Java Forum / General / April 2006
What are your views on Redhat purchasing JBoss?
Danno - 11 Apr 2006 00:11 GMT What are your views on the purchase? Does it affect you? Is this a good sign for java programmers in general to have a Linux company buy a java open-source company?
P.S. I decided not to post this on the advocacy group, because I wanted to ask straight to the developers themselves.
Oliver Wong - 12 Apr 2006 17:31 GMT > What are your views on the purchase? Does it affect you? Is this a > good sign for java programmers in general to have a Linux company buy a > java open-source company? FWIW (since you didn't get any other replies) I don't really care about it one way or the other.
- Oliver
Roedy Green - 12 Apr 2006 19:03 GMT >What are your views on the purchase? Does it affect you? Is this a >good sign for java programmers in general to have a Linux company buy a >java open-source company? I don't like companies buying other companies. Most of the time the products of the bought company deteriorate and die.
 Signature Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.
Kent Paul Dolan - 14 Apr 2006 04:45 GMT >> What are your views on the purchase? I'm a bit saddened. If JBOSS was started as a "software vision" thingie, that vision is probably dead. If it was started as a "let's get rich" thingie, the principles probably did, but now the JBOSS "ship" is rudderless.
>> Does it affect you? Only in the sense that I wouldn't anticipate JBOSS remaining a product maintained and enhanced by a highly motivated group of technologists, and so would be reluctant to invest my intellectual resources into its use.
>> Is this a good sign for java programmers in >> general to have a Linux company buy a java >> open-source company? In general, it might be, if Red Hat were "any old Linux company" but Red Hat is in IBM's pocket, and IBM's incompetence at small-company takeovers is legendary. [I was at one such company, Whistle Communications, where IBM's hamfisted imposition of a deathly burdensome corporate culture on a small dot com venture capitalized firm paralyzed all progress with no perceivable end in sight, which in turn drove all the engineering talent away in mere months. I was one of the last three software engineers to leave, because "talent" was a bit of a stretch in my case, while a few of the other engineers who departed pretty much instantly were world-class talents, working as FreeBSD committers and kernel designers/implementers in their spare time. In that crowd, I ran missions for sodas, mostly.]
> I don't like companies buying other companies. Pretty much, you get that if you take the "Capitalism" option in choosing your form of economic system/government.
> Most of the time the products of the bought > company deteriorate and die. True enough, but the other side of the story is that being taken over is the _originators'_ dream. Any stock options they might have given employees become void, because the company never does an IPO, the cash for the takeover is handed right to the principles, the rest of the staff gets beans for their efforts, and quickly, in most cases, depart.
To me, those constitute unethical business practices in and of themselves, since the staff takes low pay, typically, in return for hard work to make those stock options valuable. When that hard work makes the company valuable for takeover instead, some other compensation should be given to those employees, they shouldn't become victims of a bait and switch scheme.
That the company may then quickly fold, or have all remaining staff diverted to other efforts, because the incoming management is clueless to make keep working what the outgoing management first made work is of no consequence to the now-departed principles, who typically take their money and run off to reinvest that money in a new venture.
It's a bit sad for the original company's customers, on the other hand. I've received occasional solicitations, for over a decade, for help supporting a product, the Interjet I, which IBM/Whistle failed to support for their customers much past my departure, as the company's focus changed away from the Internet appliance field and toward web site hosting. This reference to me happens just because Google gets hits on some of my web pages that mention that "Internet appliance" by name, not because I have some hot reputation as a FreeBSD troubleshooter.
FWIW
xanthian.
Darryl L. Pierce - 15 Apr 2006 20:45 GMT > In general, it might be, if Red Hat were "any old > Linux company" but Red Hat is in IBM's pocket, and > IBM's incompetence at small-company takeovers is > legendary. Gotta put this one down: RH is not in IBM's pocket. If anything, RH buying JBoss is going to strain any relationship between IBM and RH given that JBoss is a direct competitor to Websphere. Also, RH is not a small company. Not at all.
 Signature Darryl L. Pierce <mcpierce@gmail.com> http://mcpierce.multiply.com/ "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
Kent Paul Dolan - 16 Apr 2006 21:26 GMT >> In general, it might be, if Red Hat were "any old >> Linux company" but Red Hat is in IBM's pocket, and >> IBM's incompetence at small-company takeovers is >> legendary.
> Gotta put this one down: RH is not in IBM's pocket. If anything, RH buying > JBoss is going to strain any relationship between IBM and RH given that > JBoss is a direct competitor to Websphere. Also, RH is not a small company. > Not at all. A company whose largest investor is IBM, buying up a company which competes with a heavily touted IBM product, sure wouldn't make your average cospiracy theorist very happy about the future of JBOSS.
xanthian.
Darryl L. Pierce - 17 Apr 2006 02:03 GMT >> Gotta put this one down: RH is not in IBM's pocket. If anything, RH >> buying JBoss is going to strain any relationship between IBM and RH given >> that JBoss is a direct competitor to Websphere. Also, RH is not a small >> company. Not at all. > > A company whose largest investor is IBM, Based on what, exactly, do you make this claim?
> buying up a company > which competes with a heavily touted IBM product, sure wouldn't > make your average cospiracy theorist very happy about the future > of JBOSS. Well, paranoia is its own reward, reality notwithstanding.
 Signature Darryl L. Pierce <mcpierce@gmail.com> http://mcpierce.multiply.com/ "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
Kent Paul Dolan - 17 Apr 2006 07:21 GMT > Based on what, exactly, do you make this claim? Fuzzy memory plus common sense. There's no sense searching through their securities and exchange filings, though somewhere in there is a list of all holdings 1% or greater.
One could grow old and die grubbing through that much PDF formatted boredom-inducing legalese:
http://investors.redhat.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=67156&p=irol-sec
FWIW
xanthian.
Darryl L. Pierce - 17 Apr 2006 11:54 GMT >> Based on what, exactly, do you make this claim? > > Fuzzy memory plus common sense. There's no sense > searching through their securities and exchange filings, > though somewhere in there is a list of all holdings 1% or > greater. IOW, you don't know and aren't willing to verify your claim? "Fuzzy memory and common sense" are worthless for a claim like yours. But, that's okay, it's about what I expected. FYI, I work with Red Hat and there's no IBM ownership or controlling going on there. One of the big discussions when we had our all-hands meeting to make the announcement was "How is this going to affect our relationship with IBM?" So, the conspiracy nuts are going to generate a conspiracy fantasy here because that's what nuts do, not because there is any fact to support them.
JBoss is going to roll into our supported stack since it is open-source, something WebSphere is not.
 Signature Darryl L. Pierce <mcpierce@gmail.com> http://mcpierce.multiply.com/ "What do you care what people think, Mr. Feynman?"
Kent Paul Dolan - 19 Apr 2006 09:40 GMT >>> Based on what, exactly, do you make this claim?
>> Fuzzy memory plus common sense. There's no sense >> searching through their securities and exchange filings, >> though somewhere in there is a list of all holdings 1% or >> greater.
> IOW, you don't know and aren't willing to verify your claim? No, i pointed you at the appropriate data and invited you to look for yourself. Since you impugn my information, I went to the trouble to go looking, just to prove you to be a liar, an easy task.
IBM invested $1,000,000,000 in Red Hat in 1999. Last I can find, Red hat is valued at $5,000,000,000, making that a 20% share (today, it was certainly more than that in 1999, and IBM's investment probably has grown in value with Red Hat, making it more than 20% today).
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/121405-novell-red-hat-ibm.html
The largest stock fund investor in Red Hat, FMR Corporation, owns less than 17% (as of 2004, the latest information I can find, in Red Hat's proxy filing of 2004/08/05), so, as far as i can tell, IBM is indeed Red Hat's largest investor.
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/NSD/RHAT/reports/Proxy2004.pdf
> "Fuzzy memory > and common sense" are worthless for a claim like yours. They seem to have beaten your choice of outright lying, though.
It really, really helps to check who you're picking for an opponent before setting off on a course of disinformation, as you did here.
> But, that's okay, > it's about what I expected. FYI, I work with Red Hat and there's no IBM > ownership or controlling going on there. I can't speak to the "controlling", but "no IBM ownership" is a blatant lie.
> One of the big discussions when we > had our all-hands meeting to make the announcement was "How is this going > to affect our relationship with IBM?" Oh, so maybe IBM _does_ have a stake here? You can't keep your story straight for one whole paragraph.
" So, the conspiracy nuts are going to
> generate a conspiracy fantasy here because that's what nuts do, not because > there is any fact to support them.
> JBoss is going to roll into our supported stack since it is open-source, > something WebSphere is not. And, from the large amount of commentary I had to wade through to locate the above information, is expected to sink without a trace, into Red Hat's "crippleware open source" model, to be replaced in the open source market place by JBOSS competitors.
=====
While I have a Red Hatter on the hook, what's the deal with the Red Hat feature deficit? I was a user of Red Hat's 64bit professional version 4 for a few months between 2005/11 and 2006/02, and compared to my home Debian distribution, Red Hat lacked immense amounts of user friendly desktop features. The versions of software from other sources distributed with Red Hat, like The GIMP, are many whole minor revision levels behind current freely downloadable versions, which means they go lacking lots of functionality.
Red Hat seems to have trapped itself in a non-open-source mode, where, limited to the productivity of its own employees, its (certified) products packaged with the commercial distribution fall farther and farther behind the state of the art.
IMWTK
xanthian.
Roedy Green - 20 Apr 2006 15:12 GMT >I went >to the trouble to go looking, just to prove you to be a liar, an >easy task. To prove someone a liar you need to do five things:
1. Quote the precise lie. You are accusing of a type of crime and an alleged criminal has the right to know precisely what he is being accused of.
2. Show the thing that said is factually false, not just that in your opinion it is false or in the opinion of some expert it is false. You have to show that there is consensus it is false.
3. You have show that there is no other plausible interpretation of the meaning of the words that would be true. (If there is, you have to reduce your charge at most to dissembling.)
4. You have to show the alleged liar knew the thing said was false at the time he said it.
5. You have to provide some plausible motive why the person would lie. If someone simply misspeaks, that is not a lie.
Simply demonstrating the temerity to disagree with the Bible or Kent Dolan is not sufficient.
 Signature Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.
Oliver Wong - 20 Apr 2006 17:25 GMT > To prove someone a liar you need to do five things: > [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > the meaning of the words that would be true. (If there is, you have to > reduce your charge at most to dissembling.) So far, I agree.
> 4. You have to show the alleged liar knew the thing said was false at > the time he said it. In my experience, there is a disagreement about the definition of the term "lie". Some people feel that for something to be a lie, the speaker must have intentionally said something which they knew to be false. Others feel that it is merely sufficient for the thing said to be false, (i.e. it's possible for someone to "lie" unintentionally). In the latter case, it's "okay" to lie, as long as you didn't do it on purpose, in the same way that if you stepped on my foot in an elevator, I won't be angry if you did so unintentionally.
I accept that English is an imprecise language, and try to keep both definitions in mind when someone uses the term "lie". You seem to prefer the definition in which lies are always intentional. That's fine. Just keep in mind that some people might use the other definition, and when they accuse you of lying, they aren't associating any malice or other negative connotation with the term.
> 5. You have to provide some plausible motive why the person would lie. > If someone simply misspeaks, that is not a lie. I'm not sure it's reasonable to be required to provide a motive to "prove" that someone lied (in either definitions of the term "lie"). Sometimes you know someone is lying, but you have no idea why. Sometimes people just act irrationally.
- Oliver
Roedy Green - 20 Apr 2006 22:05 GMT >Others >feel that it is merely sufficient for the thing said to be false, Hmm. I was unaware anyone considered that usage legitimate, though I have certainly heard people use the "lie" where it seems to me they meant "untrue" or "I disagree". I thought they were just being silly claiming people deliberately erred, similar to the accusations of being a Communist, a child molester, a liberal, a shill etc. when rational debate fails.
My Oxford defines lie as primarily as "an intentional false statement" and secondarily as"imposture, thing that deceives"
Both of these imply intent to deceive. Do you have a dictionary entry that shows your definition or are you reporting how you have seen the word used in practice (improperly) in Internet debates?
 Signature Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. http://mindprod.com Java custom programming, consulting and coaching.
Oliver Wong - 25 Apr 2006 17:39 GMT >>Others >>feel that it is merely sufficient for the thing said to be false, [quoted text clipped - 12 lines] > that shows your definition or are you reporting how you have seen the > word used in practice (improperly) in Internet debates? Both.
From http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=lie
<quote> (n) lie, prevarication (a statement that deviates from or perverts the truth) [...] (v) lie (tell an untruth; pretend with intent to deceive) </quote>
The first definition quoted here says nothing about intent; that is, a statement is defined to be a lie depending on whether it is true or not, as opposed to whether the speaker intended for that statement to be true or not.
The second definition could arguably be split into two parts, showing that lie has two meanings. One is to make a statement which is not true, and the other is to intentionally deceive.
If you used the above definitions as the Final Authority on English, you might pedantically argue the case that when "lie" is used as a verb, it always implies intent to deceive (and thus argue that the semicolon does NOT split the definition into two meanings, but rather the second part supplements the first), whereas when used as a noun, it conveys no information about intent.
However, I've found it useful to simply accept the fact that when some people use the word "lie", sometimes they aren't saying anything about intent, but merely about the truth value of the statement being described. I find that there is a large enough number of these people that it's not worth trying to "correct" their usage, and just accept this new meaning as a natural evolution of the English language.
So when you get into a debate with someone, and they use the term "lie", you might want to get clarification on what they mean by that term, and then you can discuss whether another term might be more appropriate, or just agree to use the agreed upon definition for the purpose of that particular debate, and perhaps later on in another debate, with a different person, agree on a different definition.
- Oliver
Darryl L. Pierce - 26 Apr 2006 15:37 GMT Sorry to not reply sooner, I was off with my wife having a baby girl on the 17th.
No, I wasn't lying, nor was I impugning your reputation. I was merely calling on you to _support_ your claim. It's called being _skeptical_ and using _critical thinking_, something I would suggest everybody do. You take that as a personal challenge, then that's your problem, not mine.
IBM has no control over operations or direction here. They made an investment 7 years ago, but in what? Buying RH common stock, or in something else like, say, entitlements? IBM has a _relationship_, but that's completely different from _ownership_?
Rather than the daft attempts at slamming me personally and grasping at something to claim I was inconsistent, you might to objectively examine the facts rather than jumping to conclusions based on some preconceived notions.
Darryl L. Pierce - 26 Apr 2006 15:41 GMT BTW, in your second link there are listed the majority stock holders of RH. Where's IBM in that list? If they own more than FMR, as you suggested, then why aren't they presented?
Arvind - 14 Apr 2006 00:24 GMT It is all part of the game :)
-- Arvind
robert - 14 Apr 2006 11:20 GMT > What are your views on the purchase? Does it affect you? Is this a > good sign for java programmers in general to have a Linux company buy a > java open-source company? > > P.S. I decided not to post this on the advocacy group, because I wanted > to ask straight to the developers themselves. The important point for me, so far overlooked, is that the Hibernate team is largely employed by JBoss. Hibernate is arguably the most important open source project in Java. Gavin King, despite being one of the most abrasive people anywhere in any context, is one of the members of the EJB3 comittee.
So in short, as Roedy accurately commented, these companies often buy others to simply kill or ignore them. Having JBoss wither and die would be bad for java - but perhaps Geronimo could recover or better yet Tomcat becomes even more popular. Losing Hibernate, however, would directly effect a significant percentage of Java development.
That all being said, I'm a Suse guy - after using redhat exclusively from '96 to '02. What Redhat became around my switch makes me wary about JBoss now, but in the short term at least projects will still be started using JBoss. Lets see if that's still true a year or two from now.
Robert http://www.braziloutsource.com/
robert - 14 Apr 2006 11:59 GMT > What are your views on the purchase? Does it affect you? Is this a > good sign for java programmers in general to have a Linux company buy a > java open-source company? > > P.S. I decided not to post this on the advocacy group, because I wanted > to ask straight to the developers themselves. The important point for me, so far overlooked, is that the Hibernate team is largely employed by JBoss. Hibernate is arguably the most important open source project in Java. Gavin King, despite being one of the most abrasive people anywhere in any context, is one of the members of the EJB3 comittee.
So in short, as Roedy accurately commented, these companies often buy others to simply kill or ignore them. Having JBoss wither and die would be bad for java - but perhaps Geronimo could recover or better yet Tomcat becomes even more popular. Losing Hibernate, however, would directly effect a significant percentage of Java development.
That all being said, I'm a Suse guy - after using redhat exclusively from '96 to '02. What Redhat became around my switch makes me wary about JBoss now, but in the short term at least projects will still be started using JBoss. Lets see if that's still true a year or two from now.
Robert http://www.braziloutsource.com/
Chris Uppal - 14 Apr 2006 12:04 GMT > What are your views on the purchase? Does it affect you? Is this a > good sign for java programmers in general to have a Linux company buy a > java open-source company? I have no idea, but it might be better than being bought by Oracle, which I believe was a rumoured possibility.
Now Oracle will have to buy Redhat ;-)
-- chris
Free MagazinesGet these publications absolutely FREE for up to 12 months. There are no hidden fees and no obligation. Simply choose a title, complete the application form and submit it. Read more ...
|
|
|