I'll start.
Kind of like how people use docker for evrything, when what you really should be doing is learn how to package software.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
Not a drop in replacement, but worth looking at.
Sigh.
Have a table level seqno as monotonically increasing number stamped for every mutation. When a subscriber connects it asks for rows > Subscriber's seqno-last-handled.
https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-12-08-ibm-to-acquire-confluent...
I don't understand how this acquisition is relevant for AI.
For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
GTK is still alive. It seems like Cosmic desktop with GTK apps will be a reasonable path forward. Of course there's KDE and QT, but I mean as an alternative to those.
Yes, two decades: https://adtmag.com/articles/2003/08/04/solaris-gets-a-gnome-...
https://www.centos.org/centos-stream/
And Fedora is still the upstream of RHEL, nothing changed there.
HashiCorp also changed their licenses to non-open-source licenses, but again I think this was technically pre-acquisition (I think as they were gearing up to be a more attractive target for an exit).
A common conspiracy theory, but not true. There were no ongoing acquisition talks or attempts to find a buyer when any of these decisions were made (the pricing or the licensing one).
Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.
IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.
Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
It was right before I left that we got our own Jira instance. This was all around the time of the Red Hat acquisition. I remember the announcement b/c we used SuSE for everything IIRC.
jituyadav•1h ago
rvz•1h ago
IBM will likely give Confluent employees a large pay package, and then let them go after the merger.
vb-8448•1h ago
edit: btw, it's typical for any acquisition/merger
xocnad•45m ago
abtinf•43m ago
IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.
My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.
paxys•41m ago
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will mostly be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.