[Beowulf] Oh.. IBM eats Red Hat

[Nathan Moore]

I spent a summer porting code for BGL at IBM, and, coming from an academic
environment, I was really surprised by how nerdy and technical the IBM'ers
were.  One guy spent night after night trying to get Linux (and Windows)
running on his new Intel powerbook.  Another guy (or maybe the same guy?)
was super excited about the new GCC compiler coming out.  I had mainlined
the koolaid that xlc was obviously the best compiler for a power6(?) chip
but he earnestly wanted to see the optimizations that had been built into
GCC 4 - think of a Trekkie on the eve of a new movie release - that excited
for gcc4....

Along similar lines, IBM seemed to be unique in their emphasis on patents.
Their metric was (and probably still is) well above the per-capita average
in a tech company.

As a grad student then, the really novel feature of the culture was the
constant reminder that we had to pay the bills (grad students - at least in
my case - have a funny ignorance of where their tuition waivers come
from...).  One "old guy" in particular asked me every morning, "So Nathan,
how are we going to sell a Million Blue Genes?  How are we going to make it
so that everyone in the world wants one of these?"




On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 9:52 AM INKozin via Beowulf <beowulf at beowulf.org>
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.
>
> On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 07:43, Tony Brian Albers <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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-- 
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Nathan Moore
Mississippi River and 44th Parallel
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