[Beowulf] Oh.. IBM eats Red Hat

[Joe Landman]

On 10/29/18 6:54 AM, INKozin via Beowulf wrote:
> exactly my thoughts (even though i have not worked there, talking to 
> its employees was enough).
> it's attitude towards open source is not exactly promising.
> the recent github deal comes to mind but at least MS is declaring to 
> be more open towards open source.
> and at least there is an alternative in that case - gitlab.
> what would be an alternative to RH? certainly not a single one.

Well, Ubuntu/Canonical is a viable option if you want to be able to pay 
for support like you do with RH.  Possibly even SuSE.

FWIW, I've largely moved most of my systems to debian, as they seem to 
be the least likely to go away any time soon, and their license does not 
preclude shipping a system preloaded in a for-profit scenario.  CentOS 
does disallow this.

This said, distributions are less important these days.  You need good 
kvm and container systems for many workloads.  You don't necessarily 
need the distro distribution radius [1], which is a form of vendor lock 
in.  Basically you choose your kernel, userspace and support model to 
fit your hardware and production requirements.  Nothing in that equation 
is locked to a distro. With tools like warewulf[2] and nyble[3], 
distributions can be chosen for each job if you need, with different 
(versions of the same or different) distributions only a boot away.

As tools like Singularity[4] gain in adoption, I expect distros to focus 
on minimal cores to be a substrate for containers and VMs.

Thus the RH acquisition is a "meh" to me.


[1] 
https://scalability.org/2018/04/distribution-package-dependency-radii-or-why-distros-may-be-doomed/

[2] http://warewulf.lbl.gov/

[3] https://github.com/joelandman/nyble

[4] https://www.sylabs.io/


>
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 07:43, Tony Brian Albers <tba at kb.dk 
> <mailto:tba at kb.dk>> wrote:
>
>     https://www.reuters.com/article/us-red-hat-m-a-ibm/ibm-to-acquire-softw
>     are-company-red-hat-for-34-billion-idUSKCN1N20N3
>     <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-red-hat-m-a-ibm/ibm-to-acquire-software-company-red-hat-for-34-billion-idUSKCN1N20N3>
>
>     I wonder where that places us in the not too distant future..
>
>     I've worked for Big Blue, and I'm not sure the company cultures are
>     compatible to say the least.
>
>     /tony
>
>     -- 
>     -- 
>     Tony Albers
>     Systems Architect
>     Systems Director, National Cultural Heritage Cluster
>     Royal Danish Library, Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
>     Tel: +45 2566 2383 / +45 8946 2316
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-- 
Joe Landman
e: joe.landman at gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
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