Do you think the new logo will be purple?
October 29, 2018 5:03 AM Subscribe
Red Hat, the software company that produces an enterprise-grade Linux distribution, contributes to projects like GNOME, LibreOffice, and also sponsors the Fedora Project is being acquired by a company known only as IBM.
Canonical must be skipping around in a little circle going "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
Software and solutions vendors who have products competing with IBM will be getting the hell out of dodge, as are customers who have some memory of what happens to "Not Invented Here" IBM products (Lotus, anyone?).
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:15 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Software and solutions vendors who have products competing with IBM will be getting the hell out of dodge, as are customers who have some memory of what happens to "Not Invented Here" IBM products (Lotus, anyone?).
posted by Slap*Happy at 5:15 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
.
(for all of the Red Hat folks in Raleigh that will suddenly find themselves redundant)
posted by NoMich at 5:20 AM on October 29, 2018 [13 favorites]
(for all of the Red Hat folks in Raleigh that will suddenly find themselves redundant)
posted by NoMich at 5:20 AM on October 29, 2018 [13 favorites]
CNBC states this is the biggest (value) tech acquisition ever (so far in tech history)
I can't even imagine what $34 billion looks like in a physical sense.
posted by Faintdreams at 5:24 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
"Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM's purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $5.2 billion deal."
I can't even imagine what $34 billion looks like in a physical sense.
posted by Faintdreams at 5:24 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
imagine a beowulf cluster of these
posted by entropicamericana at 5:25 AM on October 29, 2018 [40 favorites]
posted by entropicamericana at 5:25 AM on October 29, 2018 [40 favorites]
a lot of people are crying foul about this but im not sure why. IBM has been a major linux contributor for ages. Anyone that pays kernel hackers can't be that terrible. i dunno, red hat aint the redhat of 2000 anymore.
posted by dis_integration at 5:25 AM on October 29, 2018 [14 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 5:25 AM on October 29, 2018 [14 favorites]
Thimk
posted by sammyo at 5:26 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by sammyo at 5:26 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Let's hope they allow it to continue as a standalone and the culture stays in place.
Mario Kart and red hats are ruined now, so I'll be fine with a purple rebrand.
posted by adept256 at 5:33 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Mario Kart and red hats are ruined now, so I'll be fine with a purple rebrand.
posted by adept256 at 5:33 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
100% of airlines in the Fortune Global 500 rely on Red Hat [1]
100% of telcos in the Fortune Global 500 rely on Red Hat [2]
100% of commercial banks in the Fortune 500 rely on Red Hat [3]
100% of U.S. executive departments rely on Red Hat [4]
From their own website.
posted by adept256 at 5:47 AM on October 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
100% of telcos in the Fortune Global 500 rely on Red Hat [2]
100% of commercial banks in the Fortune 500 rely on Red Hat [3]
100% of U.S. executive departments rely on Red Hat [4]
From their own website.
posted by adept256 at 5:47 AM on October 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM Red Hat.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:52 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 5:52 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
This is entirely a IBM vs AWS/GCP. The cloud, the cloud, it's an opaque buzzword for many but there is an industry change occuring from huge corporate data centers to renting resources from a 'cloud provider', basically ultra-mega-timesharing. From my phone I can spin up a million dollar super computer for an hour, for short money.
IBM is not a player. There are some serious complexities to running tens of thousands of companies within one (ginormous) building, IBM has some important niches but the big swath of new tech it had not just lost it was not really on the field.
I was just at an open source (un)conference sponsored by RH that was very technical but the speakers were all RH employees that tried to pull in lots of developers for tech discussions but all the topics were about RH 'sponsored' technologies that were free but really mostly useful to large corporations and would need either a large expensive expert staff to actually run or a 'subscription'.
Really hoping that 34B is spread around, RH was not a huge company (12k hackers), hoping there are thousands of new tech millionaires instead of a couple billionaires.
posted by sammyo at 5:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
IBM is not a player. There are some serious complexities to running tens of thousands of companies within one (ginormous) building, IBM has some important niches but the big swath of new tech it had not just lost it was not really on the field.
I was just at an open source (un)conference sponsored by RH that was very technical but the speakers were all RH employees that tried to pull in lots of developers for tech discussions but all the topics were about RH 'sponsored' technologies that were free but really mostly useful to large corporations and would need either a large expensive expert staff to actually run or a 'subscription'.
Really hoping that 34B is spread around, RH was not a huge company (12k hackers), hoping there are thousands of new tech millionaires instead of a couple billionaires.
posted by sammyo at 5:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
Big Blue Hat
posted by freecellwizard at 5:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by freecellwizard at 5:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
Zardoz, here's your explanation in the shape of a jigsaw puzzle:
In 1995, 23 years ago, IBM had revenue of a whisker under £72Bn and 225,000 employees.
For comparison, Microsoft—founded in 1975, 18 years old, and now dominant in the PC/software sector—had revenue of $5.94Bn and around 17,000 employees.
(So: IBM was a Goliath of the tech sector with revenue more than 12 times greater than Microsoft.)
Red Hat was a tiny scrappy startup trying to turn a student's operating system kernel and a bunch of free tools written by volunteers into something that ordinary folks could install on a PC instead of Windows. Their first public beta release of this free OS—they planned to make money selling support services—came out the same year.
Today Red Hat, 23 years old, has revenue of $2.9Bn and 12,200 staff, making it about half the size/turnover of Microsoft in 1995.
... And in 2016 IBM still had revenue of roughly $72.9Bn.
Now, what does the big picture look like?
posted by cstross at 6:02 AM on October 29, 2018 [20 favorites]
In 1995, 23 years ago, IBM had revenue of a whisker under £72Bn and 225,000 employees.
For comparison, Microsoft—founded in 1975, 18 years old, and now dominant in the PC/software sector—had revenue of $5.94Bn and around 17,000 employees.
(So: IBM was a Goliath of the tech sector with revenue more than 12 times greater than Microsoft.)
Red Hat was a tiny scrappy startup trying to turn a student's operating system kernel and a bunch of free tools written by volunteers into something that ordinary folks could install on a PC instead of Windows. Their first public beta release of this free OS—they planned to make money selling support services—came out the same year.
Today Red Hat, 23 years old, has revenue of $2.9Bn and 12,200 staff, making it about half the size/turnover of Microsoft in 1995.
... And in 2016 IBM still had revenue of roughly $72.9Bn.
Now, what does the big picture look like?
posted by cstross at 6:02 AM on October 29, 2018 [20 favorites]
Let's hope they allow it to continue as a standalone and the culture stays in place.
I worked for a medium sized company that was purchased by IBM in the early 2000s. We were left alone for a little bit, then slightly integrated, then forced to conform to all sorts of corporate tech "standards" even when they made no sense, then basically destroyed (after I left).
Here's to hoping and all, but let's just say I'm ... wary?
posted by tocts at 6:04 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
I worked for a medium sized company that was purchased by IBM in the early 2000s. We were left alone for a little bit, then slightly integrated, then forced to conform to all sorts of corporate tech "standards" even when they made no sense, then basically destroyed (after I left).
Here's to hoping and all, but let's just say I'm ... wary?
posted by tocts at 6:04 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Well, how's github doing now?
If a business is doing so well they think it's worth buying, you'd think they'd want to keep running business as usual. If KFC bought Dominos, why would they start deep frying pizzas?
posted by adept256 at 6:11 AM on October 29, 2018
If a business is doing so well they think it's worth buying, you'd think they'd want to keep running business as usual. If KFC bought Dominos, why would they start deep frying pizzas?
posted by adept256 at 6:11 AM on October 29, 2018
All I can say is it's better than Red Hat being acquired by Oracle, but I'm still pretty bummed by this news.
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 6:12 AM on October 29, 2018 [19 favorites]
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 6:12 AM on October 29, 2018 [19 favorites]
Well, that's our chance for running Flock at Seneca@York in Toronto next year gone.
posted by scruss at 6:12 AM on October 29, 2018
posted by scruss at 6:12 AM on October 29, 2018
Something something Azure Cloud something IBM OS/2 something something licensing something.
posted by davemee at 6:13 AM on October 29, 2018
posted by davemee at 6:13 AM on October 29, 2018
> Really hoping that 34B is spread around, RH was not a huge company (12k hackers), hoping there are thousands of new tech millionaires instead of a couple billionaires.
That's a purchase price of roughly US$2.8M per staffer (12k total staff, not 12k programmers, according to Wikipedia). Hopefully some of the office staff who'd managed to hang in for a while will get some extra financial security out of this.
The purchase price sounds very high ($34B for a company with less than $6B in assets and $3B annual revenue), even if most of it is virtual rather than cash. Either IBM knows something the rest of the world doesn't know, or Red Hat knows something that IBM doesn't know.
posted by ardgedee at 6:18 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
That's a purchase price of roughly US$2.8M per staffer (12k total staff, not 12k programmers, according to Wikipedia). Hopefully some of the office staff who'd managed to hang in for a while will get some extra financial security out of this.
The purchase price sounds very high ($34B for a company with less than $6B in assets and $3B annual revenue), even if most of it is virtual rather than cash. Either IBM knows something the rest of the world doesn't know, or Red Hat knows something that IBM doesn't know.
posted by ardgedee at 6:18 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Well, how's github doing now?
Too early to tell, and Atlassian's BitBucket's out there as a viable alternative in case it's embrace-and-extended to an early grave.
If a business is doing so well they think it's worth buying, you'd think they'd want to keep running business as usual.
Not if it puts the screws to major rivals in an emerging sector they want to own - Hybrid Cloud in this case. By screwing with Red Hat, they screw with Amazon, Google, VMWare, HP, Intel and Cisco, all IBM competitors. Good deal all around.
If KFC bought Dominos, why would they start deep frying pizzas?
Wanna know why there are no more Pizza Hut sit-down pizza parlors anymore? Here's a hint.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:21 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
Too early to tell, and Atlassian's BitBucket's out there as a viable alternative in case it's embrace-and-extended to an early grave.
If a business is doing so well they think it's worth buying, you'd think they'd want to keep running business as usual.
Not if it puts the screws to major rivals in an emerging sector they want to own - Hybrid Cloud in this case. By screwing with Red Hat, they screw with Amazon, Google, VMWare, HP, Intel and Cisco, all IBM competitors. Good deal all around.
If KFC bought Dominos, why would they start deep frying pizzas?
Wanna know why there are no more Pizza Hut sit-down pizza parlors anymore? Here's a hint.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:21 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
> (for all of the Red Hat folks in Raleigh that will suddenly find themselves redundant)
IBM has been a major presence here since the 1960s and still maintains an immense campus in Research Triangle Park. It doesn't seem likely to me that IBM will want to consolidate everybody in the Red Hat building for the sake of proximity, because they're less than 20 miles away from each other. If anything, I'd bet that certain IBM divisions are equally at risk as their counterpart Red Hat teams.
posted by ardgedee at 6:29 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
IBM has been a major presence here since the 1960s and still maintains an immense campus in Research Triangle Park. It doesn't seem likely to me that IBM will want to consolidate everybody in the Red Hat building for the sake of proximity, because they're less than 20 miles away from each other. If anything, I'd bet that certain IBM divisions are equally at risk as their counterpart Red Hat teams.
posted by ardgedee at 6:29 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
I don't have any statistics in front of me, so take this posting with a grain of salt.
However: Think about what has the most instances of Linux on the desktop. It's Chrome OS. Probably by a wide margin. Now what has the second largest number of Linux instances on the desktop? I'm pretty sure it's Windows Subsystem for Linux. Now think about how quickly the number of those two are growing, compared to any and all GNOME-based Linux distributions. GNOME is never, ever going to catch up. GNOME is a dream whose time has passed. GNOME is a dead man walking.
Now the one place where Linux and Red Hat are significant is the cloud. What does a cloud server instance need? The main thing it needs is fast networking, i.e., 10/40/100GB. The whole point of cloud computing is pointless if you don't have fast networking. However, the Linux kernel is TOO SLOW to drive a 10GB network interface. So typically the TCP/IP stack is offloaded to the network card, and the network card's memory space is mapped directly into the user's process space, bypassing the kernel entirely. The other thing you might need in a cloud compute farm are GPUs. Again, Linux is too slow to drive a GPU, and the GPU's memory is mapped directly into the user process, bypassing the kernel.
How much of Linux, which was written as a desktop operating system, do you need in your cloud environment? That's a whole lot of bloat that's sitting around doing nothing. And that's just the kernel, never mind the additional bloat of systemd, which was written to make Lennart Poettering's laptop boot a few hundred milliseconds faster, and most of which is completely pointless in a cloud server. With hundreds of virtualized Linux instances running on your physical cloud server, cutting out all that bloat will have significant payoff.
Linux isn't going anywhere soon, but Google's Fuchsia (aka: "Suck it, Torvalds. Tannenbaum was right.") is probably going to happen, and it will have a much, much smaller footprint than Linux. And if it were possible to run your containerized services on Fuchsia instead of Linux, Linux could disappear very, very quickly.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:41 AM on October 29, 2018 [12 favorites]
However: Think about what has the most instances of Linux on the desktop. It's Chrome OS. Probably by a wide margin. Now what has the second largest number of Linux instances on the desktop? I'm pretty sure it's Windows Subsystem for Linux. Now think about how quickly the number of those two are growing, compared to any and all GNOME-based Linux distributions. GNOME is never, ever going to catch up. GNOME is a dream whose time has passed. GNOME is a dead man walking.
Now the one place where Linux and Red Hat are significant is the cloud. What does a cloud server instance need? The main thing it needs is fast networking, i.e., 10/40/100GB. The whole point of cloud computing is pointless if you don't have fast networking. However, the Linux kernel is TOO SLOW to drive a 10GB network interface. So typically the TCP/IP stack is offloaded to the network card, and the network card's memory space is mapped directly into the user's process space, bypassing the kernel entirely. The other thing you might need in a cloud compute farm are GPUs. Again, Linux is too slow to drive a GPU, and the GPU's memory is mapped directly into the user process, bypassing the kernel.
How much of Linux, which was written as a desktop operating system, do you need in your cloud environment? That's a whole lot of bloat that's sitting around doing nothing. And that's just the kernel, never mind the additional bloat of systemd, which was written to make Lennart Poettering's laptop boot a few hundred milliseconds faster, and most of which is completely pointless in a cloud server. With hundreds of virtualized Linux instances running on your physical cloud server, cutting out all that bloat will have significant payoff.
Linux isn't going anywhere soon, but Google's Fuchsia (aka: "Suck it, Torvalds. Tannenbaum was right.") is probably going to happen, and it will have a much, much smaller footprint than Linux. And if it were possible to run your containerized services on Fuchsia instead of Linux, Linux could disappear very, very quickly.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:41 AM on October 29, 2018 [12 favorites]
By screwing with Red Hat, they screw with Amazon, Google, VMWare, HP, Intel and Cisco, all IBM competitors. Good deal all around.
In the cloud era, the idea of "competitors" is not so clear-cut. IBM has business partnerships with most of those other companies, and anybody who sells enterprise solutions right now is de facto partnered with Amazon, because AWS is where everybody wants their stuff to be hosted.
As a business move, I don't think this is so much about screwing with the competition (IBM, for all their faults, aren't Oracle) as it is making sure IBM has its fingers in all the pies.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:42 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
In the cloud era, the idea of "competitors" is not so clear-cut. IBM has business partnerships with most of those other companies, and anybody who sells enterprise solutions right now is de facto partnered with Amazon, because AWS is where everybody wants their stuff to be hosted.
As a business move, I don't think this is so much about screwing with the competition (IBM, for all their faults, aren't Oracle) as it is making sure IBM has its fingers in all the pies.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:42 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
CNBC states this is the biggest (value) tech acquisition ever (so far in tech history)
Third (or fourth, if you count AOL-Time Warner) biggest according to the article you linked. Dell-EMC was almost twice the size by value.
posted by clawsoon at 6:46 AM on October 29, 2018
Third (or fourth, if you count AOL-Time Warner) biggest according to the article you linked. Dell-EMC was almost twice the size by value.
posted by clawsoon at 6:46 AM on October 29, 2018
I'm curious what this means for Centos. Wasn't the Centos project taken over by Redhat a couple of years ago?
posted by clawsoon at 6:49 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 6:49 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
A few years ago IBM bought Green Hat software, so I will now refer to the company as RGB Hat.
It seems more likely now that someone will buy out Canonical. I wonder whocrosoft?
posted by Poldo at 6:58 AM on October 29, 2018 [12 favorites]
It seems more likely now that someone will buy out Canonical. I wonder whocrosoft?
posted by Poldo at 6:58 AM on October 29, 2018 [12 favorites]
@Clawson - Red Hat hired most of the CentOS maintainers and they now work on CentOS full time on Red Hat's dime. No idea what it will mean for CentOS in the future, if anything will change, or not.
posted by jzb at 6:59 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by jzb at 6:59 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
IBM licensing sucks.
I really hope their legal and sales orgs don’t fuck this up.
posted by nikaspark at 7:02 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
I really hope their legal and sales orgs don’t fuck this up.
posted by nikaspark at 7:02 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
IBM is a great company to buy Red Hat. Their businesses are a perfect match. IBM has long since added Linux to the technologies it supports and sells. IBM is also mostly a good open source citizen. Red Hat's whole business is basically "what if we took IBM's services business model and applied it to Linux?". It worked and merging them makes total sense.
I know the Purple Hat logo thing was a joke, but Red Hat has had a shitty time with their visual brand these past couple of years. It's not their fault that red caps became a symbol of American fascism. I can't imagine they'll actually change the logo, but it sure would solve some problems for them.
posted by Nelson at 7:05 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
I know the Purple Hat logo thing was a joke, but Red Hat has had a shitty time with their visual brand these past couple of years. It's not their fault that red caps became a symbol of American fascism. I can't imagine they'll actually change the logo, but it sure would solve some problems for them.
posted by Nelson at 7:05 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
One word acronym Numeronym:
K8S
Kubernetes "Production-Grade Container Orchestration" say what?
RH is not linux and linux is quite a small part of the company although it's the banner. k8s and other deep infrastructure systems are what IBM bought.
Centos probably fits in as a very small line item in their marketing outreach budget. Lost leader labeled as educational philanthropy for tax purposes.
posted by sammyo at 7:07 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
K8S
Kubernetes "Production-Grade Container Orchestration" say what?
RH is not linux and linux is quite a small part of the company although it's the banner. k8s and other deep infrastructure systems are what IBM bought.
Centos probably fits in as a very small line item in their marketing outreach budget. Lost leader labeled as educational philanthropy for tax purposes.
posted by sammyo at 7:07 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
I was at IBM when the PWC consulting firm was acquired. Which led to the old joke:
"What do you get when you cross IBM and PWC?"
(beat)
"IBM"
Rinse, repeat.
PS
Probably old enough to be the grandmother of some of the twits insulting old lady tech knowledge. Step off.
posted by frumiousb at 7:07 AM on October 29, 2018 [18 favorites]
"What do you get when you cross IBM and PWC?"
(beat)
"IBM"
Rinse, repeat.
PS
Probably old enough to be the grandmother of some of the twits insulting old lady tech knowledge. Step off.
posted by frumiousb at 7:07 AM on October 29, 2018 [18 favorites]
I had an interview last month for what would have been my dream job at Red Hat corporate HQ here in Raleigh, and I didn't get it - and boy, was that a bullet dodged. That position is definitely not going to survive this merger. I have to imagine a lot of people working down there are feeling pretty betrayed right now.
posted by something something at 7:08 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by something something at 7:08 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Maaaaaan, I am like three-quarters done with a multi-year project to migrate our SPARC/Solaris hosts to RHEL on VMware, and now this?I thought I was going to be done with Nasty Licensing Weasels. *grump*
--
On YC I did see the innnnnteresting suggestion that this could be an Apple-style NeXT purchase, intended to turn the parent company inside out with all new technology. That was a neat notion for a moment or two, and then I snapped out of it. :7(
posted by wenestvedt at 7:16 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
--
On YC I did see the innnnnteresting suggestion that this could be an Apple-style NeXT purchase, intended to turn the parent company inside out with all new technology. That was a neat notion for a moment or two, and then I snapped out of it. :7(
posted by wenestvedt at 7:16 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
I work in downtown Raleigh and earlier we saw all the Red Hat people streaming across the plaza going (I assume) to the convention center for a meeting about this. Will be interesting to hear the chit-chat at the lunch and coffee places today.
posted by freecellwizard at 7:18 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by freecellwizard at 7:18 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Red Hatter here. I'm still in shock from finding out yesterday after lunch. In an ideal world, this would be great for both companies (and open source) if IBM is influenced by our company and we are really allowed to operate independently.
In this world, I'm updating my resume and hoping I'll be pleasantly surprised. Red Hat was not perfect as a company, but it's positives outweighed its flaws, IMO. It's the only company I know, for example, that explicitly guarantees its employees the right to work on open source projects that may conflict with its business interests or make decisions upstream that may be bad for our products.
Our internal culture, the "open organization," is deeply important. It will be a miracle if it survives, but I hope it does.
posted by jzb at 7:20 AM on October 29, 2018 [27 favorites]
In this world, I'm updating my resume and hoping I'll be pleasantly surprised. Red Hat was not perfect as a company, but it's positives outweighed its flaws, IMO. It's the only company I know, for example, that explicitly guarantees its employees the right to work on open source projects that may conflict with its business interests or make decisions upstream that may be bad for our products.
Our internal culture, the "open organization," is deeply important. It will be a miracle if it survives, but I hope it does.
posted by jzb at 7:20 AM on October 29, 2018 [27 favorites]
"the Linux kernel is TOO SLOW to drive a 10GB network interface."
That's not true.
Kernel bypass is a thing for some use cases, yes. This isn't my area of expertise, but I'm skeptical about the idea that the reason for that is bloat added to the kernel to support desktop use cases, and I'm not sure what microkernels or Fuscia have to do with handling higher-bandwidth network interfaces. (You might be right, I just don't know.)
Linux has had heavy use on the server side for ages, the idea that it's primarily a desktop OS is odd.
Yes, the memory and storage footprint matters when packing as many instances as possible on to a single machine. I don't agree that Linux is standing still here. (See for example the container work allowing multiple instances to share a kernel.) Maybe there are better approaches, I don't know.
"never mind the additional bloat of systemd, which was written to make Lennart Poettering's laptop boot a few hundred milliseconds faster"
See Lennart's blog, myths 2, 3, 7, and 12.
posted by bfields at 7:27 AM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
That's not true.
Kernel bypass is a thing for some use cases, yes. This isn't my area of expertise, but I'm skeptical about the idea that the reason for that is bloat added to the kernel to support desktop use cases, and I'm not sure what microkernels or Fuscia have to do with handling higher-bandwidth network interfaces. (You might be right, I just don't know.)
Linux has had heavy use on the server side for ages, the idea that it's primarily a desktop OS is odd.
Yes, the memory and storage footprint matters when packing as many instances as possible on to a single machine. I don't agree that Linux is standing still here. (See for example the container work allowing multiple instances to share a kernel.) Maybe there are better approaches, I don't know.
"never mind the additional bloat of systemd, which was written to make Lennart Poettering's laptop boot a few hundred milliseconds faster"
See Lennart's blog, myths 2, 3, 7, and 12.
posted by bfields at 7:27 AM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
On YC I did see the innnnnteresting suggestion that this could be an Apple-style NeXT purchase, intended to turn the parent company inside out with all new technology. That was a neat notion for a moment or two, and then I snapped out of it. :7(
RISC and Mainframe are gigantic cash-generating machines, as they are sublimely good at what they do and command fat margins from even the meanest of bean-counters. RHEL is a big contributor to that, as cloud-scale hypervisors are baked into the latest POWER and z-Series systems, and have been for a loooong while. There's no profit margin or technical advantage to x86, which is why IBM sold it all off a decade ago. One of the many reasons why this deal is so very interesting.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:33 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
RISC and Mainframe are gigantic cash-generating machines, as they are sublimely good at what they do and command fat margins from even the meanest of bean-counters. RHEL is a big contributor to that, as cloud-scale hypervisors are baked into the latest POWER and z-Series systems, and have been for a loooong while. There's no profit margin or technical advantage to x86, which is why IBM sold it all off a decade ago. One of the many reasons why this deal is so very interesting.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:33 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Let's hope they allow it to continue as a standalone and the culture stays in place.
I worked for a 400 person startup that IBM bought in '99 and they made some noises about preserving our culture but within two years we were fully assimilated*. Maybe IBM has changed in the last two decades but I doubt it.
*IBM wanted us to integrate our products with their mainframes and sent us a huge z-series machine to test on. Our lab administrator gave it the hostname "Locutus" .
posted by octothorpe at 7:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
I worked for a 400 person startup that IBM bought in '99 and they made some noises about preserving our culture but within two years we were fully assimilated*. Maybe IBM has changed in the last two decades but I doubt it.
*IBM wanted us to integrate our products with their mainframes and sent us a huge z-series machine to test on. Our lab administrator gave it the hostname "Locutus" .
posted by octothorpe at 7:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
I wonder if systemd still has the Google DNS servers hardcoded.
posted by clawsoon at 7:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by clawsoon at 7:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
@octothorpe - yeah. I'm not holding my breath. We'll see. I love my co-workers and Red Hat's culture, and it's going to really suck if / when things change.
posted by jzb at 7:42 AM on October 29, 2018
posted by jzb at 7:42 AM on October 29, 2018
GNOME is never, ever going to catch up. GNOME is a dream whose time has passed. GNOME is a dead man walking.
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
posted by good in a vacuum at 7:45 AM on October 29, 2018 [10 favorites]
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
posted by good in a vacuum at 7:45 AM on October 29, 2018 [10 favorites]
Lennart's myths post is disingenuous as hell. Sure, parts of systemd are useful in a server environment, but it's pretty obvious that lots of what systemd does only make sense if you're running on a desktop or a laptop that goes to sleep often, and really don't need to be on a server.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:48 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:48 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
See Lennart's blog, myths 2, 3, 7, and 12.
One point not addressed, so I'll address it here: "Q: Does Poettering regularly create software which is beyond his abilities to get to a production-ready state, and then somehow convince distros to release it to the world, resulting in years of bugginess and gnashing of teeth for users? A: Yes."
posted by clawsoon at 7:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [11 favorites]
One point not addressed, so I'll address it here: "Q: Does Poettering regularly create software which is beyond his abilities to get to a production-ready state, and then somehow convince distros to release it to the world, resulting in years of bugginess and gnashing of teeth for users? A: Yes."
posted by clawsoon at 7:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [11 favorites]
IBM wanted us to integrate our products with their mainframes and sent us a huge z-series machine to test on.
We had an RS/9000 with a "Mainframe Compatibility Card" and the BNC storage interface that was going to overtake SCSI any day now... and the Disco-era mainframe multi-tape drive driven by vacuum dependent on replaceable carbon fan vanes connected by Weird IBM Cable to said card, all of which were serviceable at no charge with our surprisingly cheap developer support contract.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:56 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
We had an RS/9000 with a "Mainframe Compatibility Card" and the BNC storage interface that was going to overtake SCSI any day now... and the Disco-era mainframe multi-tape drive driven by vacuum dependent on replaceable carbon fan vanes connected by Weird IBM Cable to said card, all of which were serviceable at no charge with our surprisingly cheap developer support contract.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:56 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
At least Red Hat won't have to convert to Token Ring but I'm pretty sure that they're all going to have to get Lotus Notes accounts.
posted by octothorpe at 8:06 AM on October 29, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 8:06 AM on October 29, 2018 [10 favorites]
Big Blue buy Red Hat. Developers caught in crossfire said to be marooned.
posted by avapoet at 8:08 AM on October 29, 2018 [29 favorites]
posted by avapoet at 8:08 AM on October 29, 2018 [29 favorites]
How much of Linux, which was written as a desktop operating system, do you need in your cloud environment?
I guess we'll find out. Last I checked, quite a lot actually?
I don't know the last time *nix on the desktop was particularly relevant to this conversation. Red Hat certainly hasn't pushed it for a while - however much they may contribute to Gnome, they're all about enterprise for over a decade now.
This stuff moves fast, but I don't see Linux as a whole being affected by it in the short term - IBM is hardly neutral when it comes to FOSS, but they've contributed in as many ways as they've fucked with it.
Something like a third of systemz mainframes are running some flavor of enterprise linux, mostly RedHat (itself a solid reason IBM might want to acquire RH).
posted by aspersioncast at 8:12 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I guess we'll find out. Last I checked, quite a lot actually?
I don't know the last time *nix on the desktop was particularly relevant to this conversation. Red Hat certainly hasn't pushed it for a while - however much they may contribute to Gnome, they're all about enterprise for over a decade now.
This stuff moves fast, but I don't see Linux as a whole being affected by it in the short term - IBM is hardly neutral when it comes to FOSS, but they've contributed in as many ways as they've fucked with it.
Something like a third of systemz mainframes are running some flavor of enterprise linux, mostly RedHat (itself a solid reason IBM might want to acquire RH).
posted by aspersioncast at 8:12 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Aw, shit.
posted by mikelieman at 8:17 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by mikelieman at 8:17 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
We had an RS/9000 with a "Mainframe Compatibility Card" and the BNC storage interface that was going to overtake SCSI any day now... and the Disco-era mainframe multi-tape drive driven by vacuum dependent on replaceable carbon fan vanes connected by Weird IBM Cable to said card, all of which were serviceable at no charge with our surprisingly cheap developer support contract.
In IBM's defense, I once pulled out a memory card of a live AS/400, and the damn thing halted, screamed, and then I turned it off, put the card back, hit the BRS, and it continued w/o dropping a transaction. They used to make some damned robust hardware...
posted by mikelieman at 8:19 AM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
In IBM's defense, I once pulled out a memory card of a live AS/400, and the damn thing halted, screamed, and then I turned it off, put the card back, hit the BRS, and it continued w/o dropping a transaction. They used to make some damned robust hardware...
posted by mikelieman at 8:19 AM on October 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
How much of Linux, which was written as a desktop operating system, do you need in your cloud environment?
All my VPS's run Centos. So there's that....
posted by mikelieman at 8:19 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
All my VPS's run Centos. So there's that....
posted by mikelieman at 8:19 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
"it's pretty obvious that lots of what systemd does only make sense if you're running on a desktop or a laptop that goes to sleep often, and really don't need to be on a server."
Please elaborate.
posted by bfields at 8:27 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Please elaborate.
posted by bfields at 8:27 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
In IBM's defense, I once pulled out a memory card of a live AS/400
OS/400 is basically every hacker on the cinema screen interface, all green monitor text menus and flashing hilit options. None of it made any sense without deep dives into the redbooks, but it looks good on the movie screen...
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:28 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
OS/400 is basically every hacker on the cinema screen interface, all green monitor text menus and flashing hilit options. None of it made any sense without deep dives into the redbooks, but it looks good on the movie screen...
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:28 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
"Oh hey, we're going to be adjusting the support schedule a little so if you could begin doing knowledge transfer to your offshore colleagues that'd be great. As a subject matter expert we're keen to get you working on special projects..."
posted by Damienmce at 8:41 AM on October 29, 2018 [14 favorites]
posted by Damienmce at 8:41 AM on October 29, 2018 [14 favorites]
Hah, that's pretty literally what happened to me at big blue ~6 years ago.
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 8:55 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 8:55 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Me too fifteen years ago. They laid off my whole team except for two of us. My remaining colleague and I spent almost a year training a team from IBM Bangalore to take over our jobs. Then when we were done, they screwed up and couldn't figure out how to get rid of the two of us because the "resource action" had expired and there's no easy way to lay-off just two people at IBM. We had no duties but they couldn't get rid of us so we just kept showing up. My partner finally gave up and quit when his pension vested but I owed IBM tuition for grad school so I couldn't quit without paying them back the $60K for CMU tuition. I continued on like that for another two years until they finally found a resource action to attach me to and could get rid of me. I had a very nice private window office on the 20th floor of a skyscraper in Downtown Pittsburgh with a fabulous view of the Point but almost nothing to do for the last 2.5 years of my tenure at IBM.
posted by octothorpe at 9:11 AM on October 29, 2018 [41 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 9:11 AM on October 29, 2018 [41 favorites]
I'm pretty sure that they're all going to have to get Lotus Notes accounts
Too real. Having flashbacks.
posted by tocts at 9:16 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Too real. Having flashbacks.
posted by tocts at 9:16 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
IBM and Red Hat have been primarily about business cloud and high-performance computing for several years now. In June, they had the most powerful parallel computer in the world.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:17 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 9:17 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
So now I can expect IBM salespeople to be pushing Tower on me for "just" $10k/year? In .edu? Mmmmm-hmmmm....
posted by wenestvedt at 9:24 AM on October 29, 2018
posted by wenestvedt at 9:24 AM on October 29, 2018
IBM still supports APL. Which is kick-ass awesome for a certain segment of comp-sci purists, and John Titor fans, because we're all in the altered world. Why not?
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:36 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:36 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Monty Python predicted this.
"Counsellor: Well yes. Yes. Of course, it's a bit of a jump isn't it? I mean, er, chartered accountancy to lion taming in one go. You don't think it might be better if you worked your way towards lion taming, say, via banking?
IBM: No, no, no, no. No. I don't want to wait. At nine o'clock tomorrow I want to be in there, taming.
Counsellor: Fine, fine. But do you, do you have any qualifications?
IBM: Yes, I've got a hat.
Counsellor: A hat?
IBM: Yes, a hat. A lion taming hat. A hat with 'lion tamer' on it. I got it at Harrods. And it lights up saying 'lion tamer' in great big neon letters, so that you can tame them after dark when they're less stroppy.
Counsellor: I see, I see.
IBM: And you can switch it off during the day time, and claim reasonable wear and tear as allowable professional expenses under paragraph 335C...
Counsellor: Yes, yes, yes, I do follow, but you see the snag is... if I now call Mr Chipperfield and say to him, 'look here, I've got a forty-five-year-old chartered accountant with me who wants to become a lion tamer', his first question is not going to be 'does he have his own hat?' He's going to ask what sort of experience you've had with lions.
IBM: Well I... I've seen them at the zoo."
posted by storybored at 9:37 AM on October 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
Per year? Looks like a reasonable per month/per seat for all the value added features of the customizable help forum site powered by Watson(tm).
posted by sammyo at 9:37 AM on October 29, 2018
posted by sammyo at 9:37 AM on October 29, 2018
If KFC bought Dominos, why would they start deep frying pizzas?
Executive egos ... Which have destroyed untold billions in shareholder value since time immemorial.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Executive egos ... Which have destroyed untold billions in shareholder value since time immemorial.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:38 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I worked for a medium sized company that was purchased by IBM in the early 2000s. We were left alone for a little bit, then slightly integrated, then forced to conform to all sorts of corporate tech "standards" even when they made no sense, then basically destroyed (after I left).
Either I worked at the same company as tocts, or early 2000s IBM acquisitions follow a certain... pattern.
posted by parm at 9:40 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Either I worked at the same company as tocts, or early 2000s IBM acquisitions follow a certain... pattern.
posted by parm at 9:40 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Security in the cloud? Surely you can't be cirrus!
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:48 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 9:48 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I hear Eddie Lampert (aka $ whois jgalt) is looking to buy Yggdrasil and rebadge it as Blue Light Linux.
Seriously, though, NeXT may indeed be apt (no Debian pun intended) here. Rometty had to explicitly tell CNBC that she wasn't retiring any time soon.
Also I wonder whether Oracle will migrate or fork its RHEL-clone Oracle Linux. And who will buy Canonical and soon-to-be-free-from-Micro Focus SUSE?
posted by zaixfeep at 9:54 AM on October 29, 2018
Seriously, though, NeXT may indeed be apt (no Debian pun intended) here. Rometty had to explicitly tell CNBC that she wasn't retiring any time soon.
Also I wonder whether Oracle will migrate or fork its RHEL-clone Oracle Linux. And who will buy Canonical and soon-to-be-free-from-Micro Focus SUSE?
posted by zaixfeep at 9:54 AM on October 29, 2018
Does Poettering regularly create software which is beyond his abilities to get to a production-ready state, and then somehow convince distros to release it to the world, resulting in years of bugginess and gnashing of teeth for usersPlease take this back to Reddit. systemd is not a one-man project and the distributions which adopted it didn’t just fall prey to some Jedi mind-control trick but instead had long deliberative debates. The outcome might not be your favorite competitor but I’m really tired of the mythology around idea that this debate didn’t happen and, especially, which pretends that there have been more problems with systemd than what it replaces.
At the very least, anyone who develops or supports software should recognize the benefits of not supporting 3+ systems and being able to standardize on a number of new characteristics which didn’t exist at all in SysV or were inconsistent. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for debate but I’ve very rarely seen the standard talking points backed up with technical analysis acknowledging the real engineering concerns which fed into each decision.
posted by adamsc at 9:59 AM on October 29, 2018 [18 favorites]
If KFC bought Dominos, why would they start deep frying pizzas?
But think of the business synergy case!
More seriously, the chippie over the road from me will happily deep fry a pizza slice and sell it to you if you ask them nicely. deep-fried pizza is indeed a thing here in Scotland ...
posted by cstross at 10:04 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
But think of the business synergy case!
More seriously, the chippie over the road from me will happily deep fry a pizza slice and sell it to you if you ask them nicely. deep-fried pizza is indeed a thing here in Scotland ...
posted by cstross at 10:04 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Either I worked at the same company as tocts, or early 2000s IBM ALL acquisitions follow a certain... pattern.
In my own experience, at least. I've now worked for two small companies that got acquired by larger ones, and both times the integration changes were eventually inevitable despite reassuring words to the contrary. Large businesses just can't tolerate/subsidize differing company cultures.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:14 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
In my own experience, at least. I've now worked for two small companies that got acquired by larger ones, and both times the integration changes were eventually inevitable despite reassuring words to the contrary. Large businesses just can't tolerate/subsidize differing company cultures.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:14 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
I wonder if systemd still has the Google DNS servers hardcoded.
WTF, it really does. I can only imagine that the long deliberative debates leading up to the adoption of systemd were just as productive and fruitful as the ongoing one involving that bug. I have yet to find any reason to like systemd. I've given it a chance since I don't care about the init system 99.99% of the time, but it's somehow managed to cause problems for me twice so far, most recently yesterday when it was the only thing to stop a do-release-upgrade going smoothly.
posted by sfenders at 10:14 AM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
WTF, it really does. I can only imagine that the long deliberative debates leading up to the adoption of systemd were just as productive and fruitful as the ongoing one involving that bug. I have yet to find any reason to like systemd. I've given it a chance since I don't care about the init system 99.99% of the time, but it's somehow managed to cause problems for me twice so far, most recently yesterday when it was the only thing to stop a do-release-upgrade going smoothly.
posted by sfenders at 10:14 AM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
At least Red Hat won't have to convert to Token Ring but I'm pretty sure that they're all going to have to get Lotus Notes accounts.
Wow, that’s actually worse than just laying them off.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:17 AM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]
Wow, that’s actually worse than just laying them off.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:17 AM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]
At least Red Hat won't have to convert to Token Ring but I'm pretty sure that they're all going to have to get Lotus Notes accounts.
My husband, a former IBMer and current Redhatter, cursed when I quoted that to him.
posted by heathrowga at 10:21 AM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
Systemd has undeniable benefits; however, valid concerns exist. (End derail)
posted by zaixfeep at 10:21 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by zaixfeep at 10:21 AM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Other than really oppressive patent issues and well ring topology, Token Ring was really cool technology *for the time* and actually Notes had some good ideas implemented horribly and stupidly and does not play well with the real world. Those silly icons on the login screen, implemented for the CIA and if memorized are an effective tool for defeating sophisticated password attacks. But my heard goes out the the hatters.
posted by sammyo at 10:27 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by sammyo at 10:27 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
My sister's contract at a drug company was bought out by IBM somewhere around the year 2000 but nothing changed about her actual job other than having to put in timesheets to IBM. You were only allowed to log into IBM's systems with an IBM laptop so they shipped her a Thinkpad with a token ring network adapter and no ethernet card. Not surprisingly, the company where she was located did not have a token ring network so she had to go to Best Buy to buy her own ethernet adapter just so that she could use that laptop to submit her timesheet for the week.
posted by octothorpe at 10:56 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by octothorpe at 10:56 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
I look forward to the bluewashing:
IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Cloud Services with Watson
posted by meowzilla at 11:16 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Cloud Services with Watson
posted by meowzilla at 11:16 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I've now worked for two small companies that got acquired by larger ones, and both times the integration changes were eventually inevitable despite reassuring words to the contrary.
Yeah, I've done this dance twice (the company I moved to from IBM had this happen ~3 years in), and it seems like this is just how it works. The second time wasn't as painful though, probably because the parent company wasn't nearly as big as IBM and my original company's product's revenue was significant enough in the overall portfolio that they had to care at least a smidgen about not fucking it up overnight.
Still, 5 years later and the original company was a husk of itself with a few developers keeping the revenue coming in and the rest having abandoned ship after repeated management failures to integrate the product and dev team into the company at large.
posted by tocts at 11:24 AM on October 29, 2018
Yeah, I've done this dance twice (the company I moved to from IBM had this happen ~3 years in), and it seems like this is just how it works. The second time wasn't as painful though, probably because the parent company wasn't nearly as big as IBM and my original company's product's revenue was significant enough in the overall portfolio that they had to care at least a smidgen about not fucking it up overnight.
Still, 5 years later and the original company was a husk of itself with a few developers keeping the revenue coming in and the rest having abandoned ship after repeated management failures to integrate the product and dev team into the company at large.
posted by tocts at 11:24 AM on October 29, 2018
I once interviewed at Red Hat for an admin job. I was told that the head guy considered me, at thirty, “too old for the job.”
Since then (and before) I’ve known many who have worked there. But I still harbor a bit of fuck-you toward it. Or rather, that guy, who probably goes for a swim in a pool full of money every morning.
posted by 41swans at 11:25 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Since then (and before) I’ve known many who have worked there. But I still harbor a bit of fuck-you toward it. Or rather, that guy, who probably goes for a swim in a pool full of money every morning.
posted by 41swans at 11:25 AM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
adamsc: systemd is not a one-man project and the distributions which adopted it didn’t just fall prey to some Jedi mind-control trick but instead had long deliberative debates. The outcome might not be your favorite competitor but I’m really tired of the mythology around idea that this debate didn’t happen and, especially, which pretends that there have been more problems with systemd than what it replaces.
You'll notice that I didn't criticize the concept of systemd. I have my grumbles about the concept, but I recognize that they are based solely on the fact that I learned SysV first, so that's not a valid source of criticism.
The execution, on the other hand... I remember when I learned that pulseaudio, avahi, and systemd were all created by teams led by the same person, and it was a lightbulb going off: These are all the poorly-executed good ideas which have made my life as a sysadmin miserable because of their bugginess! These are the programs which make my life better when I completely remove them from the systems I'm responsible for! And they're all from teams led by the same person. Hmmmmm.
The fact that he got exceptionally buggy software into all the major distributions multiple times suggests that he does, in fact, have mastery of some Jedi mind tricks.
posted by clawsoon at 11:31 AM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]
You'll notice that I didn't criticize the concept of systemd. I have my grumbles about the concept, but I recognize that they are based solely on the fact that I learned SysV first, so that's not a valid source of criticism.
The execution, on the other hand... I remember when I learned that pulseaudio, avahi, and systemd were all created by teams led by the same person, and it was a lightbulb going off: These are all the poorly-executed good ideas which have made my life as a sysadmin miserable because of their bugginess! These are the programs which make my life better when I completely remove them from the systems I'm responsible for! And they're all from teams led by the same person. Hmmmmm.
The fact that he got exceptionally buggy software into all the major distributions multiple times suggests that he does, in fact, have mastery of some Jedi mind tricks.
posted by clawsoon at 11:31 AM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]
Three constants of linux discussion:
1. Is it the year of the linux desktop yet?
2. I see you're using {specialized software} but have you considered just doing it all in vim?
3. Systemd sucks! No it doesn't! Yes it does!
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:32 AM on October 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
1. Is it the year of the linux desktop yet?
2. I see you're using {specialized software} but have you considered just doing it all in vim?
3. Systemd sucks! No it doesn't! Yes it does!
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 11:32 AM on October 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
That's interesting, 41swans! I am 42 and was interviewing for an admin job reporting to a C-level executive. Honestly, I am exceedingly qualified and my main feeling at not getting into the second round was puzzlement. but 42 is pretty ancient, I guess.
posted by something something at 11:32 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by something something at 11:32 AM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Maybe Bob Young can afford better players for the Ti-Cats now :)
posted by Popular Ethics at 11:34 AM on October 29, 2018
posted by Popular Ethics at 11:34 AM on October 29, 2018
Guess who made the 10Gb/s network cards we used in our Linux boxes? It's more a bus speed issue on x86 that makes things hard, it takes some wonkery to get your storage going fast enough to keep a 10Gb/s read/write to/from storage. Making 10Gb/s work isn't that hard in and of itself. Sure it's not the x86 CPU/Bus driving ever bit onto and offof the wire, that's just x86 sucking.
posted by zengargoyle at 11:42 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by zengargoyle at 11:42 AM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
I was amused to see that a distribution of GNU/Linux, based on Red Hat, and produced by Chinese company Inspur, has applied for and received official UNIX certification from trademark owner The Open Group. So, GNU stands for "GNU's Now UNIX".
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:54 AM on October 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
Really hoping that 34B is spread around, RH was not a huge company (12k hackers), hoping there are thousands of new tech millionaires instead of a couple billionaires.
Red Hat has been public for ages, so the early millionaires happened back in '99 with their IPO. IBM is paying a big premium, but small shareholders will only see a modest bump in their value depending when they bought.
Business Insider conveniently has an article Here's who will get richer when IBM buys Red Hat for $34 billion and wow shocking, it's senior RH executives and Vanguard.
posted by GuyZero at 12:39 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
Red Hat has been public for ages, so the early millionaires happened back in '99 with their IPO. IBM is paying a big premium, but small shareholders will only see a modest bump in their value depending when they bought.
Business Insider conveniently has an article Here's who will get richer when IBM buys Red Hat for $34 billion and wow shocking, it's senior RH executives and Vanguard.
posted by GuyZero at 12:39 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
>> I wonder if systemd still has the Google DNS servers hardcoded.
> WTF, it really does.
Wow, thank you for that link. The amount of wilful obtuseness on display in that thread is something to behold ... just round and round the merry-go-round they go.
"No DNS specified should give an error instead of silently falling back to Google"
-> "You can easily change the default behavior if you like"
-> "If we don't throw an error, no one will know that they're unwittingly leaking information to Google"
-> "It's a user-friendly default and you can easily change it..."
As someone who first installed RedHat on a Windows 98 machine after re-partitioning the disk, I'm sad to see it go, but to be fair, I haven't directly used RedHat in ages myself. Our servers still run Fedora and various flavors thereof, though.
Oh, and thank you 1970s Antihero for what I'm pretty sure is an insightful, informative comment. Google's Fuchsia aka "Suck it, Torvalds. Tannenbaum was right." made me laugh.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:35 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
> WTF, it really does.
Wow, thank you for that link. The amount of wilful obtuseness on display in that thread is something to behold ... just round and round the merry-go-round they go.
"No DNS specified should give an error instead of silently falling back to Google"
-> "You can easily change the default behavior if you like"
-> "If we don't throw an error, no one will know that they're unwittingly leaking information to Google"
-> "It's a user-friendly default and you can easily change it..."
As someone who first installed RedHat on a Windows 98 machine after re-partitioning the disk, I'm sad to see it go, but to be fair, I haven't directly used RedHat in ages myself. Our servers still run Fedora and various flavors thereof, though.
Oh, and thank you 1970s Antihero for what I'm pretty sure is an insightful, informative comment. Google's Fuchsia aka "Suck it, Torvalds. Tannenbaum was right." made me laugh.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:35 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I'd bet that certain IBM divisions are equally at risk as their counterpart Red Hat teams.
Based on some language around the acquisition, this is what I'd put my money on; it's the teams inside IBM who are likely to be at risk, while—at least for a while—Red Hat will get to play the part of the prodigal child. After all, IBM paid a 60% premium over Friday's closing price for Red Hat: management's going to be searching for what the secret sauce is.
Eventually, what will happen is probably what always happens: management will convince themselves that there is no secret sauce, that the acquired company wasn't magical after all, and that they know all there is to know and have learned all their is to learn. And then they'll destroy it, reducing it to a hollowed-out brand, and eventually nothing at all.
For the moment, though, Red Hatters with vested options or shares just did pretty well. I know a lot of people who did pretty well during the Lotus acquisition. The question is judging when it's time to jump ship. In my experience being acquired by larger companies, you've got 18-24 months or until they physically close or move your office (that is an immediate red line).
IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Cloud Services with Watson
IBM OnDemand Red Hat zEnterprise Linux for IoT Private Cloud Services with Watson powered by IBM Blockchain Platform. And anyone calling it "RHEL" will be sent to the same dungeon where people who utter the word "AS/400" go.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:04 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Based on some language around the acquisition, this is what I'd put my money on; it's the teams inside IBM who are likely to be at risk, while—at least for a while—Red Hat will get to play the part of the prodigal child. After all, IBM paid a 60% premium over Friday's closing price for Red Hat: management's going to be searching for what the secret sauce is.
Eventually, what will happen is probably what always happens: management will convince themselves that there is no secret sauce, that the acquired company wasn't magical after all, and that they know all there is to know and have learned all their is to learn. And then they'll destroy it, reducing it to a hollowed-out brand, and eventually nothing at all.
For the moment, though, Red Hatters with vested options or shares just did pretty well. I know a lot of people who did pretty well during the Lotus acquisition. The question is judging when it's time to jump ship. In my experience being acquired by larger companies, you've got 18-24 months or until they physically close or move your office (that is an immediate red line).
IBM Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Cloud Services with Watson
IBM OnDemand Red Hat zEnterprise Linux for IoT Private Cloud Services with Watson powered by IBM Blockchain Platform. And anyone calling it "RHEL" will be sent to the same dungeon where people who utter the word "AS/400" go.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:04 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
IBM is a shadow of its former self. All the leadership care about is EPS. Morale is no existent, the few remaining staff are exhausted from years of "resource actions" and cost cutting and many of the lost talented people left quite a while ago.
This is all about cloud cause IBM was initially caught utterly flat footed. Subsequent attempts to catch up were laughed at by customers because IBM prices were preposterous compared to amazon and Google.
IBMs great hope, Watson, has been an utter washout, the hype around AI never delivered and its biggest partner pulled out. They are desperate for a real and solid revenue stream, so this pairs nicely with both existing products and a market they really need to get into.
Of course, if you talk to customers, let's just say brand perception of IBM is not great. I'll be interested to see how this shakes out.
posted by smoke at 2:06 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
This is all about cloud cause IBM was initially caught utterly flat footed. Subsequent attempts to catch up were laughed at by customers because IBM prices were preposterous compared to amazon and Google.
IBMs great hope, Watson, has been an utter washout, the hype around AI never delivered and its biggest partner pulled out. They are desperate for a real and solid revenue stream, so this pairs nicely with both existing products and a market they really need to get into.
Of course, if you talk to customers, let's just say brand perception of IBM is not great. I'll be interested to see how this shakes out.
posted by smoke at 2:06 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
"The amount of wilful obtuseness on display in that thread is something to behold"
Where you see willful obtuseness, I just see developers with different priorities.
It's OK to optimize your distribution for privacy protection. It's OK to want a distribution that just works out of the box no matter what. Different people and use cases will weigh the pros and cons differently in this case.
We could all (myself included) be a little better at learning to just drop things and agree to disagree sometimes.
posted by bfields at 2:10 PM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]
Where you see willful obtuseness, I just see developers with different priorities.
It's OK to optimize your distribution for privacy protection. It's OK to want a distribution that just works out of the box no matter what. Different people and use cases will weigh the pros and cons differently in this case.
We could all (myself included) be a little better at learning to just drop things and agree to disagree sometimes.
posted by bfields at 2:10 PM on October 29, 2018 [7 favorites]
It's OK to optimize your distribution for privacy protection. It's OK to want a distribution that just works out of the box no matter what. Different people and use cases will weigh the pros and cons differently in this case.
Indeed, indeed. Poettering tends to weigh both privacy and working systems as cons. Different priorities.
posted by clawsoon at 2:52 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
Indeed, indeed. Poettering tends to weigh both privacy and working systems as cons. Different priorities.
posted by clawsoon at 2:52 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
That's not a particularly useful way to respond, I would suggest.
posted by howfar at 2:53 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by howfar at 2:53 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
> It's OK to optimize your distribution for privacy protection. It's OK to want a distribution that just works out of the box no matter what. [...] We could all be a little better at learning to just drop things and agree to disagree sometimes.
I agree completely - and I'm sorry if my comment came across as casting aspersions on developers for having different priorities. As someone who migrated to OS X, I of course appreciate that sometimes, prioritizing "it just works" is the better choice.
What I found baffling is that the developers in that thread just refuse to face up to the choice they're making. They could come right out and say that "working out of the box is a higher priority than the leakage of private information from the default configuration, go roll your own distro if you care so much, the end." But they wouldn't acknowledge that point of view - they persisted in missing the point.
I don't know, maybe that's just an uncharitable read. Apologies for the derail from the primary topic.
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:03 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
I agree completely - and I'm sorry if my comment came across as casting aspersions on developers for having different priorities. As someone who migrated to OS X, I of course appreciate that sometimes, prioritizing "it just works" is the better choice.
What I found baffling is that the developers in that thread just refuse to face up to the choice they're making. They could come right out and say that "working out of the box is a higher priority than the leakage of private information from the default configuration, go roll your own distro if you care so much, the end." But they wouldn't acknowledge that point of view - they persisted in missing the point.
I don't know, maybe that's just an uncharitable read. Apologies for the derail from the primary topic.
posted by RedOrGreen at 3:03 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
In IBM's defense, I once pulled out a memory card of a live AS/400
OS/400 is basically every hacker on the cinema screen interface, all green monitor text menus and flashing hilit options. None of it made any sense without deep dives into the redbooks, but it looks good on the movie screen...
My current job is working for an AS/400 shop where we run Laravel on top of RPG/CL with DB2 in between and honestly it's pretty crazy to be one minute coding in a modern PHP framework and the next writing some code in a language originally designed for punch cards.
posted by kmz at 3:16 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
OS/400 is basically every hacker on the cinema screen interface, all green monitor text menus and flashing hilit options. None of it made any sense without deep dives into the redbooks, but it looks good on the movie screen...
My current job is working for an AS/400 shop where we run Laravel on top of RPG/CL with DB2 in between and honestly it's pretty crazy to be one minute coding in a modern PHP framework and the next writing some code in a language originally designed for punch cards.
posted by kmz at 3:16 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
Morale is no existent, the few remaining staff are exhausted from years of "resource actions" and cost cutting and many of the lost talented people left quite a while ago.
That's the cool thing about acquisitions - you get a fresh injection of skilled people with good morale and new ideas. Of course in a few years, everyone with golden handcuffs will ride off into the sunset, and those with an ounce of ambition or talent will leave. The remaining few will be RA'ed or divested when IBM acquires a new, actually competitive company that beats the old one which had its blood drained out.
posted by meowzilla at 4:06 PM on October 29, 2018
That's the cool thing about acquisitions - you get a fresh injection of skilled people with good morale and new ideas. Of course in a few years, everyone with golden handcuffs will ride off into the sunset, and those with an ounce of ambition or talent will leave. The remaining few will be RA'ed or divested when IBM acquires a new, actually competitive company that beats the old one which had its blood drained out.
posted by meowzilla at 4:06 PM on October 29, 2018
In my own experience, at least. I've now worked for two small companies that got acquired by larger ones, and both times the integration changes were eventually inevitable despite reassuring words to the contrary. Large businesses just can't tolerate/subsidize differing company culture
The larger companies always say "things will go on like before!", and sometimes they even mean it. I've heard that speech a few times myself. In fact, the only time I didn't hear during an acquisition was when Beats Music got picked up by Apple. It was made very clear us engineers were losing our jobs at the old place, and that we were all getting shiny new jobs at Apple. We would not be coming in as an existing engineering organization.
My father (who's heard the speech like a dozen times in his career) also didn't hear it just once, and that was because IBM (coincidently) had driven his current company's entire industry out of business overnight (IBM clone vector graphics displays), and the acquiring company said on day one they picked up my dad's company to get the field service people. Everyone else was getting laid off.
posted by sideshow at 4:24 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
The larger companies always say "things will go on like before!", and sometimes they even mean it. I've heard that speech a few times myself. In fact, the only time I didn't hear during an acquisition was when Beats Music got picked up by Apple. It was made very clear us engineers were losing our jobs at the old place, and that we were all getting shiny new jobs at Apple. We would not be coming in as an existing engineering organization.
My father (who's heard the speech like a dozen times in his career) also didn't hear it just once, and that was because IBM (coincidently) had driven his current company's entire industry out of business overnight (IBM clone vector graphics displays), and the acquiring company said on day one they picked up my dad's company to get the field service people. Everyone else was getting laid off.
posted by sideshow at 4:24 PM on October 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
AS/400 shop where we run Laravel on top of RPG/CL with DB2 in between
I do not have a sufficient number of fingers for all the warding-off gestures I'm making.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:42 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
I do not have a sufficient number of fingers for all the warding-off gestures I'm making.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 4:42 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
That's interesting, 41swans! I am 42 and was interviewing for an admin job reporting to a C-level executive. Honestly, I am exceedingly qualified and my main feeling at not getting into the second round was puzzlement. but 42 is pretty ancient, I guess.
51 year old now curled into a fetal position, crying...
posted by mikelieman at 4:44 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
51 year old now curled into a fetal position, crying...
posted by mikelieman at 4:44 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
howfar: That's not a particularly useful way to respond, I would suggest.
Not useful, perhaps, but true. Some developers prize new features over security, privacy, and bug fixing. They are wonderful for coming up with new ideas and getting them into the world. Poettering strikes me as one of those.
Before something ends up in a long term stable release, though, it should be given a thorough going-over by a different sort of programmer, one who is a stick-in-the-mud about bugs and security.
posted by clawsoon at 5:06 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
Not useful, perhaps, but true. Some developers prize new features over security, privacy, and bug fixing. They are wonderful for coming up with new ideas and getting them into the world. Poettering strikes me as one of those.
Before something ends up in a long term stable release, though, it should be given a thorough going-over by a different sort of programmer, one who is a stick-in-the-mud about bugs and security.
posted by clawsoon at 5:06 PM on October 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I know the Purple Hat logo thing was a joke, but Red Hat has had a shitty time with their visual brand these past couple of years. It's not their fault that red caps became a symbol of American fascism. I can't imagine they'll actually change the logo, but it sure would solve some problems for them.
Well, at least they can keep the shape since fortunately fedoras don't have any negative connotations.
posted by straight at 5:22 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
Well, at least they can keep the shape since fortunately fedoras don't have any negative connotations.
posted by straight at 5:22 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
Slackware forever, n00bz.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 5:50 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 5:50 PM on October 29, 2018 [5 favorites]
"Was that Dob I saw leaving" he said, "intelligent kid, Dob is."
"Yes, he tells me he's studying IBMs."
IBM, unknown to either of the speakers, represents not only International Business Machines, but Yebem, the seventieth angel quinary of the zodiac. This angel is usually depicted plucking a quill from the wing of it's neighbor, 69 or Raah (who hangs head downward like a bat) with which to make, this legend has it, the first pen.
Like wax, the other's face took a smile. "The real money isn't in IBMs, it's in ICBMs. I study ICBMs."
Masterson and the Clerks, John Sladek
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:21 PM on October 29, 2018
"Yes, he tells me he's studying IBMs."
IBM, unknown to either of the speakers, represents not only International Business Machines, but Yebem, the seventieth angel quinary of the zodiac. This angel is usually depicted plucking a quill from the wing of it's neighbor, 69 or Raah (who hangs head downward like a bat) with which to make, this legend has it, the first pen.
Like wax, the other's face took a smile. "The real money isn't in IBMs, it's in ICBMs. I study ICBMs."
Masterson and the Clerks, John Sladek
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:21 PM on October 29, 2018
Google's Fuchsia (aka: "Suck it, Torvalds. Tannenbaum was right.") is probably going to happen
What we clearly need right now is an OS called Fetch.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 PM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
What we clearly need right now is an OS called Fetch.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 PM on October 29, 2018 [4 favorites]
Now, don't be Mean.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:13 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:13 PM on October 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
In IBM's defense, I once pulled out a memory card of a live AS/400, and the damn thing halted, screamed, and then I turned it off, put the card back, hit the BRS, and it continued w/o dropping a transaction. They used to make some damned robust hardware...
Yeah, for all their weirdness (much of which was actually the good kind), IBM's mid-range systems have always been far more reliable than PC based systems. Also better suited for high IO loads. Unfortunately, they have also always been more expensive than a cluster of PC servers and, for the longest time, had really annoying licensing.
One of my clients got a pretty nice i5 box with a pair of dual core POWER4 CPUs for less than twice the price of a PC server with half the compute. Without spending half again as much on an unlock key, however, the system firmware would limit the rate of instruction issuance to basically a single core's performance on certain workloads they thought were only useful to people trying to run legacy AS/400 or System/36/38 software.
Worked great for running Linux VMs, though, since only jobs started from a 5250 terminal were limited.
The whole nobody ever got fired for buying IBM thing wasn't the joke we take it as today. They really did (and still do, to a lesser degree) design very reliable hardware and software. The licensing has, at least in my lifetime, been somewhere between annoying and abusive, however.
posted by wierdo at 6:35 AM on October 30, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yeah, for all their weirdness (much of which was actually the good kind), IBM's mid-range systems have always been far more reliable than PC based systems. Also better suited for high IO loads. Unfortunately, they have also always been more expensive than a cluster of PC servers and, for the longest time, had really annoying licensing.
One of my clients got a pretty nice i5 box with a pair of dual core POWER4 CPUs for less than twice the price of a PC server with half the compute. Without spending half again as much on an unlock key, however, the system firmware would limit the rate of instruction issuance to basically a single core's performance on certain workloads they thought were only useful to people trying to run legacy AS/400 or System/36/38 software.
Worked great for running Linux VMs, though, since only jobs started from a 5250 terminal were limited.
The whole nobody ever got fired for buying IBM thing wasn't the joke we take it as today. They really did (and still do, to a lesser degree) design very reliable hardware and software. The licensing has, at least in my lifetime, been somewhere between annoying and abusive, however.
posted by wierdo at 6:35 AM on October 30, 2018 [3 favorites]
OS/400 is basically every hacker on the cinema screen interface, all green monitor text menus and flashing hilit options. None of it made any sense without deep dives into the redbooks, but it looks good on the movie screen...
That is what people who have never spent a couple of hours familiarizing themselves with OS/400 say about it, yes. I find it far more consistent than the alternatives. I will concede that pre-ILE RPG is unnecessarily obtuse, but ILE/RPG/4 was released in the 90s, so complaining about something that was fixed over two decades ago seems petty to me.
posted by wierdo at 6:51 AM on October 30, 2018
That is what people who have never spent a couple of hours familiarizing themselves with OS/400 say about it, yes. I find it far more consistent than the alternatives. I will concede that pre-ILE RPG is unnecessarily obtuse, but ILE/RPG/4 was released in the 90s, so complaining about something that was fixed over two decades ago seems petty to me.
posted by wierdo at 6:51 AM on October 30, 2018
Hmm, RPGIV may have been the one just before ILE. Further thought makes me doubt my memory. Apparently human brains throw away knowledge they haven't needed in 10+ years. Nonetheless, I'll probably be muttering HFELICO under my breath over and over in the nursing home.
Also, I should mention that IBM's policy of bundling the vast majority of the dev tools with the base OS/400 license (I believe they were separate line items on the invoice since they had part numbers, but they were zero cost by the late 90s when I first became involved with them) was very nice and mostly ahead of their peers. As was the ability to order PTF CDs directly from the terminal, regardless of your support contract status. It beat the hell out of arguing with TAC for a couple of hours to get them to send you working firmware for your brand new router if you hadn't paid extra for support.
And maybe I'm a freak or perhaps it's just that the only Notes/Domino setup I ever used was actually done correctly, but I actually liked Notes. That particular org's competitors were still using shelves full of binders while they tried (and failed, repeatedly) to get something similar going with other platforms or entirely custom software. Took them all most of a decade to finally catch up.
posted by wierdo at 7:16 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
Also, I should mention that IBM's policy of bundling the vast majority of the dev tools with the base OS/400 license (I believe they were separate line items on the invoice since they had part numbers, but they were zero cost by the late 90s when I first became involved with them) was very nice and mostly ahead of their peers. As was the ability to order PTF CDs directly from the terminal, regardless of your support contract status. It beat the hell out of arguing with TAC for a couple of hours to get them to send you working firmware for your brand new router if you hadn't paid extra for support.
And maybe I'm a freak or perhaps it's just that the only Notes/Domino setup I ever used was actually done correctly, but I actually liked Notes. That particular org's competitors were still using shelves full of binders while they tried (and failed, repeatedly) to get something similar going with other platforms or entirely custom software. Took them all most of a decade to finally catch up.
posted by wierdo at 7:16 AM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
So one of the strange things about IBM's pricing structure is that a lot of what their customers thought of as "license fees" — and this includes executives of companies cutting seven-figure checks to IBM a couple times a year — were actually support. Not licensing. That's a key distinction.
I have been told, and I don't know if this is true or not, so perhaps someone with better historical perspective can correct me, that IBM did at one point charge whoppingly high license fees that included support. But then as a result of some lawsuit or other (maybe Bull, before they went under? or one of the other 36-bit big iron companies? I'm not sure), they had to start breaking out the s/w license fees from the support fees. This was, in theory, to allow companies to go and buy support from others while still paying licensing to IBM for the use of the software itself.
IBM sales was always very cagey about this, and would do all sorts of scaremongering to keep companies from debundling support and licensing. But especially on the older gear, the licensing often was the smaller part, and the support fees were huge, and increased every year. For companies with good in-house IT operations, and where they hadn't called IBM in decades because whatever issues they had were invariably in the custom APL or JCL or whatever their business logic was written in, it didn't really make sense. I helped hand-hold a couple of mid-sized businesses through giving up their IBM support and going license-only, over much wailing and veiled threats, and for all I know they're still happily running their old midrange systems, and probably will continue until the people who understand them retire.
Red Hat always seemed to want the same sort of revenue feeding-trough that IBM had, for support, but Linux is a bit harder to sell that way because more people understand it. I've still seen them land some whales of deals, though.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:03 PM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
I have been told, and I don't know if this is true or not, so perhaps someone with better historical perspective can correct me, that IBM did at one point charge whoppingly high license fees that included support. But then as a result of some lawsuit or other (maybe Bull, before they went under? or one of the other 36-bit big iron companies? I'm not sure), they had to start breaking out the s/w license fees from the support fees. This was, in theory, to allow companies to go and buy support from others while still paying licensing to IBM for the use of the software itself.
IBM sales was always very cagey about this, and would do all sorts of scaremongering to keep companies from debundling support and licensing. But especially on the older gear, the licensing often was the smaller part, and the support fees were huge, and increased every year. For companies with good in-house IT operations, and where they hadn't called IBM in decades because whatever issues they had were invariably in the custom APL or JCL or whatever their business logic was written in, it didn't really make sense. I helped hand-hold a couple of mid-sized businesses through giving up their IBM support and going license-only, over much wailing and veiled threats, and for all I know they're still happily running their old midrange systems, and probably will continue until the people who understand them retire.
Red Hat always seemed to want the same sort of revenue feeding-trough that IBM had, for support, but Linux is a bit harder to sell that way because more people understand it. I've still seen them land some whales of deals, though.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:03 PM on October 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by MikeKD at 12:51 AM on October 31, 2018 [4 favorites]
Whenever I contemplate systemd I can't help being reminded of Henry Fondle.
posted by flabdablet at 1:27 AM on October 31, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 1:27 AM on October 31, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'm sorry, but Poettering is an idiot and should be kept away from the command line.
Wow. Just wow. "For some people it's advisable to never miss a chance to stay silent."
posted by mikelieman at 5:01 AM on October 31, 2018 [1 favorite]
Wow. Just wow. "For some people it's advisable to never miss a chance to stay silent."
posted by mikelieman at 5:01 AM on October 31, 2018 [1 favorite]
> Poettering regularly create software which is beyond his abilities
> Poettering is an idiot
So much toxicity.
posted by Poldo at 6:17 AM on October 31, 2018 [2 favorites]
> Poettering is an idiot
So much toxicity.
posted by Poldo at 6:17 AM on October 31, 2018 [2 favorites]
Poettering is an idiot and should be kept away from the command line.
Good grief. For those of us that work on open source, most of our work is done in publicly archived mailing lists. If you can't find one mistake at least that stupid in any of our work, you probably haven't looked hard enough.
If we can't agree on the merits of systemd, we can at least agree to treat each other with basic respect.
posted by bfields at 9:33 AM on October 31, 2018 [6 favorites]
Good grief. For those of us that work on open source, most of our work is done in publicly archived mailing lists. If you can't find one mistake at least that stupid in any of our work, you probably haven't looked hard enough.
If we can't agree on the merits of systemd, we can at least agree to treat each other with basic respect.
posted by bfields at 9:33 AM on October 31, 2018 [6 favorites]
Poldo: So much toxicity.
Unfortunately, that link - plus history - is fuel for the anti-CoC crowd. They claim that reducing the toxicity will allow bad software to get through because people are too busy being nice to each other to say when something needs a re-write. I don't agree with that opinion - one can be firm about quality without being an asshole - but Poettering's ability to get bug-ridden software into major distributions combined with his commitment to a well-moderated community is a coincidence that makes nice programmers look bad.
We all make mistakes as programmers, and my own feeble contributions are as bug-ridden as most. But... but when a piece of code is going to be a fundamental part of the experience of millions of users, it needs an extra level of quality control, and Poettering hasn't been willing to provide or champion that in the projects he leads. He has innovative ideas, and the ability to turn them into working code. He just needs a QC superego for his id.
posted by clawsoon at 12:31 PM on October 31, 2018 [3 favorites]
Unfortunately, that link - plus history - is fuel for the anti-CoC crowd. They claim that reducing the toxicity will allow bad software to get through because people are too busy being nice to each other to say when something needs a re-write. I don't agree with that opinion - one can be firm about quality without being an asshole - but Poettering's ability to get bug-ridden software into major distributions combined with his commitment to a well-moderated community is a coincidence that makes nice programmers look bad.
We all make mistakes as programmers, and my own feeble contributions are as bug-ridden as most. But... but when a piece of code is going to be a fundamental part of the experience of millions of users, it needs an extra level of quality control, and Poettering hasn't been willing to provide or champion that in the projects he leads. He has innovative ideas, and the ability to turn them into working code. He just needs a QC superego for his id.
posted by clawsoon at 12:31 PM on October 31, 2018 [3 favorites]
That's a hell of a stretch there. However you cut it, assholes like (the hopefully reformed?) Linus are still the problem, not Poettering.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:46 PM on October 31, 2018
posted by tobascodagama at 12:46 PM on October 31, 2018
tobascodagama: That's a hell of a stretch there.
It is a little stretchy, true.
However you cut it, assholes like (the hopefully reformed?) Linus are still the problem, not Poettering.
There are many ways to be a problem, and both those individuals bring their unique gifts to the table. :-)
posted by clawsoon at 3:08 PM on October 31, 2018 [1 favorite]
It is a little stretchy, true.
However you cut it, assholes like (the hopefully reformed?) Linus are still the problem, not Poettering.
There are many ways to be a problem, and both those individuals bring their unique gifts to the table. :-)
posted by clawsoon at 3:08 PM on October 31, 2018 [1 favorite]
No, I'm sorry, a basically decent human being who writes software that some people dislike is absolutely not on the same level as people who go around calling others idiots and insisting that they should be retroactively aborted because their code doesn't mean some subjective standard of quality. Get some fucking perspective.
posted by tobascodagama at 3:12 PM on October 31, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 3:12 PM on October 31, 2018 [5 favorites]
tobascodagama: No, I'm sorry, a basically decent human being
But are you "basically decent" if you actively ignore, diminish and and dismiss real problems that you're causing your users, so long as you use nice words to do it?
There must be a word for that, though I can't think of it offhand.
posted by clawsoon at 4:51 PM on October 31, 2018 [4 favorites]
But are you "basically decent" if you actively ignore, diminish and and dismiss real problems that you're causing your users, so long as you use nice words to do it?
There must be a word for that, though I can't think of it offhand.
posted by clawsoon at 4:51 PM on October 31, 2018 [4 favorites]
Marketroid?
posted by flabdablet at 7:47 PM on October 31, 2018
posted by flabdablet at 7:47 PM on October 31, 2018
Insufficiently responsive to user requests on the one hand.
Insufficiently responsive to user requests and also a raging asshole on the other.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:03 AM on November 1, 2018
Insufficiently responsive to user requests and also a raging asshole on the other.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:03 AM on November 1, 2018
It's more than insufficiently responsive, though, and it's more than just "user requests". It's active reality distortion about serious bugs; not precisely gaslighting, but something along those lines. Something where an outsider would look at it and say, "This man is being perfectly polite and pleasant; I don't see what the problem is", while people who can see what's happening say, "Yep, he's fucking with this person who's reporting a problem."
My father had some of that skill, which he sometimes used on my mother. He would never, ever get angry, and when my mother would get angry at being fucked with, he would claim the moral high ground because he was never impolite or angry. He was still fucking with her, though. It took me years and years to see what was happening.
Insufficiently responsive to user requests and also a raging asshole on the other.
They are complementary problems; you can have one or the other, both, or neither. Torvalds engages in much less reality distortion around serious bugs, but he is a raging asshole.
posted by clawsoon at 7:28 AM on November 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
My father had some of that skill, which he sometimes used on my mother. He would never, ever get angry, and when my mother would get angry at being fucked with, he would claim the moral high ground because he was never impolite or angry. He was still fucking with her, though. It took me years and years to see what was happening.
Insufficiently responsive to user requests and also a raging asshole on the other.
They are complementary problems; you can have one or the other, both, or neither. Torvalds engages in much less reality distortion around serious bugs, but he is a raging asshole.
posted by clawsoon at 7:28 AM on November 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
To belatedly bring this back around to the IBM acquisition: It'll be interesting to see how Poettering, a Red Hat employee, fares under IBM. Poettering's ability to identify points of leverage that'll help him push his projects (e.g. getting Gnome 3 to require systemd, thus forcing distributions to use systemd if they want Gnome 3) reminds me of Robert Moses as described in The Power Broker. If IBM is as political as my impression of it, I imagine that Poettering will either do extremely well there or will get backstabbed and pushed out early by someone who sees him as a threat and has more insider power. VP or bust.
posted by clawsoon at 7:56 AM on November 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 7:56 AM on November 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
people who can see what's happening say, "Yep, he's fucking with this person who's reporting a problem."
Sorry, I haven't seen that.
posted by bfields at 8:18 AM on November 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Sorry, I haven't seen that.
posted by bfields at 8:18 AM on November 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
people who can see what's happening say, "Yep, he's fucking with this person who's reporting a problem."
Sorry, I haven't seen that.
Here he is dismissing a security bug: "0day" as username, closed as not bug (Narrator: It is a bug that grants root access.)
Here he is belittling people wanting to track vulnerabilities as part of the "security bureaucracy", again (it's now a "circus"), and again.
It really makes me confident that the head person on such a fundamental part of the operation system has such a high opinion of security processes and best practices ("systemd-networkd contains a DHCPv6 client which is written from scratch").
Other fun bits:
Here's Ted Ts'o's take (granted in 2014). (quoted since it's a G+ post, emphasis added):
Oh, here's one MeFites will like, in which he mansplains what UNIX is:
posted by MikeKD at 4:23 PM on November 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
Sorry, I haven't seen that.
Here he is dismissing a security bug: "0day" as username, closed as not bug (Narrator: It is a bug that grants root access.)
Here he is belittling people wanting to track vulnerabilities as part of the "security bureaucracy", again (it's now a "circus"), and again.
It really makes me confident that the head person on such a fundamental part of the operation system has such a high opinion of security processes and best practices ("systemd-networkd contains a DHCPv6 client which is written from scratch").
Other fun bits:
Here's Ted Ts'o's take (granted in 2014). (quoted since it's a G+ post, emphasis added):
It's not entirely fair to charge all of this to Systemd's account, but I think one of the reasons why this happens is because +Kay Sievers and +Lennart Poettering often have the same response style to criticisms as the +GNOME developers --- go away, you're clueless, we know better than you, and besides, we have commit privs and you don't, so go away.
Oh, here's one MeFites will like, in which he mansplains what UNIX is:
The Unix misconception is a pretty interesting one, because most people who say Systemd is un-Unixish have no idea what Unix is actually like.The usual complaint is that isn't not following the UNIX philosophy--not whatever his strawman idea of Unix is.
What’s typical for Unix, for example, is that all the tools, the C library, the kernel, are all maintained in the same repository, right? And they’re released in sync, have the same coding style, the same build infrastructure, the same release cycles – everything’s the same. So you get the entire central part of the operating system like that. If people claim that, because we stick a lot of things into the Systemd repository, then it’s un-Unixish, then it’s absolutely the opposite. It’s more Unix-ish than Linux ever was!
posted by MikeKD at 4:23 PM on November 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
Pottering: I understand your currency is CVEs
Can anyone explain why he's talking in terms of transactional exchanges?
posted by mikelieman at 4:52 PM on November 1, 2018
Can anyone explain why he's talking in terms of transactional exchanges?
posted by mikelieman at 4:52 PM on November 1, 2018
I mean, there's the Cape Verdean escudo (CVE) which IS currency, but is there some backstory to why he's got this strange viewpoint?
posted by mikelieman at 4:54 PM on November 1, 2018
posted by mikelieman at 4:54 PM on November 1, 2018
"Narrator: It is a bug that grants root access"
If you have the ability to write unit files, you already have root access. This doesn't seem likely to be useful to an attacker absent some additional mistakes elsewhere. Am I missing something?
The "security bureaucracy" is a strange issue to choose if you want to draw a contrast with Linus; to quote: "Some security people have scoffed at me when I say that security problems are primarily "just bugs". Those security people are f*cking morons." In that case Linus is mostly talking about security hardening, but the same arguments over bug handling come up a lot too. It's a perennial conflict, because developers just want to fix bugs and are probably always going to be irritated at people who care about CVEs, embargoes, etc.
"Oh, here's one MeFites will like, in which he mansplains what UNIX is"
I'm not sure why that's "mansplaining" exactly. Or what he's saying that's even wrong--but anyway I'm not seeing what here is some sort of gaslighting, as opposed to just disagreeing.
posted by bfields at 6:16 PM on November 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
If you have the ability to write unit files, you already have root access. This doesn't seem likely to be useful to an attacker absent some additional mistakes elsewhere. Am I missing something?
The "security bureaucracy" is a strange issue to choose if you want to draw a contrast with Linus; to quote: "Some security people have scoffed at me when I say that security problems are primarily "just bugs". Those security people are f*cking morons." In that case Linus is mostly talking about security hardening, but the same arguments over bug handling come up a lot too. It's a perennial conflict, because developers just want to fix bugs and are probably always going to be irritated at people who care about CVEs, embargoes, etc.
"Oh, here's one MeFites will like, in which he mansplains what UNIX is"
I'm not sure why that's "mansplaining" exactly. Or what he's saying that's even wrong--but anyway I'm not seeing what here is some sort of gaslighting, as opposed to just disagreeing.
posted by bfields at 6:16 PM on November 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
If you have the ability to write unit files, you already have root access. This doesn't seem likely to be useful to an attacker absent some additional mistakes elsewhere. Am I missing something?
You're missing the fact that systemd makes it far too easy for an admin to set up a system in an unsafe fashion, with a service running as root when it's not supposed to, without meaning to.
Lennart is all "well it validates everything" but if a service unit file contains something that doesn't validate, the Right Thing would be to log that and not start the service instead of merely applying defaults and carrying on - especially when one of those defaults involves running stuff as root.
He's so completely sure he knows how usernames are supposed to go - even though the possibility of pathological cases is something he really should be aware of - that he dismisses the bug report out of hand. Which is a pretty good indication that somewhere inside the guts of systemd, there is code that parses user IDs and doesn't use the same rules that apply outside systemd.
It may well be that the design of systemd is good enough that in practice a Linux with systemd has fewer security holes than one without, but I'm still not ready to presume that, and Lennart's attitude doesn't help. The main reason I personally still don't trust systemd is the intense reek of Not Invented Here emitted by every part I've ever subjected to close scrutiny. Lennart is a bright guy, but nobody is bright enough to keep all of the ways that creative people have found to attack operating systems in their head at once.
posted by flabdablet at 1:31 AM on November 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
You're missing the fact that systemd makes it far too easy for an admin to set up a system in an unsafe fashion, with a service running as root when it's not supposed to, without meaning to.
Lennart is all "well it validates everything" but if a service unit file contains something that doesn't validate, the Right Thing would be to log that and not start the service instead of merely applying defaults and carrying on - especially when one of those defaults involves running stuff as root.
He's so completely sure he knows how usernames are supposed to go - even though the possibility of pathological cases is something he really should be aware of - that he dismisses the bug report out of hand. Which is a pretty good indication that somewhere inside the guts of systemd, there is code that parses user IDs and doesn't use the same rules that apply outside systemd.
It may well be that the design of systemd is good enough that in practice a Linux with systemd has fewer security holes than one without, but I'm still not ready to presume that, and Lennart's attitude doesn't help. The main reason I personally still don't trust systemd is the intense reek of Not Invented Here emitted by every part I've ever subjected to close scrutiny. Lennart is a bright guy, but nobody is bright enough to keep all of the ways that creative people have found to attack operating systems in their head at once.
posted by flabdablet at 1:31 AM on November 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
-IBM's Old Playbook
-Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source
posted by kliuless at 6:06 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
-Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source
posted by kliuless at 6:06 AM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
I feel like such a bad nerd because I have no strong opinion on systemd.
posted by octothorpe at 7:52 AM on November 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by octothorpe at 7:52 AM on November 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat: The Economics of Open Source
This chart is a little funny because it has companies of different ages mixed together and filtered by selection bias. Red Hat was 18 years old when it got acquired. SUN only made it 28 years. DEC 41. SGI 28. None of which were open-source.The thesis that you gotta charge money for your core product to get the big returns doesn't totally hold up because empirically you can charge a shitload for your products and not be viable enough to stay in business. Maybe the business model isn't really the issue.
posted by GuyZero at 10:56 AM on November 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
This chart is a little funny because it has companies of different ages mixed together and filtered by selection bias. Red Hat was 18 years old when it got acquired. SUN only made it 28 years. DEC 41. SGI 28. None of which were open-source.The thesis that you gotta charge money for your core product to get the big returns doesn't totally hold up because empirically you can charge a shitload for your products and not be viable enough to stay in business. Maybe the business model isn't really the issue.
posted by GuyZero at 10:56 AM on November 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
Man, at least when we blame all of Windows’s faults on Bill Gates he’s a gazillionaire.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:46 PM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:46 PM on November 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Or on Steve Ballmer but he owns the Clippers which is punishment enough.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:48 PM on November 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Huffy Puffy at 3:48 PM on November 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
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