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).
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