christ the IBM acquisition is turning out to be the WORST timeline.
- Redhat kneecaps centos because some mid manager was worried he might not get this years bonus
- Redhat kneecaps Ansible by making ansible-core and forcing everyone to re-install community plugins they were using from EPEL, or buy the shiny Redhat version of ansible.
- Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage product with the same exorbitant support fees and contract payments that were the original motivation for an open source storage solution in the first place.
All this is being done under the guise that "oh its not proprietary, its enterprise grade now!" like the very same devsecops engineers and SRE's who made this shit work in the first place arent wholly capable of running it in production without forking over most of their $round of investment to the same company that turned softlayer into a swirling vortex of DDoS gangs spam relays and double extortion rings.
to date it feels like all IBM wants to do with Redhat is turn it into IBM so if thtas all these juggernaut dinosaurs can do im quietly waiting to see Microsoft acquire Ubuntu and quietly turn it into a teams plugin the same way they acquired github and turned it into an outage response simulator for developers.
Regarding Ansible, I still default to installing with `pip3 install ansible`, which installs the "Ansible Community Distribution" (which is still called "Ansible" even though it seems "ansible-core" is also called "Ansible", but there's also "Ansible by Red Hat" which is the 'Ansible Automation Platform' which includes Tower and other related products...).
The ACD (or what I still call "Ansible") includes everything that was traditionally part of Ansible, and then some, just bundled up into one big install instead of requiring you to install ansible-core then pick and choose collections to install on top.
This covers about 99.9% of all use cases (for Ansible for automation work) still, and for anything else, you can add your own roles or install an additional community collection or two.
After much struggle, I reached the same conclusion. And it gets around the problem of downloading collections only to find that they don't support the version of python on the system you're trying to use it on. But since those collections get stored in python site-packages instead of anything in ANSIBLE_COLLECTIONS_PATH, it's still kind of confusing. And I still haven't checked what happens if a teammate accidentally installs the latest collection version locally in their home from Galaxy as well (a stupid default imho).
I understand why collections got split out due to development needs, but the switch over to them has been pretty crappy from a user perspective.
I was at IBM (research) at the turn of the century after the Lotus acquisition. IBM was all in on Notes and I was developing notes applications for a department. (I actually came to appreciate Notes, and understand that Notes was being sold for mail, when mail is just another notes database, which is why it isn't great...)
But it was clear later when I met from people from Lotus there was tension between the Lotus division which IBM had bought. The cultures didn't mesh well and they resented everything being IBMified. Though from the IBM side it seemed they really were all in on Notes. Really pushing it hard. Lotus's "smart suite" of desktop application not as much.
Another friends company got bought by IBM a couple years ago. It seems they didn't really want it as they let half the people go (core people, not just overhead).
Its kinda sad really. It seems its better after an acquisition to let the company keep doing what it was doing, with minimal changes (excepting removing the corporate overhead stuff).
Notes was always pretty horrible, slow and buggy. It was right handy to make little databases in it, which wormed their way into business critical processes and became dependencies long after their developer left the company. I think this is what kept Notes going, because there was no migration path for all this legacy stuff. We spent years moving away from notes, rebuilding each little 'handy Joe's database' that was caught somewhere in a critical business process manually in modern technologies. And this was after we already discarded the 90% that weren't important.
I'm pretty sure that if not for this we would have moved away in the early 2000s. Instead we waited until the situation became so untenable that we had no choice to invest the millions and years to make it happen. I remember Notes constantly crashing when someone would send me a 'funny' GIF on Sametime, and of course it would take all my draft emails with it because the autosave never seemed to do what it was supposed to.
The only thing I did like about it was collapsible sections in emails. And the fact that you could write really advanced 'agents' for it. I had one that would remove the "return read receipt" flag and insert a button in the email so I could send it whenever I did wish to send it instead.
Anyway, when IBM took over Lotus we were still full-on using it and I was really hoping they'd clean up the product and make it functional. Of course none of that happened and they just let it continue on its path to extinction. I have no idea why they would buy something way after its prime and then just let it wither away.
Oh yeah and the notes mail databases. When there was a new version we'd get tons of questions like "why does my mail still look like the old app but notes itself is new??". Well, click on the upgrade your database. Ooops now it got corrupted completely well good luck bye :D
Seriously why did the email UI look and behaviour have to be embedded inside each user's mail database??? This makes totally no sense and breaks pretty much every software design concept. As well as create tons of vulnerabilities for malware to embed itself. Data and code don't belong in the same place. Though luckily Notes got deprecated before that really became a thing.
We didn't have any of the stability problems though is was kind of "quirky" (I also used it at another big corp which was only mail, which is terrible). I see you are not a fan. I had to use it and by the end kind of liked it. I didn't have to migrate from notes to something else though. (I migrated a non Y2K database to Notes). I suspect "Mail" was the way to get an installed base of Notes applications across a business.
>The only thing I did like about it was collapsible sections in emails. And the fact that you could write really advanced 'agents' for it. I had one that would remove the "return read receipt" flag and insert a button in the email so I could send it whenever I did wish to send it instead.
Thats pretty good.
I see notes as a basically a NoSQL database attached to a primitive gui and a very bad scripting language (lotus script). You could make a little application and deploy it to a team pretty easily. IBM had a bunch of little Notes databases/applications that could be used by the dept to track project and other things. I haven't seen much that replaces its sort of simplicity and ease of use. I guess the web, but it seems it takes more to stand up a custom app these days.
I have no idea how you would export the unstructured data that lives in those databases..
I'm surprised you didn't have the stability problems. So so so many times have I been looking at a standard Windows "OK" popup box with so much java traceback in it that it literally filled the entire screen. Some periods this happened literally every 2 days or so. What helped stability extremely was installing the separate Sametime client and disabling the sametime functionality in Notes itself. However our admins frowned on that for some reason (never found out why). So I always had to get it from dubious sources.
> I see notes as a basically a NoSQL database attached to a primitive gui and a very bad scripting language (lotus script). You could make a little application and deploy it to a team pretty easily.
Too easily, yes. It was too handy. I wonder if this was intentional because these little databases had a way of becoming indispensable over time. Leading to Notes being set in stone as a business requirement.
> IBM had a bunch of little Notes databases/applications that could be used by the dept to track project and other things. I haven't seen much that replaces its sort of simplicity and ease of use. I guess the web, but it seems it takes more to stand up a custom app these days.
Yep.. MS Access roughly had the same and it was actually structured as a decent relational database, not some unstructured mess. But file based, a bit like sqlite with a forms and scripting tool built in. So it was also easy to migrate to SQL Server once an app became so big that it needed a real server. MS even had (has?) a wizard for this. It was really piss-easy to make a little tool in it and its scripting language was easier and known by more people (being VBA which most Excel experts know). It was even quite possible to make decently performing fairly complex apps in it. Not sure how it stands now as I haven't used it in years, but from what I've seen with some quick looks throughout the years, Access has not really changed at all since 2005 or so.
However, Access did not reach this ubiquity and the reason is that MS left it out of the cheapest office editions. Which meant most standard users never had it on their PC and they would have to request it and provide a business reason for the cost.
Notes on the other hand was always there and available, ready for people to tinker with to their heart's desire and create a whole shadow IT world :) Very smart move from Lotus, I have to say.
> I have no idea how you would export the unstructured data that lives in those databases..
Oh don't start... It was terrible. None of it was documented because said "handy Joe"s were usually not experienced developers and had almost always left the company years ago.
Also, most of these had been unmaintained for many years and thus not really fitting business requirements anymore. So lots of ugly workarounds were used, and the business side tried to use the project to inject new business requirements. Which in some cases made sense but in other ways would derail the project completely.
In the end most of them were converted to web using a low-code/zero-code platform.
I remember when Notes came out and they said "It's Groupware!" and I said "what does it do?", and they just said it does Groupware stuff and I said what does it do? Then more marketing that it was groupware and I said WTF does it do???
I have a feeling IBM doesn't even know what they want to be themselves, let alone their acquisitions.
What they do now is dabble in a bit of consultancy, a bit of datacenter ops, a bit of software and some servers here and there. And of course all the support on their legacy mainframe stuff. But when they have something that really stands out like the Thinkpad line they divest it.
It's almost as if they don't want to be noticed or something. I don't know.
I never thought their RedHat acquisition was a good thing for RedHat, though I never thought RedHat was a very good company to begin with. When Microsoft acquires Ubuntu (and I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet) they have more good stuff to mess up. Which I'm sure they will. And it seems like Canonical in anticipation of the acquisition has already started going the wrong way themselves.
I've been through an IBM acquisition a few years ago, peak Openstack time. They don't know what they're doing or what they want to achieve. They're trying to buy something that would keep em relevant but the end results are usually just sad. Early version of IBM cloud was unstable to a point I couldn't even use it for personal experiments. Last I heard it's still not very close to being reliable, while their middle management is always obsessing about Gartner magic quadrant or whatever that is. It's a dinosaur firmly on its way to extinction along with everything they buy along the way.
> Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage product
Is Ceph still a viable alternative in hardware and operational cost and reliability to HDFS to store hundreds of PBs of data, if not EBs? I kept hearing people recommend Ceph over HDFS, but was unable to find examples of large deployment of Ceph for HDFS-like workload.
I'm working with academics that have code/support from Red Hat, and rumours are that funding is not gonna get renewed. Red Hat has been a very valuable collaborator, very open to the academia side, and funded a lot of cool stuff around the ecosystem, looks like that's all going away now :(
> all IBM wants to do with Redhat is turn it into IBM
Reading the histories of both companies, it seems to me that Redhat was always IBM. The acquisition was a marriage of separated twins more than anything else, the dominating culture in both organizations is largely sales and consulting driven, with public strategy not quite identical but strongly rhyming. The technology aspects (while perhaps once important) were far from the prime focus of either organization long prior to the merger. I think of IBM's acquisition more as a desire to access marketing expertise and established sales channels than anything to do with technologies, most of RH's open source technology is after all mostly just an advanced form of disguised marketing
I don't think that's right; Red Hat, culturally, does much more community engagement and open source development. I know several RH developers from working on Ceph-adjacent things and RH has been much more open to contributions and collaborations in academia and industry, plus they funded a significant chunk of research around storage in quite a few labs around the area. IBM never had that kind of culture imo, I would take RH anyday.
From what I know Red Hat devs are also very open in other areas of OS research and development, from the new io_uring, eBPF, etc. IBM is trying to stamp it out, but it's still there.
Maybe GP is referring to IBM having an equity stake in Redhat since the late '90s? Or, maybe because they both generate the majority of their revenue via support contracts with the same sorts of customers buying said contracts?
We manage this POS for some clients, and it's the worst distribution you can have. Stuff you can "just install" under any other popular distro is often silosed off into special packages you need to buy, despise it being OSS and "just available" on EPEL.
This isn't really reality-based. There are/were a bunch of problems, but it's not these.
> - Redhat kneecaps centos because some mid manager was worried he might not get this years bonus
Red Hat paid (pays, probably) bonuses quarterly, and they were (are, probably) based on stock performance. They are not and never were based on cost saving measures.
The reality is that, probably, CentOS should have never become part of the "Red Hat family". The Chinese firewall concept didn't really work internally, the vast majority of RH engineers ran Fedora anyway, and it was basically just giving CentOS better build infrastructure plus giving customers a way to buy their way out of nonsense situations. The Red Hat support agreement always said "if you're not running RHEL, we'll close your case", which frequently meant customers who ran CentOS in dev/qa/preprod and RHEL in production who were forced to install another RHEL system (which RH made no money on anyway, since they never charged license costs, only subscription fees for updates) just to reproduce an issue so the sosreport didn't say "CentOS Linux ...".
In general, the same engineers who worked bugs (or were escalated to cases) on RHEL were often part of the community of upstream maintainers anyway, and RH's policy was "upstream first, and if it needs an emergency downstream bandaid, take it out once upstream accepts a patch and backport it properly", but it was easier for customers to get attention on problems if they could back it with dollars.
Rocky, Alma, and OEL (however you feel about that) exist anyway and basically picked up where they left off. Stream probably always should have been a thing. It was (probably is) an enormous amount of work to branch, re-sync, and generally re-sync again any given Fedora snapshot to a new RHEL release, and getting it into shape was (probably is) a nightmare, because the difference between the code which is currently running on any given RHEL release and what upstream is is huge. sysvinit -> upstart/sysv -> systemd, for example.
- Redhat kneecaps Ansible by making ansible-core and forcing everyone to re-install community plugins they were using from EPEL, or buy the shiny Redhat version of ansible.
The Ansible leadership was generally terrible about open source philosophy regardless. This is nothing new.
- Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage product with the same exorbitant support fees and contract payments that were the original motivation for an open source storage solution in the first place.
Open source Ceph still exists. I don't see the difference here. It's just moving it from one independent company to another independent company, at least nominally.
The systemic problem with IBM acquiring Red Hat was in a lack of good answers for many of the questions employees had (policies on open source, WFH, etc), the fact that the purchase was not communicated even to management until news articles broke, a six month cliff for "business critical" employees, and following that, the fact that IBM fundamentally believed that they could do what everyone always thought Red Hat was doing and drive the market, so they were constantly pouring money and engineers into projects that had no chance to succeed in the market rather than adopting and fostering upcoming solutions, and *that* drove engineers out of the company very rapidly.
They already stopped building packages for Ubuntu for Ceph...
>to date it feels like all IBM wants to do with Redhat is turn it into IBM so if thtas all these juggernaut dinosaurs can do im quietly waiting to see Microsoft acquire Ubuntu and quietly turn it into a teams plugin the same way they acquired github and turned it into an outage response simulator for developers.
RedHat was eating into their business so they bought it.
> For instance, it is possible to deploy Ceph Quincy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS via the UCA or on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS via the regular Ubuntu package archive. See Ceph and the UCA for details.
- Redhat kneecaps centos because some mid manager was worried he might not get this years bonus
- Redhat kneecaps Ansible by making ansible-core and forcing everyone to re-install community plugins they were using from EPEL, or buy the shiny Redhat version of ansible.
- Redhat decides to turn Ceph into yet another garbage storage product with the same exorbitant support fees and contract payments that were the original motivation for an open source storage solution in the first place.
All this is being done under the guise that "oh its not proprietary, its enterprise grade now!" like the very same devsecops engineers and SRE's who made this shit work in the first place arent wholly capable of running it in production without forking over most of their $round of investment to the same company that turned softlayer into a swirling vortex of DDoS gangs spam relays and double extortion rings.
to date it feels like all IBM wants to do with Redhat is turn it into IBM so if thtas all these juggernaut dinosaurs can do im quietly waiting to see Microsoft acquire Ubuntu and quietly turn it into a teams plugin the same way they acquired github and turned it into an outage response simulator for developers.