On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 19:32:37 +0000 Rick Stevens <ricks(a)alldigital.com> wrote:
On 10/29/18 11:52 AM, Walter H. wrote:
> On 28.10.2018 23:49, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>> I know this is strictly OT, but I suggest it's of some interest to this
>> list:
>>
>>
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-to-acquire-red-hat-in-deal-valued-at-...
>>
>>
>> poc
>>
> I guess this won't affect anything on the development of Fedora, RHEL,
> CentOS, Scientific Linux
> this might be a chance to have RHEL on IBM Main Frames ...
Do big IBM (or any) mainframes still exist?
Fedora is the "bleeding edge" development arm of RHEL. Eventually, once
enough changes have been made and stabilized in Fedora, it becomes the
next release of RHEL. We Fedora users are just the lab rats and a giant,
very vocal and fairly sophisticated bunch of beta testers. CentOS is
built off the RHEL source tree. It's rebranded, but it is essentially
RHEL (but free and without direct RedHat support to users).
Now, will any of this change? Likely, but due to the various copyright
and patent prohibitions (GPL, Apache license, etc.), IBM couldn't lock
down the guts of Linux. They might not put any of their "enhancements"
in the wild, but....
On the flip side, if IBM follows the example of, oh, say Tata in its
acquisition of Jaguar Cars, this might not be a horrible thing. Tata,
fortunately, took the view that "We at Tata know how to build trucks and
forklifts. Jaguar, you know how to design and build cars, so you do that
and share the profits with us." So far, that's worked out fairly
successfully for Jaguar and Tata. If IBM takes a hands-off approach
similar to what Tata did, this might not be that horrible.
Only time will tell. Am I scared? A bit, but I can wait. There are
alternatives out there. I'd hate to switch...I've been a RedHat/Fedora
user for a LONG time (since Red Hat 3, I think).
Btw,I think that it is still true that Tatas' largest shareholders (in both Tata Steel
and Tata Motors) and lots else are public sector banks which are owned by the government
of India which is constitutionally a Socialist Sovereign Secular Democratic Republic. More
importantly, the Tatas are known for their social bent and for taking care of their
employees, and have been since Jamsetji founded the steel plant in Jamshedpur. The first
non-Tata chair of the holding company Tata Sons was shown the door maybe two years ago
because, if i remember right, he did not quite care much for the niceties of acquiring
Corus, etc, and thought it was a waste of money.
Of course, it is not known what direction IBM will take Redhat and its contributions to
OSS but with Wall Street breathing down the neck for a quicker bang for the buck, who
knows. I don't know that things can be better than they have been, as far as Fedora
goes, so hopefully they will not be worse.
Ranjan