IBM acquires Red Hat - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-hybrid-cloud-provider <comment><USER2> 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.

<comment><USER3> 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

<comment><USER4> 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.

<comment><USER5> 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.

<comment><USER6> 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).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 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).

<comment><USER8> 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?

<comment><USER9> 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.

<comment><USER10> >> 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.

<comment><USER8> This makes a lot of sense, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> 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.

<comment><USER12> 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.

<comment><USER13> 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.

<comment><USER14> big typo on your home page "by using our our open source"

<comment><USER13> Thanks - forwarded onto marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 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.

<comment><USER16> 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.

<comment><USER17> Wait, so your university owns copyright on all your work by default?! That's a bummer if true. Outrageous, actually.

<comment><USER16> 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.)

<comment><USER18> 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.

<comment><USER19> 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.

<comment><USER20> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER22> > GPFS, which is a shining beacon compared to ceph and gluster.

Solves an entirely different problem.

<comment><USER23> Is there a short summary of which problems are solved by which filesystem?

<comment><USER22> 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.

<comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER22> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 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.

<comment><USER26> 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?

<comment><USER27> Oracle sales means promising everything and delivering half of that at best. Are you sure you want to use that as an example?

<comment><USER28> ...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.

<comment><USER29> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER31> 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.

<comment><USER30> 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.

<comment><USER32> 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.

<comment><USER29> > 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.

<comment><USER33> 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.

<comment><USER34> 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".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 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)

<comment><USER36> 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)

<comment><USER35> 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.

<comment><USER36> 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.

<comment><USER36> 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/)

<comment><USER37> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 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.

<comment><USER38> RH has been a sales-based organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> 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.

<comment><USER40> 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?

<comment><USER41> 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.

<comment><USER42> Rational Rose, Lotus

<comment><USER41> Can you expand?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> 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.

<comment><USER44> 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.

<comment><USER45> > 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)

<comment><USER46> He does still have a regular (i.e. not the chairmanship) board seat though, "non-independent" like Nadella.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> 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)

<comment><USER48> >> _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.

<comment><USER49> 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.

<comment><USER50> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Is this event comparable to when Oracle bought Sun? Should we expect IBM to rip RH apart and alienate all existing customers?

<comment><USER24> 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.

<comment><USER21> 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.

<comment><USER52> 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.

<comment><USER53> Core database engineering is still strong at Oracle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> 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.

<comment><USER55> 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.

<comment><USER56> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> 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.

<comment><USER58> _"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!)

<comment><USER59> 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.

<comment><USER58> Right. What I should have said was "should have hung onto the stock that I got from exercising the employee stock options".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> 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.

<comment><USER61> 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.

<comment><USER62> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> 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.

<comment><USER64> 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.

<comment><USER65> Red Hat is a lot more than the distros, isn't it?

<comment><USER66> Working for a competing company (Pivotal), I can say that yes, Red Hat does more than RHEL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> 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.

</comment><comment><USER68> 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.

<comment><USER69> Do you think Ubuntu has a future as an independent company?

<comment><USER68> I don't understand your question, sorry. Can you explain what you mean?

<comment><USER70> 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?

<comment><USER68> 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).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> 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...

<comment><USER24> There are strong rumors that IBM will be selling/spinning off its services group so perhaps that's the funding justification?

<comment><USER66> 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.

<comment><USER24> That's an interesting thought, though Red Hat has a significant services group too, so they'd still have one afterward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> 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.

</comment><comment><USER73> 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 :)

</comment><comment><USER74> 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.

<comment><USER75> 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.

<comment><USER74> 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.

<comment><USER75> _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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 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!)

<comment><USER24> Now official! It's at $190/share vs Friday's $116.68 close

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

<comment><USER76> [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"

<comment><USER77> Do truth-in-advertising laws apply if IBM were to change course from a stated goal?

<comment><USER78> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> 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)

</comment><comment><USER80> 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.

<comment><USER81> 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.

<comment><USER82> 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.

<comment><USER81> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> 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.

<comment><USER55> 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)

<comment><USER84> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> 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.

</comment><comment><USER86> 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.

<comment><USER87> > "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?

<comment><USER88> 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?

<comment><USER87> > "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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> 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.

</comment><comment><USER90> > 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)

<comment><USER91> I wouldn't have sold also, but IBM paid an 80% premium. Not exactly cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> 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 :-)

</comment><comment><USER93> 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.

<comment><USER94> Red Hat used to sell non-free software using the freemium model with Redhat Enterprise. Is that no longer the case?

<comment><USER93> 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.

<comment><USER95> They also require a support contract to view their bug tracker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Redhat website confirmed it. [https://www.redhat.com/en](https://www.redhat.com/en)

<comment><USER97> 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].

<comment><USER35> That URL looks like the best one so far, so we'll use it. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> 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.

<comment><USER66> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> 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.

<comment><USER47> > 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.

<comment><USER99> most projects on those incubators are there to die a slow death after being abandoned by the group you call "open source corporations"

<comment><USER100> > 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> 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?

<comment><USER102> 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).

<comment><USER70> 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.

<comment><USER103> [https://getsol.us/download/](https://getsol.us/download/) Long time arch user. Now using Solus for the last 9 months and I love it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Good news for Canonical/Ubuntu I guess? I wonder how Linux distro popularity will plot out in next few months.

<comment><USER105> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> If this happens, I see older engineers targeted by IBM as they have done over the for "cost savings" as part of the acquisition.

</comment><comment><USER107> 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.

<comment><USER108> > Can't think of any company I'd want less to be a steward of CentOS upstream

Oracle

<comment><USER107> > Oracle

Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> 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.

</comment><comment><USER110> 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.

</comment><comment><USER111> 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.

<comment><USER112> "Y buys X for it to operate distinctly within Y." usually doesn't mean much. It doesn't imply independence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> R.I.P. Red Hat.

</comment><comment><USER114> 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.

</comment><comment><USER115> 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

</comment><comment><USER116> 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.

</comment><comment><USER117> Wow this would be a very expensive purchase for IBM , redhat is currently worth about 20% of IBM's market cap

</comment><comment><USER118> IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.

<comment><USER22> Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.

<comment><USER119> 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 :)

<comment><USER120> 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.

<comment><USER119> [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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER121> (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.

</comment><comment><USER122> 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.

<comment><USER123> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER124> 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.

</comment><comment><USER125> This is terrible news. I hope its not true.

</comment><comment><USER126> 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.

</comment><comment><USER127> The real story here is that cloud is killing them both.

<comment><USER128> 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.

<comment><USER129> 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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER130> 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.

</comment><comment><USER131> 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.

<comment><USER132> Out of curiosity what sort of workloads are you running on a Talos II?

<comment><USER131> 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).

<comment><USER132> Interesting. I wouldn't have expected those tasks to require an expensive machine though?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A big loser here is Microsoft. IBM has basically just purchased Linux at the time when Microsoft has finally embraced it.

<comment><USER38> Nah, they'll end up picking up Canonical. I'm guessing this acquisition was preemptive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER133> 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.

</comment><comment><USER134> 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.

<comment><USER135> I hope CoreOS succeeds regardless. It has built a very nice ecosystem around it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER136> 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.

</comment><comment><USER137> 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.

<comment><USER137> > release of 8.0

"beta of 8.0" is what I meant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER138> Good thing we're using CoreOS instead of Red Hat.

 _/ me looks at the CoreOS article on Wikipedia_

Fuck.

<comment><USER139> relevant line:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER140> $50 says someone like Microsoft or Google responds to this by buying Canonical.

<comment><USER141> 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.

<comment><USER66> > _What would they need from Canonical, really?_

Staff, existing customer relationships and credibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER142> 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.

<comment><USER143> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> 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?

<comment><USER145> I don't want Google or Amazon anywhere near Canonical.

<comment><USER146> Why?

<comment><USER147> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER148> 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).

</comment><comment><USER42> IBM have a consistent, decades long history of acquiring superb firms and then mismanaging them into marketplace irrelevance.

</comment><comment><USER149> 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.]

</comment><comment><USER150> God help us.

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

<comment><USER109> Probably if things go wrong, every community will just fork the code and move on.

<comment><USER151> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER152> 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?

<comment><USER153> What do you mean "a la Satya Nadella and Microsoft"? He didn't join MSFT through an acquisition. Did you mean Jobs/NeXT/Apple?

<comment><USER152> 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?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER154> Interesting to see no comments praising this at all. I wonder what happened to RedHat for them to make this decision.

<comment><USER155> 50% premium on stock price, or $10B+ of extra money

</comment></comment><comment><USER156> This feels like Sears buying KMart - One ailing firm buying another in the hopes that scale will fix everything...

<comment><USER157> I think KMart bought Sears and then renamed itself as Sears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER158> 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.

</comment><comment><USER159> I look forward to IBM marketing taking over.

"yum, powered by Watson"

<comment><USER43> "dnf, powered by Watson"

<comment><USER86> System/D, powered by Tivoli Cluster Manager

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER160> 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.

<comment><USER161> 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.

<comment><USER162> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER163> 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/)

<comment><USER164> 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.

<comment><USER163> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER165> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they buy you."

</comment><comment><USER166> 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)

</comment><comment><USER167> 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.

</comment><comment><USER168> 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!!

<comment><USER169> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER170> 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?

<comment><USER52> 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).

<comment><USER170> 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!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER171> 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.

</comment><comment><USER172> 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.

<comment><USER173> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER174> 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.

</comment><comment><USER175> 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.

</comment><comment><USER176> 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.

</comment><comment><USER177> 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

</comment><comment><USER178> 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.

</comment><comment><USER179> 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.

</comment><comment><USER180> 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.

</comment><comment><USER181> Fuck. RH seemed like a good company, and for it to go into a slow wasting death at IBM is a bummer.

</comment><comment><USER182> 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.

<comment><USER52> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER183> Time to update the FreeBSD Handbook, I suppose:

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

</comment><comment><USER181> Dupe [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321937)

</comment><comment><USER184> 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)

</comment><comment><USER185> 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 ?

<comment><USER186> 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.

<comment><USER185> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER187> 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?

</comment><comment><USER188> Oh shit. This is one of the worst things I can imagine.

<comment><USER189> Well, I can easily imagine something worse, like for example Oracle buying it... ^__^;

<comment><USER188> Or EMC...

<comment><USER189> 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...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER190> 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?

</comment><comment><USER191> 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.

</comment><comment><USER192> Welp, just as I got hired to work at Red Hat. :(

<comment><USER38> RH has been full of corporate drones for a while. You'll fit right in after the acquisition.

<comment><USER192> Well, thank you for the uncalled-for insult!

<comment><USER38> I'll think otherwise the day I can log into LinkedIn and see something besides RH employees sharing the same advertisements without any discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER193> Can anyone walk me through the reasoning behind all this IBM hatred? What's going on? I thought they just sell mainframes.

<comment><USER194> Try to use something made by IBM and then tell us if you like it.

<comment><USER195> 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.

<comment><USER196> 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...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER197> 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.

</comment><comment><USER198> 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?

</comment><comment><USER199> They will put the Watson marketing department and the salespeople to work and cut off any meaningful tech. Sigh.

<comment><USER200> 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'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER201> 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.

</comment><comment><USER202> 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?

</comment><comment><USER203> 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. firstname.lastname@example.com

Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER204> 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™...

</comment><comment><USER205> 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.

</comment><comment><USER206> 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.

</comment><comment><USER207> Nooooooooooo.

</comment><comment><USER208> 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?

</comment><comment><USER209> 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)

</comment><comment><USER210> This is a cloud play ... But they're like late by a decade, hmm interesting times!

</comment><comment><USER211> 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.

</comment><comment><USER212> _tips Fedora_

</comment><comment><USER213> Welp, there goes any chance Research Triangle Park ever had of being a major tech hub.

<comment><USER214> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER215> This is an HN black-bar-worthy event (given the OSS implications).

\-- longtime CentOS/Fedora user

</comment><comment><USER216> 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.

<comment><USER155> > 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER217> 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.

</comment><comment><USER218> I haven't felt this way since March 25th, 2014.

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

</comment><comment><USER219> 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?

</comment><comment><USER220> 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.

</comment><comment><USER24> 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.

</comment><comment><USER175> 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.

</comment><comment><USER221> 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?

</comment><comment><USER222> 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...

</comment><comment><USER223> 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.

<comment><USER224> You know you can run your own kernel, right?

<comment><USER223> 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.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER225> I think Microsoft should buy Ubuntu now, and we are all set.

<comment><USER198> Please don't give anyone any ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER226> 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.

</comment><comment><USER227> They should have taken over docker. Instead, they went old fashioned. Fine. But this probably doesn't scare competition away (MS, AWS, Google).

</comment><comment><USER228> 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.

</comment><comment><USER229> 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.

</comment><comment><USER184> They failed with watson, They failed with Bluemix They .... with Redhat.

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

</comment><comment><USER230> 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.

<comment><USER70> IBM is to RedHat what Oracle was to Sun

</comment></comment><comment><USER231> I still fail to see how this will help Red Hat achieve "even more", as they claim in the statement. Sad day!

</comment><comment><USER232> Well Canonical - if you were waiting for the right moment to push hard and take Red Hat's business this is it.

</comment><comment><USER233> 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?

</comment><comment><USER234> Terrible news for scientific computing :(

</comment><comment><USER235> I am extremely worried for Fedora. I don't see IBM allowing RH to support us with servers and employees.

</comment><comment><USER236> Does this mean they will turn the super good red hat documentation in IBM style super useless documentation?

</comment><comment><USER237> Hmmm - even less happy about systemd and all the other red had stuff that's been pumped into linux.

</comment><comment><USER238> I dunno. IBM was pretty generous with the operating system when they invented the PC in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe IBM can re-acquire ThinkPad from Lenovo too. Red Hat traditionally uses ThinkPads internally.

<comment><USER38> Red Hat employees traditionally use Macs and Windows PCs.

<comment><USER16> 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).

<comment><USER38> 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.

<comment><USER16> My understanding (via the Ubuntu podcast) is that Canonical allows people (outside of core desktop team) to use at least non-Ubuntu distros.

<comment><USER38> 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.

<comment><USER16> 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.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER239> Oh boy, am I going to have a field day ribbing my Fedora-sporting friends about their IBM PCs ...

</comment><comment><USER240> In retrospect I'm surprised this didn't happen a long time ago. Good lucky RH brothers.

</comment><comment><USER46> I had to mentally check the calendar to see if it was April 1. (Sadly, it is not.)

</comment><comment><USER241> How easy is it to switch to Ubuntu instead of upgrading my web server to CentOS 7?

</comment><comment><USER160> Colocation of mainframe and commodity compute is huge if they can pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER242> 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 ?

</comment><comment><USER243> Oh my god

</comment><comment><USER244> Hearing this, nothong else than a big f word comes out of my mouth.

</comment><comment><USER245> What the expletive! (Awesome, really didn't see it coming though!)

</comment><comment><USER246> IBM is where Unisys was in 1990, this is not positive for Red Hat.

</comment><comment><USER175> 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.

</comment><comment><USER247> Bad news.

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

But, IBM would have to change.

Good luck with that.

</comment><comment><USER248> I am having a feeling that Dell might buy Canonical soon.

</comment><comment><USER249> 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.

</comment><comment><USER250> RH + IBM is like making a bad thing much much worse.

</comment><comment><USER251> Like ten years after they should have done this.

</comment><comment><USER252> Who do people dislike more : Oracle or IBM?

</comment><comment><USER253> Does this have regulatory approval already?

</comment><comment><USER254> 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

</comment><comment><USER255> Tomorrow: Microsoft acquires canonical :P

<comment><USER256> 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 :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER257> Proud to be part of Americas 5 companies!

</comment><comment><USER258> Can the shareholders block this somehow?

<comment><USER259> 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.

</comment></comment><comment><USER260> Good bye last true open source company!

</comment><comment><USER261> Big BlueHat

</comment><comment><USER258> Please no.

</comment><comment><USER262> oohhh..maybe we can finally get some laptop drivers written for linux!

<comment><USER263> Assuming you are thinking of Thinkpads, IBM hasn't owned that since 2006.

</comment></comment><comment><USER264> At least it's not Oracle.

</comment><comment><USER265> Good news for Debian :)

</comment><comment><USER179> Oracle2.0.

Good news for fedora thou

<comment><USER266> What is your reasoning? In the other HN news thread, there were some people specifically worried about Fedora after the acquisition

</comment></comment><comment><USER267> Ugh. Terrible news. Better than by MS or Oracle though. Just.

</comment><comment><USER268> 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.

</comment><comment><USER191> This is fine.

</comment><comment><USER269> RIP Red Hat.

</comment><comment><USER270> .

</comment><comment><USER271> Oh, no!

</comment><comment><USER179> Big if true

>bloomberg.com

 _if_ true

<comment><USER23> Reuters is reporting the same

<comment><USER108> Now official - [https://www.redhat.com/en](https://www.redhat.com/en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> alishan-l Another one bites the dust

</comment><comment><USER272> Welp, there goes Fedora!

</comment><comment><USER273> fork?

</comment><comment><USER274> 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

<comment><USER24> Plus the wonderful 401k match once a year plus the "colocation" scandal etc, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The history of the "free economy" is one of concentration of market power. Good reference is Galbraith's "1929 the great crash"

<comment><USER275> 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?

<comment><USER276> 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.

<comment><USER16> > 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.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER277> 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.

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

<comment><USER86> Maybe to prevent insider deals during stock hours eg. traders already in the know of upcoming acquisitions minutes before others?

</comment></comment><comment><USER278> The fun thing is that IBM stock was already recently dropping.

</comment><comment><USER279> Well, I don't know anybody in the FOSS community which would be worried it systemd became endangered ;)

<comment><USER280> So you'd rather go back to Upstart or SysV? Really?

<comment><USER281> 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.

<comment><USER282> Then you should pick up the reins of System XVI.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER151> 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.</comment>