bmicklea · HackerTrans

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

From my experience the only real proof that will convince people comes from the actions that are taken from now forward. I'd ask that if you believe these actions are harmful to developers or open source communities let me know @bradmicklea on Twitter.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I can't really speak to business or HR questions. My role is focused on our relationship with developers. What I can say...We are a distinct entity in IBM and the only person reporting to an IBMer is Jim (our CEO) who now reports to Ginny (IBM CEO). We retain control over our associates. That said, the actions taken in the coming months and years will provide the real proof.

Speaking to integration. In terms of the Red Hat developer tools portfolio (which is ~15 tools and plugins), and a mix of Red Hat supported products and upstream open source projects - there is no change to our roadmap.

We are committed to continuing to invest deeply in open source as we have from Red Hat's inception.

We are going to continue to publish and support IDE plugins for VS Code [1], JetBrains [2] and Eclipse [3] - even if they compete with IBM plugins.

We will also continue to offer CodeReady Workspaces for the OpenShift Kubernetes platform [4]. I expect this will be of increasing interest to IBM customers as they adopt OpenShift more aggressively. The open source upstream project for this offering (Eclipse Che [5]) is also an area that has seen increasing IBM participation over the past year.

In open source communities there continues to be collaboration around the Eclipse Foundation's Cloud Development portfolio [6]. Be on the lookout for some announcements here in the coming months.

Similarly there's interest from IBM in continuing to create open source language servers that adhere to the Language Server Protocol [7] that the Red Hat tools could consume.

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/publishers/redhat [2] https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/12030-openshift-connect... [3] https://marketplace.eclipse.org/user/jtools/listings [4] https://developers.redhat.com/products/codeready-workspaces/... [5] https://github.com/eclipse/che [6] https://www.eclipse.org/ecd/ [7] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/impleme...

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Proof will come in the actions that follow. If you see changes in how Red Hat behaves in the community feel free to let me know - @bradmicklea on Twitter.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I really hope so too. To me this is a huge signal that open source has won. That alone is exciting.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

At the risk of opening up another debate I'd say that GitHub currently looks to be doing better (more releases, more enterprise sales) after Microsoft's purchase than before. I also see them as a model of how to keep a distinct culture alive and grow it inside a larger entity. If GitHub can do it I think Red Hat can too. But only time will tell. Everything at this stage is some form of speculation.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

There are no guarantees in life and I'm in technology because I like change...but when the announcement came across my email in October I was nervous for some of the same reasons.

The assurances I have come from several angles. The public statements from both Jim (our CEO), Ginny (IBM CEO) and Arvind (SVP Cloud Products @IBM). You can see those here: CEO: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/jim-whitehurst-email-red-hatt... Arvind: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/qa-ibms-landmark-acquisition-...

But I always put more trust in my own interactions and I've had an opportunity now to work with quite a few of my new colleagues in IBM on both the engineering and business side. What I have seen from them is humility and curiosity about our business - there has been no arrogance. This has been true of their words and their actions so far. To me this is important because I think it's as a result of arrogance on the part of the acquirer that many deals go bad post-close.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I respectfully disagree - I'm a Red Hatter so you can take that for what it's worth. To me the 34B buys IBM the real estate in the open hybrid cloud market which Red Hat has built up in the last 5 years. That is part of a large and rapidly growing market. If IBM interferes with Red Hat they will likely squander the value of what we've built. If they foster what Red Hat did to win that critical ground then their 34B could stand to increase substantially.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Red Hat's business model and open culture isn't changing. We will remain independent and I look at this as an opportunity for more people to engage with our stellar support and field teams.

For some context you can read the email our CEO sent out to the whole company today: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/jim-whitehurst-email-red-hatt...

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Open source creates market share, that's the foundation on which money can be made. Red Hat's business model wasn't charging for the open software, it was charging for the expertise we have in supporting that open software. The more market share the open source software has, the greater the monetary opportunity for us and the more we can put back into the communities. Red Hat has offices in ~40 countries and IBM is in ~175. That's a lot more touch points for us.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I’m Brad Micklea and I lead Red Hat’s Developer Business Unit, which covers developer evangelism, our developer program at developers.redhat.com, and our developer tools. All these facets of our business, as with Red Hat more generally, will remain independent from IBM. This means that…

- You’ll still bump into our fantastic Red Hat developer relations team at events, meetups and keynotes.

- The Red Hat developer program—including the site, blog, and our social media channels—will remain independent and continue to focus on great open source software and culture.

- If you’re a member of the developer program, you’ll continue to enjoy free access to Red Hat software downloads, eBooks, events and great content.

I’m sure there is some nervousness in the developer community with this announcement. I welcome your questions and will be monitoring this thread and replying to as many as I can over the coming day or so.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

Red Hat's commitments to the open source projects it works on from linux, to kubernetes, to java, and many others will remain unchanged.

bmicklea

vor 7 Jahrendiscuss

I run Red Hat's Developer program, our developer tools portfolio and our developer relations team. When I first heard the news I had a similar reaction. But I've worked with IBM'ers in open source projects for years and they've always been great contributors. Perhaps more importantly both IBM and Red Hat are very committed to not changing our open culture and open source development model. That's been the source of our growth and why IBM felt we were worth 34B. Ultimately words are cheap, so if you see Red Hat's actions in the open source community changing please say something - I for one am committed to continuing to work the open source way.

You can read my blog post and comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20391504

bmicklea

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

I'm the project lead for Che and can confirm that Red Hat will be contributing changes that will allow Che to run on OpenShift, but it will also roll in most of the enterprise features that were previously only available in the proprietary licensed Codenvy product. https://www.eclipse.org/che/

bmicklea

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

The docker-based install is a little tricky because we need access to the docker socket and have to create a mount point so that workspaces can be stored locally (so they're not lost with upgrades). It's likely that when you last tried it we had not completed the local storage option.

If you have a chance try this: https://www.eclipse.org/che/docs/setup/getting-started/index... - we've added interactive help but we've also tried to clarify the syntax needed. I'd love to hear what you think. Of course if you hit issues please let us know on the eclipse/che GitHub repo.

bmicklea

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

Eclipse Che is an open source developer workspace server and cloud IDE (https://www.eclipse.org/che/). It's got strong Java support as well as support for many other languages.

You can run it wherever Docker runs (and soon wherever you have OpenShift) and you can use it for free with 3GB RAM at codenvy.io.

Disclosure: I'm the Che project lead.

bmicklea

vor 9 Jahrendiscuss

OpenShift.io is pre-beta but we have begun onboarding in order to get early feedback. So far ~400 people and in and we are slowly adding more as we stabilize and build out the product and underlying SaaS infrastructure.

We will be communicating our progress more openly and consistently with those on the waitlist. We really do appreciate your patience and are working hard to get people onboard.

Disclosure: I'm a PM in the Red Hat DevTools BU.

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