist in both modern cases,
notwithstanding, both have opposite contribution histories.

Am I missing something?

~~~
prepend
Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft
is at least a software company.

IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.

Competing with AWS and Microsoft is pretty crazy and does not make sense to
me. RedHat’s value is in its software, not its cloud delivery.

And, frankly, I depend a little more on centos/fedora than I do Github.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> Others pointed out that the Github merger wasn’t all positive, but Microsoft
> is at least a software company.

> IBM is a consulting company and their model is really different than RedHat.

Maybe the complementariness of this could be good?

(Yes, Microsoft is a software company, but they produce a particular type of
software which is why many people weren't thrilled about their acquisition of
Github.)

------
anoncoward111
Oh, that's _suuuuuper_ gross. Red Hat is pretty cool for open source but this
can only mean one thing if IBM is going to suck blood from the stone.

------
red-tea
Why are these things announced on Sunday? Microsoft acquiring Github was
announced on Sunday too.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Maybe to prevent insider deals during stock hours eg. traders already in the
know of upcoming acquisitions minutes before others?

------
yuhong
The fun thing is that IBM stock was already recently dropping.

------
severino
Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it
systemd became endangered ;)

~~~
eliaspro
So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?

~~~
cthalupa
I'd rathe someone take another shot at service management.

I don't want to hold onto everything about SysV style systems - I love SMF in
Solaris! - but I'd definitely prefer a leaner and more focused approach to
development than we see with systemd.

~~~
JdeBP
Then you should pick up the reins of System XVI.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770)

------
outbackcoder
This is just as well, as I'm moving quite a bit to Net and OpenBSD. I'm tired
of the Linux drama (systemd, CoC, balkanised standards, etc.) the broken stuff
between distros. The slower changes for BSD development typically means more
stable software. And ZFS. Plus, I actually prefer the ICS/BSD license for
software in general, as it's maximally free. I've found over the years, that
my BSD boxes are far and away more stable than their Linux counterparts. I do
devops mostly, so stability and long-term availability are key factors. ext4
is getting long in the tooth and btrfs is nowhere near ZFS in stability or
ability or I/O. I've never had a BSD system crash unexpectedly other than bad
HW. I cannot say the same for Linux, even RHEL. I feel like a kid again in
many ways, because I get to explore all the cool things the BSDs can do again.
I'm even moving my Raspberry Pi over to NetBSD in the coming days as a
prototype platform to explore BSD embedded possibilities.

