IBM TO ACQUIRE RED HAT
Maybe today's biggest news:
Responses
From being part of very special bunch of people, <15k in number, to being part of crowd of 4,00,000 employees.. A Redhat employee just lost its premium market value.
Most important thing is that the work culture in IBM is crap. Soon the IBM management and accountants will kill the culture of Red Hat as well.
If we want good open source software to live, it's time to fork it.
Yes, that is the hot news... Not sure what would happen to the open-source culture of Red Hat after the acquisition...
Guru
2484 points
According to the press release "IBM to maintain Red Hat’s open source innovation legacy, scaling its vast technology portfolio and empowering its widespread developer community".
Let's see how long this remains true.
Guru
6222 points
All,
Let us wait and see if the investors back this plan.
Regards,
Jan Gerrit Kootstra
Pro
469 points
Hi,
Some of my personal views, based on 33 years of experience in IT and previously working for companies like CSC and Hewlett-Packard...
Potentially good:
• IBM’s AIX O/S and mainframe will be on the way out (finally).
• IBM has very large staff base.
• IBM has much larger development teams.
• IBM will rely on widely-used CPUs more (customers will not want Power chipset to force their destiny).
• Further boost for cloud offerings. Even Microsoft Azure is more than half Linux and Red Hat dominates those installs.
• IBM’s emphasis of hybrid clouds as the reason for the deal shows they would be better off tending to workloads that users put in clouds other than their own.
• IBM has weakness as its own IaaS remains unsophisticated compared to rivals and efforts to renovate it have not achieved desired state. IBM is effectively buying a cloud that spans several IaaS. IBM is not a natural fit for IaaS because much of its value proposition is tied up in its proprietary platforms and software. The software can make them profit by piping them into other clouds as native services, which is what IBM and Red Hat have announced.
• Buying Red Hat gives IBM management tools across multiple IaaS clouds, and an easier route to market for its software delivered as SaaS, a possibility to turn IaaS weakness towards IBM’s strength.
Bad:
• IBM will acquire major technologies and possibly dictate the future paths for their use.
• IBM will change the licensing model for RHEL products.
• Red Hat runs lean business, without much overheads, hence able to pass savings to customers. IBM is a bloated company with lot of loose ends and technologies that need serious modernization.
• Questions for IBM and VMware to clarify what this deal means for their joint VCPP cloud partner program.
• Inevitable job losses. Every time I see a merger or acquisition, I think of staff that become unemployed. Personally, I believe corporations have duty of care and should pay higher taxes when they "let employees go" because those poor employees become, in some way, a problem for society. On average, each unemployed person has a few family members, so the job loss does not affect only one person...
As the others said, time will tell.
Regards,
Dusan Baljevic (amateur radio VK2COT)
Guru
Community Member
3711 points
• IBM’s AIX O/S and mainframe will be on the way out (finally). • IBM will rely on widely-used CPUs more (customers will not want Power chipset to force their destiny).
Much like tape, mainframes in general and AIX/PPC in particular, have been repeatedly declared dead. Yet, IBM's been selling PPC and Z-series pretty successfully for "dead" products. So long as demand outstrips costs, I doubt they'd give up the revenue stream. There's still use-cases where the reliability of big-iron and associated OSes trumps other considerations. Hospitals and financial services companies still love IBM.
• IBM will acquire major technologies and possibly dictate the future paths for their use. • IBM will change the licensing model for RHEL products.
Great thing about OSS: even if you change the license, you don't necessarily dictate the software's future. Everything that existed before the license change stays under its prior terms. If the product is worth preserving and people don't like the new terms, they'll fork it an leave the post license-change software behind. If the product isn't worth it, it likely has no future, any way.
Guru
9765 points
Hi Dusan,
What you said about the possible job losses : I feel the same way you do - having been a "victim" of such merger consequences myself, I can only hope that this will not become true for too many of the Red Hat employees ...
Regards,
Christian
Pro
469 points
Hi Christian,
With full heart, I sympathize with your unpleasant experience and hope nobody needs to go through it.
It is almost degrading when a skillful person is "let go" (a terrible phrase some companies use) only for monetary reasons.
I have many friends who went through those events. Some of them took long time to recover.
Let's hope the IBM/Red Hat marriage will succeed in every aspect, with the main goal to progress humanity and leave this planet for next generations in as clean state as possible.
Some years ago, I watched a scientist in Australia who asked directors and managers:
How much would you pay if our "mother planet Earth" stopped creating oxygen and clean water that we all take for granted?
Regards,
Dusan Baljevic (amateur radio VK2COT)
Redhat is popular for it’s open source culture. Redhat recently changed its licensing model and not sure whether IBM will redesign it again. We will have to wait and see.
Guru
10133 points
Wondering how the chips will fall on this.
Guru
Community Member
3711 points
Other than the potential for culture-clash, it feels like there's a lot of overreaction to this. Kind of like the Microsoft/GitHub thing.
Unlike the Microsoft/GitHub thing, Microsoft is only a recent convert to OSS. They haven't quite fully established their bona-fides.
IBM was one of the early legacy-UNIX companies to gamble on Linux. Over the years, they've spent a lot of money, engineering- and lawyer-hours on Linux (remember SCO vs IBM?) and OSS. I think they've at least earned a "wait and see" on this one.
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