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mikece

I wonder how many companies will either not upgrade to RHEL 8 or seek to leave RHEL because of the acquisition by IBM.

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I don't think "but IBM sucks" is a good enough reason to change an entire infrastructure away from RHEL/CentOS.

About as many that left Github when it was acquired by Microsoft.

Judging by the surge of new users on alternative platforms (gitlab), that's at least a couple of thousand.

https://thenextweb.com/dd/2018/06/04/devs-are-flooding-to-gi...

Edit: Your silly comparison deserved a silly response. Customer bases and services between the two are not similar.

But how many paying customers? It's slightly different also because Github may not want to lose non-paying customers either, because of name recognition and not wanting competitors being seen much, but I don't think the IBM acquisition will sway most people that are using CentOS, since it's already somewhat divorced from RHEL proper.

No, it's incredibly different to compare the number of customers who might leave Red Hat to the number of customers who left Github. The services are not even close to being similar, and the customers are generally not even close to being similar.

> it's incredibly different to compare the number of customers who might leave Red Hat to the number of customers who left Github.

I don't think it's that different. Github makes somewhere around 50% of it's revenue from enterprise customers.[1] That said, my point was that they aren't very similar, so we seem to be saying the same thing, you just seem to be doing so rather aggressively.

1: https://www.businessinsider.com/githubs-enterprise-service-b...

The question about who will leave is always silly because we don’t have privileged info about IBM’s plans for what happens after the acquisition. Things that keep people with RedHat could go away without much notice.

That’s why the uproar and threats to leave over the MS acquisition was dumb.

And it isn't as if the new home couldn't be bought as well.

I'm affiliated with a number of projects that moved from github after the MS acquisition, and I'm aware of a few others. So at least some of us decided to act and not threaten.

There is more optimism about the future of Microsoft than the future of IBM. Evidence: Microsoft's stock price has nearly tripled during the last 5 years, whereas IBM's has dropped almost 40% during the same period.

Most companies are more pragmatic than this. Change adds risk, and companies which select RHEL are relying on it's stability and enterprise support, and will likely continue to do so, until there is a real, material reason to reconsider, such as IBM changing the pricing or service agreement.

(Note as a comparison, individuals who distrust Microsoft moved their projects off GitHub when it was acquired, but most businesses, even those in direct competition with Microsoft, such as Google, did not.)

The real question is if IBM will cut off CentOS in the hope of driving customers to pay for RHEL.

So I work for Red Hat and the truth is no one will know until after the acquisition, but there are certainly no plans for that, nor have I heard anyone even discussing such a thing. CentOS is a valuable part of Red Hat and an important part of keeping users in the ecosystem even if they're not paying us, so it wouldn't really make any sense. IBM aren't stupid (despite nonsense that people write online), and Red Hat is a cash machine and they'd be stupid if they messed with a proven model which works.

Seems like supporting and incorporating RHEL support into IBM’s business is the reason they bought RHEL. They effectively grew their business contracts with the addition of all the RHEL contracts.

If anything, I would expect business as usual for their business customers. It was a really obvious market move in hindsight.

my guess is they bought redhat because it bought coreos. and ibm wanted that, too.

That’s a big premium over this what? 250 million?

It would do damage to the brand, and then you'd see developers fork Fedora and build their own RHEL-like "enterprise Linux".

IBM has never struck me as that clueless about open source, and I imagine Red Hat management would fight that as much as possible realizing how much of a long term strategic blunder it would be.

CentOS is being used by a lot of HPC shops, academia and research units like one where I administer a HPC.

For the number of cores that HPC shops run, the bill would become FAT real soon if we have to pay for OS. I'd imagine that if IBM messed with CentOS, it'd be called out for being incredibly dumb about RH business, and there would emerge an open fork of RHEL that is not owned by IBM like CentOS is.

To give you an idea, we run CentOS 7.5 on all compute nodes, but make use of paid for RHEL for our identity server, DB servers and the like. If IBM touches CentOS, the whole domino falls and we start looking for alternatives.

I haven't used scientific linux since version 6, but it was a very nice centos alternative at the time.

Still is.

Regardless of who owns Redhat, they still have to provide the source RPM's for most of the packages. The best they could do is change the build format enough and often enough to make it painful to repackage.

I don't envision them doing this however. That would force a lot of people away from Redhat based distros and guarantee barring conversion to RHEL entitlements.

From the people I know using huge amounts of centos in production, they're not going to pay for RHEL, if centos becomes non viable they'll be switching to debian-stable and debian-testing.

I don't think any serious Enterprise will leave until they're giving a reason that's more than the acquisition itself.

So if Red Hat continues doing good by their customers, things will continue business as usual.

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