That’s my kind of speculation. I LOVE Whitehurst as IBM’s CEO. That’d be a really smart move.
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Hmm… So in a really really screwed up “I’m my own grandpa” way, Lenovo now owns Fedora? Wellp… I’m torn about this. Given that SUSE uses a lot of packages from them, I should have a bigger concern… But given that I switched back to Mint a while ago after I started caring more about getting stuff done than about politics I could really care less.
And that’s a good feeling to have! But hopefully good news for Fedora. IBM has always been pretty awesome about stuff like this so let’s hope for the best.
Lenovo is not part of IBM. Lenovo bought IBMs PC business from them.
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Considering I run Fedora on everything, I agree.
I worry more about Microsoft’s embrace of Linux. IBM’s desire to compete against Azure influenced this move more than anything. Will powershell be included in RHEL8? Any bets?
Not IBM directly, but Raptor in the US makes their Talos II workstation/desktops with IBM’s POWER9 processors. Technically they’re Power, since that’s the successor to PowerPC, but it’s still all backward compatible, or so I hear.
The best part is, under the OpenPOWER moniker IBM has open-sourced all of the firmware that boots the chip, down to DRAM training and the on-chip thermal control core. You can literally compile the firmware (for Talos II at least) yourself! The NIC and optional SAS controller do need proprietary firmware (not drivers), but there is already work to reverse engineer the NIC firmware.
You can read more about this on the Power Architecture thread where I sometimes nerd out.
I dont really know what to think about it.
IBM has been off my radar for a very long time as I tend to follow x64 hardware. There is a lot of good and bad to read. From Redhat the goals.
They clearly want to sell IBM hardware and optimize it for linux. From phoronix they can compete with Intel and AMD. Hay more competition is good.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-talos-2&num=1
Like many have mentioned. I care most about what happens to Fedora on desktop and the desktop innovations they work on. I would hate to see Fedora more focused on the servers versions.
I find it mildly amusing/disturbing that so many people don’t realize that IBM is a large reason that Linux, Open Source Software the Open Source Initiative and I can keep going on and on with names are dominating today because IBM has spent countless man hours and billions of dollars pushing for them for over 20 years. Not to take away from all the people also contributing to all those efforts but a large part is due to IBM stating that they were going to use Linux in Enterprise and scientific solutions and then they actually did it.
IBM hardware is literally designed to work with Linux, if you read their manuals it goes on about linux, how to set it up, how to contribute to open source, how to choose what license to release something under and what protection, liability or lack there of each affords you in an unbiased way.
Seems like a logical choice to me since a really good amount of IBM product manuals have a “Installing RHEL” section in them.
Yup. 10-15+ years ago if i’m not mistaken 
edit:
i very much doubt this is being used as a lever for “IBM” hardware (e.g., RISC based servers).
IBM are becoming more of a service company; they will put redhat on third party (maybe re-badged as IBM so they can also include that in the full support contract) boxes is my bet, and offer support contracts and full-stack IBM certified solutions for people like government agencies, hospitals, other large enterprise contracts.
i.e., they aren’t in the market to sell copies of RHEL per se.
They’re in this in order to offer a top to bottom fully IBM supported platform including the OS and cloud application(s). The OS platform is one piece in that puzzle that IBM haven’t really had since AIX died (well, i believe it is essentially dead now?) and OS2 failed.
i.e., you want to run some application for your big business or government department. You have a single source of support through IBM for the re-badged hardware, the OS platform, the application development and the cloud hosted components.
IBM have been partnering with Apple on the application development side a lot lately too. They’ve been heavily involved in swift/cloud development with Apple; IBM and Apple are going to war with Microsoft for the enterprise via cloud and mobile device.
I suspect that they’re eventually going to win out. In terms of end user devices, Microsoft is nowhere without the PC, and the vast majority of business end users simply do not need one.
What they bought and what lives is basically RHEL + whatever cloud integrator products and services, and whatever heads they could aquahire. I’m not worried about the cloud stuff, good management wouldn’t mess with what’s good.
Everything else, that doesn’t have a sales pitch for large enterprise IBM customers will likely die and will have to be reborn somewhere somehow.
IBM’s net worth is in the $170 billion range. It remains a very large corporation. What’s changed is a few companies like Apple and Amazon have ballooned to huge net worth.
IBM sold its PC division years ago to Lenovo. IBM was first to market with Intel desktop PC’s running DOS. The Intel PC architecture in use today was shaped by the needs of Windows once that OS began to dominate. IBM stayed too long with its own PC architecture, pushing OS/2, and missed the cheap-as-possible commodity Windows PC boat.
The Red Hat acquisition is all about cloud and only incidentally about Linux. Scuttlebutt says IBM is strong on sales while Red Hat has been not-so-strong. I’d expect to see IBM push hard on Red Hat sales.
The reasons Red Hat sponsors Fedora remain, no matter who owns Red Hat.
That announcement would probably turn me in to an IBM fanboi. There are only a handful of CEOs that really manage to inspire me, and Jim Whitehurst is definitely one.
It will be interesting what happens internally, Bryan Lunduke mentioned that Watson is/was built on SUSE rather than RHEL; and then I saw an IBM employee on Twitter, saying:
So it sounds like there is quite a mix of distros internally; again, interesting to see what will happen.
Cannonical’s Statement on the merger
Rather snarky, boiling down to: “thank you for all you’ve done Red Hat, but you’re irrelevant and we’re already well on our way to stealing all your customers”
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I would buy it from Canonical if they had the developer community quality of Fedora…And i do not think they do. But that needs the extra mile on community catering that cannonical has not done yet imo.
Who the fuck wants to run ubuntu servers CentOS or RedHat would be my options
SEE a few more posts ahead before you respond (reading is hard mkay)(#obviousBaitisObvious)
We have a product that runs on Ubuntu. The difference in how it’s managed isn’t really significant. Some of us prefer apt over yum, too 
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Way not to take the bait /s Honestly If your gonna run linux you cant use the kmart brand of Ubuntu and be a sweet hipster. But yeah not really a lot of difference. You ever have to use support contracts on either wonder how they compare.
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Nah, when someone needs support on the Linux servers they call DevOps (my team lol).
I do what I can 
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My company was testing RHEL at some point as a replacement for windows 7.
I found out when I was at the office in a small meeting room and one of the PCs were running rhel, sadly you needed special access for it so I didn’t get to take it for a spin.
Anyways two years later some Microsoft official must have whispered some nice words in a EVPs ear cause we’ve moved to Office 365 and we’re in the process of upgrading to windows 10.
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