[CentOS] IBM buying RedHat

Sun Oct 28 21:43:36 UTC 2018
Albert McCann <albert.mccann at outlook.com>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: CentOS [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Alain péan
> Sent: Sunday, October 28, 2018 5:21 PM
> To: centos at centos.org
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] IBM buying RedHat
> 
> Le 28/10/2018 à 22:10, Albert McCann a écrit :
> > Damn, this is bad enough to make one weep.
> 
> Red Hat would stay as a distinct entity inside IBM. IBM has also
> contributed to Free software, and especially Linux kernel.
> I don't know how bad it is and the implications for CentOS...

IBM screwed up with the purchase of the Weather.com properties, including Weather Underground. For more than a decade, WU benefitted from thousands of people with personal weather stations feeding local data to WU. IBM now plans to kill the existing WU weather API (which also was the Weather.com API), and gives the appearance of screwing over all those personal weather folks. While IBM now claims that they will have minimal 'free' access 'to their own data', a huge number of the PW folks have bailed and left, as IBM won't even tell them if they can even have the three-day forecast, let alone the ten-day forecast, plus the weather alerts data.

The WU API will die 12-31-18, and still there is no announcement as to what and how the PW people will be allowed to access the API. this leaves a bunch of downstream users who had free API keys, which WU gave out to nonprofit users up until last April or so. It also screws over the paid API users, and looks like the costs for commercial API access will drastically increase. 

The IBM rep on the message forum still claims that IBM will support the PW data providers, but will not answer what exactly that will provide to those PW providers.

As they've completely screwed over users providing free data, I can see them attempting to do the same to the 'free software' company where they plan to monetize the software and data the same way as the weather data.

Read all the comments here from the PW providers:

https://apicommunity.wunderground.com/weatherapi/topics/end-of-service-for-the-weather-underground-api

Al