I guess the only silver lining is that the buyer wasn't Oracle.
"Do not fall into the trap... of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison... If you put your hand inside a lawnmower, it will get chopped off. The lawnmower doesn't care... The lawnmower doesn't want to kill open source. The lawnmower just can't think about open source. The lawnmower can't have empathy."
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?
There are two coins to toss: whether IBM reaches into Red Hat in a way that kills off either project; and whether enough of the community steps out.
I'm curious what openSUSE folks think of SUSE having been acquired by Novel, then Attachmate, and then the Micro Focus merger. They've been through a lot, and openSUSE is still here.
If you look at what runs on production servers, it's virtually always RHEL/CentOS, or Debian/Ubuntu. Everybody else isn't even above 5%, and most of those you've listed are in fractional digits.
For another data point, if you look at websites, Debian+Ubuntu is already >50%. At this point, I think it's well on its way to becoming the Linux distro, with everything else being relegated to the hacker/boutique niche. And I think that this announcement, and what IBM is likely to do with RHEL afterwards, will accelerate that trend substantially.
While people do have a reasonable level of hostility over the Novell acquisition (which has left some deep cultural scar tissue within SUSE), they did give us openSUSE.
Overall there is often worry when we have an acquisition (since a very large portion of openSUSE maintainers are employed by SUSE). With EQT quite a few folks were worried about how separated the finances were between openSUSE and SUSE and I believe Richard Brown commented on how exactly he's pushing for better financial and trademark separation (the only two things that they really share anymore).
So while people do get worried every one in a while, I get the impression that overall things are going okay despite the series of acquisitions in recent years.
However, Fedora/RedHat have a different structure and relationship and I wouldn't use the openSUSE/SUSE model to predict how things will work out.
With the current state of things, forking Fedora seems unlikely to be a wise decision. RedHat is the major contributor, paying the salaries of many Fedora developers. So far, nothing has changed here with that acquisition.
OpenSuSE has been more like Fedora over their years; they historically never had a CentOS equivalent (although the newer OpenSuSE is moving there).
I’m thinking RHEL’s support contracts will keep IBM from shuttering RHEL. An IBM branded RHEL would represent plenty of income.
I would say that Fedora and CentOS aren't going away anywhere. Not because of this anyway. There were similar concerns around RH's acquisition (if that's what you call it) of CentOS a couple of years ago, but things have largely been the same. And it's mostly for selfish reasons. The overall dev mindshare of RH based systems has shrunk compared to Ubuntu. So anything that moves people away from Ubuntu to the RH ecosystem is net win because eventually some corp will write a check when they need support. It's the same idea as MS not going after pirates just to increase MS's overall market share.
That was the sentiment regarding OpenSolaris when Oracle bought Sun... (And I can't believe no one's mentioned this in 800+ comments so far.)
Could you expand on that? I'm curious.
Maybe we'll see more community offerings?
Never actually used RHEL, but I've heard that they're basically the same - one comes with the support, the other obviously doesn't.
Is CentOS supported by Red Hat, so IBM in theory could shut them down?
I assumed Redhat was going to capture lost revenue by somehow making CentOS less viable.
IBMs business nature makes me think its even more likely now.
They're different products for different customers. Folks who want to work cheap and hack their own stuff together will use CentOS and would never have bought a RHEL license anyway.
Meanwhile, folks who need a "we've got support" answer for every question will use RHEL and wouldn't be tempted by CentOS anyway; the cost savings is not worth the risk.
This is possible because everything in Redhat/Fedora/Centos is open source.
I'd be willing to bet numerous people are working on a non IBM/Redhat version of Centos.
Buying an open source company only makes sense if you give the employees of that company exactly what they want. They are the real value.
Of course in practice that requires a lot of coordination, there's a ton of legal hoops to jump through and you end up with a big company built around customers it doesn't currently have.
Kidding aside, nothing about this is good for the open source movement.
RedHat is a public company, in what fantasy land do you exist where this isn't expected?
Furthermore, the deal is still subject to shareholder approval:
> The acquisition has been approved by the boards of directors of both IBM and Red Hat. It is subject to Red Hat shareholder approval. It also is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.
So you really should be complaining that RedHat's board of directors just sold out, and that's their fiduciary duty.
The Red Hat board were offered a massive premium on an already generously-priced stock. If they hadn't sold there probably would've been lawsuits left and right.
RHT is $20 billion in market cap as of Friday, and the offer is $34 billion.
What's going on with Linux providers? Is Amazon really just dominating the space?
[Disclaimer: I work at SUSE.]
Or, if you don’t like Canonical (and to be fair they do a lot less than Red Hat do), encouraging corporate users to sponsor Debian directly would be amazing.
It does make me wonder though if it would ever be possible for a bunch of business savy open source developers could ever get around to creating an open source co-op. Something like the commercial version of the FSF. Build open source products with solid support contracts, and build/contribute to open source that way.
The organization would be owned by the very people building and contributing the code.
RedHat is the only company that I can see that really did everything in the open.
I'm not sure which one I feel worse about, Oracle buying Sun, or IBM buying RedHat? I feel that Oracle did some major missteps in their acquisition (for this I look squarely at OpenOffice, and their misshandling of it, although, the OOo community hated the Oracle acquisition from day one, which I guess might have made it a little like poison berries - no one would want to go near it).
Oracle completely ruined MySQL during the acquisition too.
What prevents anyone from offering an enterprise support program for Arch?
I'd suggest building an auto-upgrade system on top of Arch (or Alpine), and go for immutable infrastructure as the selling point. That's stepping on CoreOS's toes a bit, but I haven't seen any progress from that crowd ever since Red Hat bought them, so it'll probably get even worse now.
That way you can target AWS/Azure/$OTHER_MODERN_STUFF in a more focused way, and you won't be stuck on supporting months/years old versions of the OS.
In that case, why not go all the way over to NixOS? They already have a more or less complete cloud stack with NixOps, the only problem is hardly anyone knows how to use it.
That's a massive, show-stopping problem.
How so?
I agree that it's a nontrivial problem to learn a piece of complex software from scratch to the point that you can offer comprehensive enterprise support for it, but how is that show-stopping?
I'm not sure what the cause is. If it's a fundamental technological problem, then it's insurmountable, but if it's just a documentation problem, then it might be fixable. It doesn't look good though, since, like I said, the whole stack has existed for a long time. You would think that something would've been done about it.
All that said, perhaps I'm just dumb. I'll be happy to see someone prove me wrong and succeed with that combo. The underlying technology is certainly interesting and powerful. But I won't be trying it.
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=amazon --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @amazon | wc -l 206
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=microsoft --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @microsoft | wc -l 1825
~/linux master ● $ git log --author=google --format='%h %s%n %ad, %an <%ae>' --date=short | grep @google | wc -l 11283
Besides the kernel contributions, Google has a long list of open source projects: https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured
For all the hates Google gets on HN, they have been at the forefront of supporting OSS.
This list is not nearly exhaustive, but my main point is Google is hardly the outlier here.
Good on all the developers pushing for open source so much. The industry is in a much better place than it was 25 years ago.
Edit; ah sorry I didn't know...
There is also Gentoo, Alpine, and Void.
However, Red Hat is _far_ more than RHEL. They actually build a ton of OSS that's used in RHEL and elsewhere. Ubuntu does little more than repackage Debian. That's not a criticism. They package well, and they know how to polish. But there's no replacement for Red Hat as a company.
And if one really needs a "one click out of the box" desktop distro, then Mint.
Ubuntu made big inroads on the desktop in the early 2000’s, and now those people are running their own infrastructure.
Conversely, non-opinionated might not be good, but it's guaranteed to be not bad.
I've been doing this crap way too long to want to configure everything myself.
I wonder how this change will pan out across the entire Linux-sphere. I’m wondering and I’m trying not to be pessimistic.
It's not good, but it's the peril of most public quoted companies.
Private companies (especially one's who aren't beholden to VCs or similar) have the option to say no, regardless of how much money they're offered.
Two or three years from now IBM will be the next GE.
Might be going out on a limb here, but maybe that’s why they bought the stock, so they could sell out at a profit?
Where? Can you give an example of an expression of cognitive dissonance here?
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.