IBM buys Red Hat

[Red Squirrel]

https://www.businessinsider.com/ibm...software-company-valued-at-20-billion-2018-10

Not sure how I feel about this... wonder what this will mean for RH based distros like CentOS, Fedora Core etc.

 

[Ajay]

From the article

• IBM will remain committed to Red Hat's open governance, open source contributions, participation in the open source community and development model, and fostering its widespread developer ecosystem.

At least for now.

 

[mxnerd]

Probably will make Ubuntu & its forks even more popular.

 

[Atari2600]

From the article

At least for now.

Yeah.

Till some day we're fed the line "re-aligning product roadmaps with corporate core values" (or some similar PR crap).

'Tis an unfortunate state of affairs. Basically no big corporation can be trusted to maintain the ethics of the companies they acquire (there is a long history of examples to justify this).

 

[whm1974]

Wasn't Red Hat losing market share to Ubuntu?

 

[EXCellR8]

I've never used Red Hat because it always seemed a lot less accessible than Debian/Ubuntu

 

[BurnItDwn]

Redhat was one of the first distros I ever played with. In the late 90s it was more or less the popular distro with least barriers to entry to get started with linux for people who had never messed with it before.

That said, Slackware was a much better Distro back in that era.

 

[beginner99]

wonder what this will mean for RH based distros like CentOS, Fedora Core etc.

The will go down the drain...Has anything ever not been made kaputt by IBM?

 

[piokos]

Don't you think you're a bit paranoid? What's so bad about IBM?
They're one of the safest investors for RH that we could hope for.

You shouldn't be worried about CentOS as it's an important distro for the whole RH ecosystem (as a free, compatible platform). It's not just some RH-based distro used by the community that they could suddenly axe.

Fedora is another story. But it's a nice product with a lot of commercial potential and possibly doesn't cost much to maintain, so IBM may keep it alive.

 

[beginner99]

It's not just some RH-based distro used by the community that they could suddenly axe

No one said they will suddenly axe it, the will almost certainly make it bad over time.

I don't know any IBM derived software that isn't crappy. i have had the pleasure with Lotus Notes and of course eclipse. And it is just how large Orgs work.

 

[piokos]

No one said they will suddenly axe it, the will almost certainly make it bad over time.

To be honest, CentOS is so heavily based on RHEL, it's not that easy to harm feature or performance-wise. I mean: they would also have to make RHEL worse and that wouldn't make sense.

I don't know any IBM derived software that isn't crappy. i have had the pleasure with Lotus Notes and of course eclipse. And it is just how large Orgs work.

Well, I bet you don't know a lot of IBM software in general - just like me and most people. They're only making corporate stuff these days. So yeah: unless you're a data architect or server admin, you might not have a chance to use anything other than Lotus and maybe SPSS.

As for Lotus... well. It may seem a bit raw and unfriendly, but features are just fantastic. Nothing comes close.
It has the best MS Office integration I've seen in any e-mail system (including Microsoft's). I loved the scripting possibilities as well.

 

[Red Squirrel]

How nazi is IBM when it comes to intellectual property? That will probably determine the likeliness of them axing CentOS, Fedora etc as they can just say it impedes on their IP. A big corporation like IBM is probably not going to care about the GPL or if it goes against it.

 

[piokos]

How nazi is IBM when it comes to intellectual property? That will probably determine the likeliness of them axing CentOS, Fedora etc as they can just say it impedes on their IP. A big corporation like IBM is probably not going to care about the GPL or if it goes against it.

Doesn't matter, really. As mentioned before: free RHEL-compatible alternative is important for the ecosystem, i.e. testing, cloud, factory-built VMs etc. CentOS has to survive.

Just a simple example of CentOS importance:
When you download a VM-packed software distribution (often learning or developer versions), they'll usually be based on CentOS. That's because every "enterprise" software for Linux is built with RHEL in mind.
If CentOS vanishes or isn't free anymore, this whole idea dies.

Also, don't think IBM is some evil corporation that wants to kill all free software. They're a huge contributor to open-source and they've given us quite a lot of things.
Sure, IBM used to be very close to consumers, so we "felt" their importance. Today they're focused on enterprise solutions, but they remained a similar company as they used to be.

 

[ultimatebob]

Don't you think you're a bit paranoid? What's so bad about IBM?
They're one of the safest investors for RH that we could hope for.

You shouldn't be worried about CentOS as it's an important distro for the whole RH ecosystem (as a free, compatible platform). It's not just some RH-based distro used by the community that they could suddenly axe.

Fedora is another story. But it's a nice product with a lot of commercial potential and possibly doesn't cost much to maintain, so IBM may keep it alive.

I think that we all remember what happened to Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun. Oracle did such a lousy job supporting them that the code forked and we now have OpenJDK, MariaDB, and LibreOffice now.

I could see CentOS going down the same hole if support for it gets transferred to a bunch of junior developers in Brazil or India to cut costs a few years from now, which is something IBM is famous for.

 

[ultimatebob]

How nazi is IBM when it comes to intellectual property? That will probably determine the likeliness of them axing CentOS, Fedora etc as they can just say it impedes on their IP. A big corporation like IBM is probably not going to care about the GPL or if it goes against it.

Most of RedHat is open source except for the logos and a few proprietary systems for things like OS updates.

What I would expect IBM to do is to make CentOS more like the "Red Hat Lite" version, and starting adding more Enterprise grade features that are only available if you get an expensive license or support contract.

 

[piokos]

I think that we all remember what happened to Java, MySQL, and OpenOffice when Oracle bought Sun. Oracle did such a lousy job supporting them that the code forked and we now have OpenJDK, MariaDB, and LibreOffice now.

OpenJDK and MariaDB exist simply because some people are fundamentally against corporations. So they forked the code to keep some community driven alternatives.
At this point MariaDB is heavily sponsored by Microsoft and if you follow some db linux communities, you may notice that it's already seen as a problem (a hit to some community purity, whatever that would mean - possibly poverty and death ).

Java and MySQL are still better.

 

[ultimatebob]

I don't think that most people would agree that MariaDB is better than MySQL. MariaDB has basically replaced it as the default database server for most Linux distributions and cloud hosting services.

Oracle JDK is definitely more popular than OpenJDK right now, but that might change once Oracle requires commercial users to buy licenses to use the latest version.