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.
Yes but which company's leadership has given up? If this is the ordinary acquisition model, where the buying company (IBM) leadership stays in charge, then I say it's Red Hat's leadership that's given up. If it's the 'buy a company to get an entirely new leadership team' then it means those in charge of IBM might actually understand their dire situation. But I have no idea if they have that awareness.
My perception is that IBM (and HP, Oracle, etc) will buy a product company, and then IBM-ify it, and then just sit on that product for years with minimal improvements.
That is my fear for Red Hat. Successful product companies are hungry - IBM is not.
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.
I've really got to wonder at the people who would stay at a company that treated them like utter garbage ... especially if they're experienced ... and especially in this job market.
Red Hat tends to employ people through offices in low/moderate COL areas or as fully remote. It would have been my #1 prospect after leaving the Bay Area. People who've already established lives in places like Raleigh may not find a comparable job so easily.
They didn't fire theirs - they ordered them to move to an arbitrary office, most commonly not the closest geographically either, without relocation money. If you didn't move, it was considered a voluntary departure. There was often no room at these offices even for the minority who accepted the moves.
It was/is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges.
Who needs fusion power when you can run off the Watsons spinning in their graves at relativistic velocity?
The second link, which details how the reporting for the story happened, explains how older workers were often given 90 days to move thousands of miles to "an office" or else lose their jobs.
--
The results are stunning and should shock and scare all of us, whether we're in our 20s, 30s, or beyond. Because we all age -- this is a fact. And if the IBMs of the world can get off scott free, other companies may do this too.
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.
However nice their open source work is, RH licensing is already every bit as scummy as the others, at least if my coworkers in the department I used to work for are to be believed. Bait and switch freebies, "we need to run this sketchy shell script on your production system to determine how much money you owe us" nonsense, coming back with a ludicrously inaccurate bill that has to be argued over point-by-point with lawyers, the works.
When IBM bought Informix they replaced competent database support with aggressive DB2 marketing droids and presented us with an annual bill sixty times more than Informix had charged.
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.
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.
The alienate and destroy part is likely. Very different situations otherwise.
Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline.
Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall.
Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1.7b, $2b, $2.4b, $2.9b
They look like they could do $3.4b in sales for fiscal 2019.
Their profitability is mildly lacking and combined with their modest growth doesn't come close to supporting their extreme valuation (much less when the stock was 50% higher). It's not surprising the board might sell the company here, the stock market bubble is likely nearing an end, with interest rates rising or a recession coming up next (either of which guarantee it's over). Red Hat may not see much higher than this market cap for another decade - assuming continued modest growth - if they were valued at a more sane level.
Red Hat is riding relatively high. Sun was on its last legs as an independent entity. Red Hat very clearly does not need to sell here, if they do it's simply the board taking what is an extraordinary price (would have to guess the deal will value them at 60 to 80 times idealized 2018 earnings).
There is also the big difference that Sun was in the middle of transitioning to open source company (almost begrudgingly I think after everything else had failed), they weren't the great friend of open source they now are remembered as at their peak of their success. Sun still held significant amount of proprietary IP when they were acquired. In comparison RH has been open source from the get go, and pretty much everything they have is open source.
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.
Microsoft would have actually been better. They're at least still a product development company. IBM at this point is just consultants and their sales ilk. They'll gut Red hat.
Half a year ago I was still at RedHat, and we were joking around with colleagues, that either the big bet on OpenShift/kubernetes starts paying off, or somebody buys us.
We joked that Microsoft under Satya Nadella would actually be quite a good fit :D
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.
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...
You'll see a lot of preconfigured CentOS images, not RHEL because of the licensing. Red Hat's recent (and sensible) play has been on-prem Kubernetes with OpenShift.
Ubuntu has its own orchestration toolsets, and I wonder if RHAT only had the upper hand with being the incumbent in the US and buying things like Ansible and OpenShift and CoreOS.
Ubuntu runs Systemd, it's a modern distro - if someone wants to take Openshift core and other components and run it on Ubuntu, it will happen.
RH back in the day made a lot of hay by being the go-to option for enterprises migrating proprietary UNIX workloads to x86+Linux. But I guess that market is mostly saturated by now.
What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.
RHEL is just a small piece of the Red Hat puzzle that is sold to enterprises. In some way Red Hat is an exception -- there have been no multi-billion dollar businesses built purely on open source except them. (Or maybe I have missed something.)
Well yeah, there's CentOS, so a company just needs to step up and provide the level of support RHEL customers expect.
I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in.
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.
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.
As for alternate Linux distributions, I don't know how similar you want to stay to Fedora, but my current setup would surely conform to your stated requirements: Arch linux, with i3 as window manager. I use st as my terminal emulator. All together, the memory footprint is minimal, and it makes my not-all-that-low laptop specs shine far more than a heavier distribution would have.
If you want something similar to Fedora, dunno. I believe the desktop interface is a big part of the memory usage of most distributions, so unless I'm mistaken in that, wanting low memory usage as well as a nice interface is going to be difficult.
No reason to change. Though I might try it on one of my Orange Pi's one day. Does sway support OpenGL ES 2.0?
EDIT: Actually I probably use a few things that would need to be modified to work, like screencast recording via some custom gst-launch command, that depend on X in a non-trivial way.
Ubuntu, Debian, Arch? (Or Endless if you want something OSTree/Flatpak-based like Fedora Silverblue.)
> with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora?
Anything not GNOME? Not being (too) snarky — GNOME uses a lot of memory, although I've read they're making some progress recently. Even KDE these days is pretty low in memory usage by default.
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).
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.
Why not consider Open or NetBSD? They can make nice desktops, and OpenBSD is very friendly on laptops. And they are lighter than Fedora and perform much better. And, they use a maximally free license, but this is simply my preference. You may feel different.
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.
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.
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.
It's also worth pointing out that Red Hat (and Big Banks) have been desperately trying to train new mainframe operators with limited success due to the shift to distributed, to the extent that they've even been giving money to select colleges specifically to develop mainframe-centric curriculum.
I have some hopes that Red Hat has a strong-enough future value for IBM that we end up redefining IBM rather than the other way round. There are precedents, notably the Apple/NeXT merger. Today's Apple is 95% NeXT and 5% old Apple. Can this happen here? Time will tell.
An an IBM employee, I definitely hope that some of the RH culture rubs off on us, but I also hope that RH retains its own distinctive identity and isn't altered very much by the deal aside from having access to IBM's resources such as the scale of the sales organisation.
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.
This has been my experience too, and not when it was released. I was playing with some of their APIs last month and it was horrible: CORS issues, high latency, random failures or server errors for no reason.
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.
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...
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.
That's a positive scenario but I don't see Ginni Rometty relinquishing control voluntarily. The IBM board has given no signs of dissatisfaction with her performance.
...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.
Make them do proper accounting, an empty promise costs more engineering dollars than a believable one, and the difference should not be determined by sales.
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.
The sales process needs both rewards (commission) as well as punishments (commission loss based on unmet delivery). The idea, "As soon as the contract is signed I should get my money." is a broken one as it reinforces the type of behavior that leads to unrealistic promises being made. The 50% at signing and 50% at delivery model is better for this reason. Yes, there would need to be additional language surrounding what an "unmet delivery" would be and how it would be gauged with relation to promises made during the sales process.
Ugh I hate their sales. There was a day they decided to spam my cell phone number constantly while I was on lunch. Not even sure how they got it, but I finally answered and got super angry with the other end. I didn’t even know it was Red Hat because they didn’t even bother leaving messages. Just back to back to back times 4 calls. Even if it were my work number, if you didn’t get through the first time, spamming my line isn’t going to get you there either.
Given that IBM are after the tech and will probably reject the culture (as also happened when Oracle ate Sun), I suggest an appropriate name would be...
IBM is sliding into irrelevance in the mass market for sure, but they've still got a sizeable slice of the HPC/supercomputing market and their research in quantum computing is hard to overlook.
I work in HPC, and, well, it's VERY hard to make a good profit there.
- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.
- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.
Lovely idea that won't be possible. All that brilliance and inspiring leadership from Red Hat will be overwhelmed by the tsunami if indifference that is IBM corporate culture. On the plus side, if you're looking to hire real OSS talent for your team, I suspect a bunch of Red Hat folks will be on the market as soon as their contractual lockups expire.
> If IBM has one brain cell left, they'll pull a NeXT/Apple merger and let Red Hat executives start running the combined company.
Honestly, I could see that happening and working out great .. for legacy IBM customers. But if you aren't an existing IBM mainframe/midrange shop, there will be only tangental benefits for you.
To go with your Jobs analogy, the original iMac was all about preserving legacy Mac users. The new customers had to come in from a different angle. Does either RedHat or IBM have the angle?
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 406 ms ] threadIf 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!)
Yes but which company's leadership has given up? If this is the ordinary acquisition model, where the buying company (IBM) leadership stays in charge, then I say it's Red Hat's leadership that's given up. If it's the 'buy a company to get an entirely new leadership team' then it means those in charge of IBM might actually understand their dire situation. But I have no idea if they have that awareness.
This happened at Apple (NeXT took over). Somehow with Disney/Pixar too if I'm not mistaken.
What happened with Apple and NeXT is the exception, not the rule.
It takes 6 months to be acquired by IBM, so I don't think recent stock market gyrations have anything to do with it.
That is my fear for Red Hat. Successful product companies are hungry - IBM is not.
https://www.redhat.com
"- 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"
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.
Be sure to collect & notarize proof.
I read this as "everything aside from the cloud stuff will be gutted"?
Didn’t IBM have a massive crackdown on remote working recently? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/09/ibm_workfromhome_cu...
Gonna have to disagree here. Raleigh is not a tech backwater. There’s plenty of comparable work to be found in the area.
It was/is a deliberate attempt to dispose of senior, less portable people without having to pay layoff charges.
Who needs fusion power when you can run off the Watsons spinning in their graves at relativistic velocity?
https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
https://www.propublica.org/article/investigating-ibm-digital...
The second link, which details how the reporting for the story happened, explains how older workers were often given 90 days to move thousands of miles to "an office" or else lose their jobs.
-- The results are stunning and should shock and scare all of us, whether we're in our 20s, 30s, or beyond. Because we all age -- this is a fact. And if the IBMs of the world can get off scott free, other companies may do this too.
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.
Most competent Sun people have left oracle and are onto greener pastures.
Sun was essentially a dead shell that still held a few valuable pieces when Oracle purchased them. Overall the business was in terminal decline.
Red Hat, while wildly overvalued (as many things are/were in this bubble market), has a consistently growing business that is on good footing overall.
Their prior four fiscal year sales figures: $1.7b, $2b, $2.4b, $2.9b
They look like they could do $3.4b in sales for fiscal 2019.
Their profitability is mildly lacking and combined with their modest growth doesn't come close to supporting their extreme valuation (much less when the stock was 50% higher). It's not surprising the board might sell the company here, the stock market bubble is likely nearing an end, with interest rates rising or a recession coming up next (either of which guarantee it's over). Red Hat may not see much higher than this market cap for another decade - assuming continued modest growth - if they were valued at a more sane level.
Red Hat is riding relatively high. Sun was on its last legs as an independent entity. Red Hat very clearly does not need to sell here, if they do it's simply the board taking what is an extraordinary price (would have to guess the deal will value them at 60 to 80 times idealized 2018 earnings).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunsite
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&feature=youtu.be...
This is a threat to OSS, sadly.
Maybe Google or Amazon will buy Canonical soon?
What makes you think that would be a good thing?
Half a year ago I was still at RedHat, and we were joking around with colleagues, that either the big bet on OpenShift/kubernetes starts paying off, or somebody buys us.
We joked that Microsoft under Satya Nadella would actually be quite a good fit :D
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.
Ubuntu don't have JBoss or OpenShift, amongst other things. Neither do SuSE, unfortunately.
Ubuntu runs Systemd, it's a modern distro - if someone wants to take Openshift core and other components and run it on Ubuntu, it will happen.
What I worry about is not the fate of RHEL per se, in the end it's just a distro among others. What I worry about, as a huge FOSS fan, is the fate of RH engineering which is certainly one of the biggest individual upstream FOSS contributors on a lot of places in the stack. By comparison, the Canonical engineering team is absolutely puny. If the work that RH does disappears, we're going to see a lot slower progress in the FOSS ecosystem.
I think this is going to be great for SUSE. They already have comparable service and they already have a solid customer base in Europe. If RHEL alienates its customers through a slow death at IBM, SUSE can come in.
I really don't understand this acquisition.
>bloomberg.com
if true
Canonical is basically bankrupt
And what's the future for CentOS?
If you want something similar to Fedora, dunno. I believe the desktop interface is a big part of the memory usage of most distributions, so unless I'm mistaken in that, wanting low memory usage as well as a nice interface is going to be difficult.
EDIT: Actually I probably use a few things that would need to be modified to work, like screencast recording via some custom gst-launch command, that depend on X in a non-trivial way.
Ubuntu, Debian, Arch? (Or Endless if you want something OSTree/Flatpak-based like Fedora Silverblue.)
> with a lesser memory footprint than Fedora?
Anything not GNOME? Not being (too) snarky — GNOME uses a lot of memory, although I've read they're making some progress recently. Even KDE these days is pretty low in memory usage by default.
If this deal goes through I'll be super disappointed.
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.
50% of the portal pages were failing due to their own cross origin policies.
Only a idiot would touch such an incompetent cloud system.
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.
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.
Oracle
Fair point.
That is the one path to a real future for IBM instead of its slow decline into complete irrelevance.
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?
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.
Purple hat.
Old Hat (tm)
;)
#stillyounghat
- Customers are stingy (think academic labs, supercomputer centers etc.), are not typically married to your solution architecture so for every purchase they will put out a tender that you have to bid for and win.
- Performance is king, which means very expensive R&D, and customers don't spend much on all these "enterprise value-adds" that enterprise focused businesses use to pad their bottom lines.
Performance is king, and we don't buy into the kind of sales bullshit that IBM is famous for.
Sadly, we just standardised on CentOS 7 for our new cluster and I am nervous about its future considering IBM involvement now.
A big part of the open source appeal is the the vendor who owns the trademark cannot unilaterally kill a product.
> Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.
> "I'm still young and I'm not going anywhere," she told CNBC.
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-de...
Honestly, I could see that happening and working out great .. for legacy IBM customers. But if you aren't an existing IBM mainframe/midrange shop, there will be only tangental benefits for you.
To go with your Jobs analogy, the original iMac was all about preserving legacy Mac users. The new customers had to come in from a different angle. Does either RedHat or IBM have the angle?