IBM Announces Deal To Acquire Red Hat At $34 Billion

[M@yeulC]

Haha, nice try. It has been one of the funniest jokes I've ever read for an April's fool 😃

*checks date* Wait, it's not April yet?

Oh. That's a thing, then, I guess... So long, and thanks for all the fish, Red Hat!

Let's hope the best comes out of this. I initially read this as Oracle being the acquisitor, but that doesn't sound so bad. I won't hold by breath, I just hope IBM won't kill off every project not directly tied to their cloud aspirations.

[tuxd3v]

This is good news for Suse
This is also bad news for Intel and specially for AMD( because intel made some provisions in advance and had clear linux ..), AMD, needs to join again with Suse, and fast..

RedHat support for x86 will be down the toilet in next years..
I can't say that it wasn't unexpected...because it was expected!

IBM come to cpus again in force, it loose the Aix OS race to linux + amd64, they already acknowledged that publicly...

IBM is investing in Linux, and taking it has a big player...what IBM needs?

Yes a Good expertise on the market about linux, a OS for Compete with intel( clear linux), discontinuing with time RedHat os in X86, and ofcourse, take RedHat userbase, to power technology, why?
because x86 its it major concurrent, that's why.

They killed several rabits, with only one shoot!!

Intel is safe guarded with clear linux, AMD is not..

[torsionbar28]

I also have a bad feeling. It's mainly because I like Red Hat's focus on GNU/Linux desktop with a bunch of their developers scattered around such projects as LibreOffice and Mesa (i.e. apps that doesn't make much sense for servers), and their awesome QA. I don't see much point for IBM in keeping that focus — did you ever see a POWER-based consumer desktop or laptop?

What does POWER have to do with anything? IBM has a solid track record of open source contribution, they are one of the better companies in this regard. Remember that Red Hat also sells a workstation product, RHEL Workstation, which for years has been a popular replacement for aging proprietary UNIX workstations.

[SofS]

This has potential, given how x86 has been squeezed by difficulties related to losing the manufacturing edge and MIPS and ARM growth, if IBM is to use Red Hat's resources combined with their own enterprise connections towards a POWER workstation then the opportunities are awe inspiring. The prospects of finally breaking free from this lack of competition in architecture design would have been beyond dreams a few years ago.

Even taking into account their stated focus on cloud products, this will inevitably help server platforms and, by a side channel, desktop/workstation platforms, kind of how games are helping high performance computing development.

Good luck for them with my best regards.

[justmy2cents]

GTK is one giant hack and assumes it's users are morons. systemd applies similar philosophy to the init system while also being fascist about it.

you do realize that Gtk is not Gnome which you probably wanted to say.

Gtk is a window toolkit which allows you to do anything you want just like any other toolkit out there. they all allow you to allocate screen espace and do anything you want.

[polarathene]

Personally I’d like to see Swift be promoted to thelanguage of choice for GUI apps but Rust is another option.

For the life of me I never understood Gnomes focus on C and JavaScript. Not exactly the technologies I would choose to engage a wide range of developers.

I don't have enough experience with Swift to comment, it seems nice from the litlte exposure I have had, but last I had heard it was still not doing so well on other platforms beyond Apples. If that's changed since, awesome(I wasn't aware of IBM making such efforts with it).

Rust is great, but I wouldn't say it's quite ready yet for GUI apps, still needs to resolve some things like getting async sorted out. Lacks the ability to do some nice reactive GUI style dev like React and Redux offer(Swift is more likely to have something like this or be able to support it I guess? not sure). While Rust may lead to better quality code with bugs/issues, it does have a bit of a learning curve.

You'd also probably want to integrate with an existing cross-platform toolkit, would be quite the investment to build one up from scratch. Rust does have two libs for integrating with GTK to build GUI apps, and to a degree some Qt and QML ones, which last I heard are not at the same level. React-Native might have taken a good alternative approach though, last I heard that approach has worked well for web/macOS/iOS/Android, not quite sure about Windows but better than React-Native efforts for Linux I think?

As for why Gnome focused on C and JS? Probably because there weren't many options at the time and those seemed the most appropriate at the time with the direction they were going? Swift definitely wasn't an option, nor Rust or Go, or even C# I think(mono aside, I'm thinking of the efforts from a few years ago to make .Net core cross platform instead of Windows only). JS perhaps made sense with the decision to work with CSS for styling and target web developers? But similar to flash, that sort of accessibility can lead to bad code with a language known not to perform that well, lua might have been more appropriate at the time? Rust also has some run-time based scripting languages, so it could cater to both the static compiled and dynamic script languages with minimal difference to know both. C, I don't know, but it is one of the better choices for systems programming at the time, and preferred over C++ if you want it to be more accessible to other languages where afaik C++ has more of a difficult time interacting/integrating with other languages.

[calc]

That's not how this works. The $34 billion go to the shareholders, who may or may not be employees of Red Hat.

I suspect very few RH employees have a note worthy amount of stock, its not run like a SV company.

[Toyoracer]

Maybe IBM wants to re-invent it's company as Cloud and future AI leader, thus using Red Hat in a positive manner.

34 B is still a lot of coin. Gotta be positive.

[Terrablit]

IBM has been massively struggling to source profit for its stockholders and investors. Their CEO is beyond clueless. The stories I hear of staff meetings involving Rometty make me wish for more hands to facepalm with. No one who actually does work in the company enjoys them. 2018 Q1 was the first time revenue rose to counteract the 5 year downward trend that marks most of Rometty's time in office. They've laid off over 30K employees in the past five years, and 3/5 of that is people over 40. They also decline to hire people in that same age range. Which is why there's a class-action lawsuit over the discriminatory practice.

That's not to say that everyone with experience in Linux is old. Far from it. But there's a fair bet that a large chunk of Red Hat is pushing 40, if not over it. Especially in projects like kernel development. And current IBM employees have no idea of the company's future. IBM desperately needs Red Hat, considering their lack of high-level support personnel since they started pushing Linux over AIX. But Red Hat really doesn't need IBM. It's going to drastically change the direction of the company. And that's still assuming that IBM doesn't dump more than 40% of staff within 6 months of the acquisition.

If IBM can keep their filthy, paste-eating, lucre-stained hands off of Red Hat and it's staff, it might go well. IBM needs Linux support, and they do pretty well at supporting external projects they need. Like they did with OpenOffice and Java through support contracts. But to not fuck up a new acquisition is so un-IBM that any promise to the contrary is unlikely at best.

[calc]

IBM has been massively struggling to source profit for its stockholders and investors. Their CEO is beyond clueless. The stories I hear of staff meetings involving Rometty make me wish for more hands to facepalm with. No one who actually does work in the company enjoys them. 2018 Q1 was the first time revenue rose to counteract the 5 year downward trend that marks most of Rometty's time in office. They've laid off over 30K employees in the past five years, and 3/5 of that is people over 40. They also decline to hire people in that same age range. Which is why there's a class-action lawsuit over the discriminatory practice.

That's not to say that everyone with experience in Linux is old. Far from it. But there's a fair bet that a large chunk of Red Hat is pushing 40, if not over it. Especially in projects like kernel development. And current IBM employees have no idea of the company's future. IBM desperately needs Red Hat, considering their lack of high-level support personnel since they started pushing Linux over AIX. But Red Hat really doesn't need IBM. It's going to drastically change the direction of the company. And that's still assuming that IBM doesn't dump more than 40% of staff within 6 months of the acquisition.

If IBM can keep their filthy, paste-eating, lucre-stained hands off of Red Hat and it's staff, it might go well. IBM needs Linux support, and they do pretty well at supporting external projects they need. Like they did with OpenOffice and Java through support contracts. But to not fuck up a new acquisition is so un-IBM that any promise to the contrary is unlikely at best.

Considering they did this just last year there's not much hope.

https://www.fastcompany.com/40423083...the-new-normal

A very large percentage of RH is remote.