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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Makes me curious what the internal politics is like. IBM does seem to have mostly let RedHat continue working as it did before, not meddling on a broad scale.

Now we have some RedHat employees getting the news they are being transferred to an IBM area. I wonder how that's viewed from the RedHat side.

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> Now we have some RedHat employees getting the news they are being transferred to an IBM area. I wonder how that's viewed from the RedHat side.

Shocking absolutely no one. Every acquisition comes with the promise of "X will let Y operate exactly like it always has been, and we'll never steer their direction" and it has never been true.

In this case, I had asked some RH folks about it when the acquisition happened. There was a lot of bravado that IBM would leave it be. This is small in relative terms, but appears to be the first crack. Thus, I'm curious if it's a hot topic there.

This is for sure the biggest crack in the divide. Red Hatters have had multiple occasions for pause, however, beginning with IBM obtaining the list of Red Hat customers and trying to upsell OpenShift/IBM Software customers to Cloud Paks (IBM's embedded software solutions on OpenShift).

Why would that give anyone pause? They're IBM customers now and it makes sense to sell as much as you can I would think.

Was it a crack when ACM came over from IBM to Red Hat? Or Hypershift came over from IBM to Red Hat?

You align software to where it works best. IBM is better suited to develop and sell Software Defined Storage than Red Hat.

Well the presumption is that the culture at RedHat is preferable to the one at IBM. So, no, those two moves didn't cause me to wonder about whether those teams had concern about the move.

IBMs culture is varied.. It’s a huge company. I work at Red Hat, it’s culture is varied.

I saw some people furious because of personal prejudices against IBM but many seem to be looking at this opportunistically.

Former Red Hatter here. It has also gone the other way, where Red Hat obtained IBM teams that were better suited to live on our side and those products were more successful via integration with other Red Hat products.

We miss you already Rob!

At Red Hat very talented people leave money on the table to align their work with their passion and idealism. The main risk with “you work for IBM now” is that this bubble is burst and that the smartest people decide to just go somewhere and get paid.

It was broadcast pretty widely inside Red Hat, post acquisition, that some products are going to be deduplicated.

It wasn't clear which products those would be and when, though.

Whats next? Websphere and JBoss?

It would likely frighten me to know how much JBoss and Websphere is still used.

It seems 15 years ago I was asking ?why aren't we running this in vanilla Tomcat?

I know, I know, it's like "Beetlejuice", you say "Integration Integration Integration" and five salesmen appear to sell you something that provides a bad UI in front of configuration files you'll eventually hand-edit anyway.

> It would likely frighten me to know how much JBoss and Websphere is still used.

Most of the big banks

And Insurances

Plenty of it in big companies but you won't see a new release. The existing 8.5.5 and 9 will be supported through 2030 but customers are being encouraged to migrate their existing WAS apps to Liberty on OpenShift. There are several migration tools that help analyze the code and runtime for the best way to dissect legacy Java.

This is not the first time that people have been moved from IBM to Red Hat or vice versa, for what it's worth.

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