Binary logs are broken logs. You can't just grep them.
Oh boy. This is the most stupid argument against them. If you have more than a handful of machines, you're not going to grep logs. If you do, you're doing something terribly wrong. And even if you only care about a single machine, grepping logs is still a terribly inefficient way to work with them. Binary logs can provide way more protection against tampering, corruption and whatnot than plain text logs do. Not to mention that most of the time, you'll compress logs older than a day or two anyway, and boom, you have binary data, which you have to uncompress first to grep them. Not much different than using journalctl.
(Not saying the Journal is good - it isn't -, just that binary logs are not the reason it's bad.)
Sorry for the off-topic, but this silly argument gets me triggered all the time. I spent too much time working in the logging industry, I guess.
I'm curious to hear GH's thoughts on this Red Hat acquisition.
I worked for a company once that got acquired by IBM. We were promised to be able to remain independent, that IBM won't interfere with our day to day lives. That was a lie. Pretty much everything we built had to be rebuilt on top of IBM technologies, even if they were completely rubbish. We had to switch to Lotus Notes (oh dear god, that thing is a disaster!) for email and calendaring. Conference tickets, hotel bookings and other things had to be cancelled (and in some cases, paid for by employees when they could not be cancelled), even though they were approved previously by management (and this happened because another acquired company in the same unit happened to underperform badly! nothing to do with us).
IBM also had a very strong propaganda and push for software patents, and some crazy policies like having to ask management for every single open source contribution one might do, even on their free time. Higher ups could give blanket approvals, but that placed additional risk on them, and wasn't a practice IBM was recommending. Oh, thet list had to be printed. If you were a frequent contributor to open source software, you were easily looking at hundreds of pages. They eventually backed down when a few of us sent them a few hundred pages of PDFs with our lists, but it took quite an effort and a lot of push to get even this far.
Needless to say, I left IBM pretty soon after. It's not a good place to work. They may tout they like Linux, and they do: they want to reap all the benefits of free software, but contribute a little back as possible. Embrace, extend, extinguish. That's the plan down the road, and always has been.
In short, the acquisition will be great for RedHat shareholders. It will be great for the brand (both RedHat and IBM). I'm fairly sure it will turn out to be a disaster for free software and open source folks within RedHat.