[BlueOnyx:22463] Re: IBM to Acquire Linux Distributor Red Hat for $33.4 Billion

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Ernie,

> A bit of newws that might effect BlueOnyx
> 
> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-28/ibm-is-said-to-near-deal-to-acquire-software-maker-red-hat
> 
> Lets hope IBM don't rock the boat

Yeah, it's too early to tell what impact (if any) that'll have on us.
I've been following the discussions on Reddit to see what others think
of it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9sbsm2/is_the_acquisition_of_redhat_by_ibm_a_concern_for/

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9s5vgi/ibm_to_acquire_redhat_for_34b/

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9s5pcr/its_official_ibm_is_acquiring_software_company/

It's a bit of a let down - to be sure. We all know IBM horror stories
and the obvious joke is that it could only have been worse if RedHat had
been bought by Oracle. ;-)

IBM is known for micro-licensing where it tries to really milk the cash
cows. Perhaps they might fancy binning CentOS in order to sell more RHEL
licenses? Who knows.

But pretty much anything that's part of RHEL is licensed under GPL, so
RedHat is obliged to make the sources available and that's what used to
roll up CentOS (and Scientific Linux and others). At this time that
means SRPMs, which makes it an easy undertaking. Ways to throw a wrench
into that would be shipping tarballs and/or diffs and releasing them a
bit too late for comfort, but fast enough to satisfy the GPL. It would
be a nuisance, but could be dealt with.

As far as CentOS 7 goes I imagine we won't see any changes in the near
future - if at all. We'll have to see what happens when RHEL8 ships and
what plans the CentOS team announces for CentOS 8.

I have no insight into when RHEL will release RHEL8, but I hear it's in
Alpha and might be out sometime early or middle of 2019.

Here are some of the rumors, but take them with a grain of salt:

https://www.certdepot.net/rhel8/

CentOS is/was neat due to the long life cycles. 10 years is an awful
long time for an OS. Debian's and Ubuntu's LTS is five years and both
their currently most recent LTS versions will be EOL 1-2 years before
CentOS 7 will be EOL.

For a moment let us consider the worst case scenario: IBM pulls the rug
from under CentOS. If (and it's a big if!) that happens we can expect a
bit of a stampede towards other alternatives and it might even lead to
one or more new alternatives that we don't have on our radar yet.

If push comes to shove I'm prepared to say "Awwwwww, shucks ..." and
we'll make the next BlueOnyx available on a different OS.

Basing BlueOnyx on a new major CentOS release has always been a ton of
work. Like a three month all out effort. Switching OS's entirely make
that a bit more complicated, so throw in another 2-3 months, yet I'm not
growing any (more!) gray hairs over it than I already have.

We'll be around and there will be a 5210R ready long before the OS under
5209R will hit EOL.

Most likely 5210R will be based on CentOS 8 - unless IBM has other
plans. ;-)

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber