https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world%E2%80%99s-1-hybrid-cloud-provider
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-red-hat-m-a-ibm/ibm-nears-deal-to-acquire-cyber-security-company-red-hat-sources-idUKKCN1N20N5
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-is-reportedly-nearing-deal-to-acquire-red-hat.html
If you have a Fedora OS then you will be affected by the Red Hat/ IBM Deal.
Based on the comments I've seen on City-Data forum and Reddit, nobody in Raleigh is happy about this.
OS/2 Part 2, Electric Boogaloo
The IBM Amphitheater doesn't have the same ring to it.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/29/ibm-is-betting-the-farm-on-red-hat-and-it-better-not-mess-up/
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/ibm-shares-slide-to-nine-year-low-after-34-billion-red-hat-cloud-deal-14760038
Update on the Red Hat/ IBM Deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMRgrP5IR8
Surprised that Red Hat sold out but not surprised that IBM made the move. They've been trying desperately to get into the cloud provider space for years now, and having control over RHEL and OpenStack / OpenShift will set them up very nicely in the future; assuming, of course, that they don't screw it up (which is rarely a given with IBM these days). Plus, Red Hat employs a huge number of contributors to various open-source products, GNOME and LibreOffice being among the most notable, giving IBM a significant amount of influence over the open-source community, something that they've again been pushing for for awhile. IBM loves to chase trends, and I'm sure these new toys that come with RedHat will be useful for whatever blockchain / Watson nonsense they'll continue to stuff my inboxes about.
Basically, this follows the recent trend of huge enterprise-focused dinosaurs snapping up newer companies in order to gain influence over "cooler" technologies in order to keep themselves afloat. Microsoft's recent acquisition of GitHub serves as a good example of this. I have thoughts about this, mostly concerns about these companies looking to acquire innovation rather than put in the effort to do it themselves, but that's a rant for a different time (and site).
As for what will happen to RedHat? I'm not sure, but if history is anything to go by, I suspect that the people who made RedHat what it is today will likely begin to filter out as IBM's corporate culture begins to take hold, even if it is allegedly going to be run as a separate unit. They'll slowly be replaced by fresh hires (about 80% new college grads, from what I can tell) and it'll eventually be IBM-ified.
Full disclosure: I occasionally work with IBM products at my job, and my experiences with them have been uniformly awful. The delivered product never works properly, the support staff does not seem to care or understand the software at all, and they charge an insane amount for what they actually do. So my analysis of them may be slightly tinted.
Does Linus Torvalds still work for Red Hat? Whether he does or not, I wonder what he thinks of this.
In my own case, I use Linux Mint and Slackware, so it won't affect me or anyone else that doesn't use RHEL, Fedora, or CentOS. But would IBM be interested in continuing the (free) latter two?
Quote from: KeithE4Phx on October 30, 2018, 12:55:38 AM
Does Linus Torvalds still work for Red Hat? Whether he does or not, I wonder what he thinks of this.
In my own case, I use Linux Mint and Slackware, so it won't affect me or anyone else that doesn't use RHEL, Fedora, or CentOS. But would IBM be interested in continuing the (free) latter two?
Torvalds never worked at RedHat. He received stock options from them in the early 2000's, and has often mentioned Fedora as his personal distro of choice, but he's never been employed by them.
Do you use GNOME, LibreOffice, or noveau? If so, then you'll likely be affected, as RedHat is one of (if not the) largest contributors to each of those projects. They have a huge impact on the open-source realm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLRoh5h5hgI
Here is the Twit.tv Pundits reaction to the IBM/Red Hat Deal.
Hopefully IBM lets Red Hat remain fairly independent and lets them continue to do what they're doing. While still being able to leverage what they're doing to become a viable competitor to AWS, Azure, and Google. I'm not worried about RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora, those will be just fine. But I do worry about a lot of desktop oriented software like GNOME (and a lot of the pieces surrounding it, which are used by many desktop Linux users even if they don't use GNOME as their DE). I'm not sure if IBM cares about the desktop much (only servers), and Red Hat is a huge contributor to desktop Linux. That said, I feel better about IBM than the likes of Oracle or Microsoft.