IBM Announces Deal To Acquire Red Hat At $34 Billion

[coder]

I can't say I was happy with the news, but it might turn out to be a good thing after all. Apparently they're going to let Jim Whitehurst and the management team lead RedHat and maintain Red Hat's headquarters, facilities, brands and practices. Time will tell though, I guess.

Ah, but when budget and sales pressures trickle down from above, that will be the real test.

They will also be pressured to prioritize IBM's interests, and this will inevitably de-prioritize or starve some things Red Hat has traditionally done. Also, I can't imagine IBM corporate won't eventually want to "eliminate some redundancies" or "realize some synergies" between the two entities.

Ultimately, whether Jim leaves or is pushed, there will be a new head of Red Hat, and that person will face more pressure to sing the corporate tune.

[dungeon]

So, cloud is blue now, not red anymore

[jacob]

I concur with those who feel bad about this. Ever since IBM stood up to SCO many in the FOSS community think that they are the Good Guys but nothing could be further from the truth. Besides, Red Hat has been one if the main forces trying to get Linux on the desktop and seeing it turning into the n-th insipid cloud distro is not what the FOSS needs the most urgently.

After all, it's Halloween, folks. This time of the year hasn't historically been good for Linux. :-/1

[cbxbiker61]

The type of customer's IBM has typically serviced like to sign all-inclusive service contracts, i.e., IBM please handle all service of hardware and software stacks on our servers. The buyout just makes that type of contract more appealing. And as was mentioned earlier, IBM was one of the biggest corporate early sponsors of Linux in both money and developer resources. I really don't see them throwing all of that out the window.

[TemplarGR]

Yes and no. While I'm not in favor of killing them, I do see the complaints as somewhat legit, considering how dominant they are in the Linux ecosystem.

Sure, you can find a dark corner where you don't have to touch them, but most people seriously involved in Linux cannot completely avoid them.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think Systemd, in particular, was not driven as any sort of consensus effort. A small cadre created it, then proceeded to ram it down everyone's throats. It did not come about as any sort of broader consensus of what should replace that constellation of Linux userspace utilities.

You don't have to use systemd.

[S.Pam]

Perhaps this will be good. Never really liked RedHat, though I ran it for years. Perhaps IBM can kill the RPM too?

[Tomin]

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I think Systemd, in particular, was not driven as any sort of consensus effort. A small cadre created it, then proceeded to ram it down everyone's throats. It did not come about as any sort of broader consensus of what should replace that constellation of Linux userspace utilities.

I'm not sure why anyone thinks that systemd was ram down anyone's throat. Of course many software has now grown to depend on it some ways but initially I think it was just matter of choice. Not choosing systemd in Debian, for example, would have meant that they had to look for other solutions. There was nothing else like logind back then and systemd had also other useful things. It was just less effort for Debian maintainers as far as I can see. They voted and decided that systemd should be what Debian uses. Yes, there were already a few distributions using it but certainly not all (and it still isn't all of them) and nobody forced them to make this decision. But maybe I don't have the whole picture here.

Also the fact that some software depend on systemd shows that it has some value. You can write new software to replace it and since we are all about open source, I don't think there is any reason why the replacement would not be accepted. There are users for OpenRC and elogind that both were created as replacements for some parts of systemd. All distributions don't have them packaged but that's usually because they don't have the resources to support them. Systemd is easier for them.

Some day Linux and systemd will both be replaced with something that is hopefully better and has better value for stakeholders (developers, maintainers, users, etc.). I have no idea what that will be and it will not be soon if you ask me but it'll happen. As an example nginx has replaced Apache in many cases. Unity pretty much replaced Gnome among Ubuntu users and it certainly didn't take long. Chrome has taken over Firefox's and IE's shared first place (it depends on part of the world you are looking at). I think you can find more examples of software replacing other software, but these are those that came to my mind when thinking about this.

[wizard69]

That is actually my hope. That is that redhat gets a little direction from IBM. There are lots of things with Linux in general and Redhat related distro specifically that can be improved. They may have to shake things up a bit to get things moving forward but frankly that would have to happen sooner or later!

The most interesting thing here is that Redhat will be a separate division. That actually might result in too much hands off. If Redhat was absorbed into an existing division we might have seen far more people focused on Linux development.

Ah, but when budget and sales pressures trickle down from above, that will be the real test.

They will also be pressured to prioritize IBM's interests, and this will inevitably de-prioritize or starve some things Red Hat has traditionally done. Also, I can't imagine IBM corporate won't eventually want to "eliminate some redundancies" or "realize some synergies" between the two entities.

Ultimately, whether Jim leaves or is pushed, there will be a new head of Red Hat, and that person will face more pressure to sing the corporate tune.

actually the pressure Jim will be under will be less and hopefully more rational. As apublically traded company you are under pressure from hundreds even thousands of investors. Each of those investors has his own interests but often fall under the “why didn’t you make more money” kind. The demands from investors, especially the stupid ones an be irrational. You can have the best quarter ever any you will get demands to make more money, sell off divisions, or just do the opposite of what the industry requires.

Being a publically traded company isn’t always a picnic. You can end up with significant stock holders that want to tear a company apart simply to profit from it. As for being part of IBM much of that will not exist anymore. You still need to remain profitable of course and get onboard but there is nothing to say that Jim will not be there in 10 to 20 years, he might even become CEO.

[rockcat]

Perhaps this will be good. Never really liked RedHat, though I ran it for years. Perhaps IBM can kill the RPM too?

I don't think so. rpm packages are good system, they are also used in AIX. Anyway, IBM is based on old technologies and now ones developed by IBM software engineers are usually poor.

[MarkG]

I'm surprised no one mentioned IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer back in 2013, and how that worked out.

My guess is Mark Shuttleworth is almost as happy as Jim Whitehurst.