[Bloomberg] IBM to Acquire Linux Distributor Red Hat for $33.4 Billion

I'm not super enthused beyond the fact that I have some friends that still work for IBM And I'm glad they finally made an acquisition that will secure their future for at least a few more years. They needed something bold like this to insure that future.

Man, must've been nice being a stock holder of Red Hat. Nearly 50% jump.

Right, and like I said I'm not rushing to judgement, but it's not as though IBM has a history of cleanly executing acquisitions and mergers. It's far too early state unequivocally that we won't see any effects at RH or with the Fedora project. I don't at all disagree with your reasons for why IBM pursued RH nor do I think they have any specific intentions to alter the enterprise and desktop distributions, but IBM has a history of flailing around like a drunken giant in the town square - RH could very well be what they need to finally stabilise, or it could suffer under IBM's questionable decision-making and experience some turbulence before being sold or spun off. We'll see what happens.

Unintentional duplicate.

My company was acquired by IBM 2 years ago. I have to say I was very nervous at first but I think overall they did a really good job considering how small we were and how big they are. I was definitely surprised and 2 years later I'm still there.

Edit: Side note I'm super excited that I now get access to all this cool Red Hat stuff.

@SuperZan , the reason I'm so confident in saying RH distro and support business won't be touched is because it's a fundamental backbone and strategically something IBM just does not understand. They aren't going to kill the fundamental cashcow for the customer chain they just spent $34B to acquire.

They also have a recent tendency to buy and for the most part leave well enough alone. Internal IBM culture might not have moved much, but they are at least fundamentally aware of their massive blind spots and don't kill the mojo of most of the firms they acquire, recently at least.

Let's see how it goes, the big players are definitely making big moves in the Linux world and this particular one represents a very considerable company valuation.

As to everything staying the same, that almost never happens, it's just a matter of time.

For the time being it's still fun and games:





Speaking of which, one of the first games I've ever played:




Good memories.

I migrated to Windows purely because this is where the market went - running OS/2 - (or Linux for that matter) just wasn't an option any more. Windows is better than it was, but still pretty terrible. I just wonder if IBM will make something from RH that could compete with Windows not only for cloud, but maybe even desktop computing.

It could be very interesting time - imagine if they come out with something based on RH with their own desktop, APIs and tools, to compete with MS Windows Desktop? About time MS had some competition - in whatever area that might be.

IBM still has many clients using it's tech. If they port (or have ported) their APIs and services to Linux this would be an ideal opportunity to offer these clients up to date services while makig it easy to move to the new platform.

Arguably, when IBM was split up by the US gov, they inadvertently helped create MS, giving it an advantage. MS is now bigger than IBM ever was, and might stay that way with Azure.

And we all 'get it' - it's just a discussion

Microsoft has been pushing more and more into Linux the past couple of years, its quite possible Microsoft will buy Ubuntu and support it an an enterprise linux server OS. IBM and MS would be competing there. Microsoft knows they need some Linux support both to gain, and hold server marketshare.

When I first read this, I thought.. aren't they too late?

Where I work, we already have agreements with AWS, Google and of course Azure. We've been renegging with IBM for the past few years with respect to on site solutions, dropping everything to the bare minimum. I can't help but think we aren't the only ones in this industry making these changes already so...

With this acquisition to be finalised next year, will they be ready in time to actually make a difference ?