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

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-maker-red-hat

This will alter the cloud computing space dramatically.

Change how? Oh no now either there isn't Red Hat or it's named IBM Hat. Ready up your tin Foil Hats.

IBM's share of the cloud space will increase dramatically. This acquisition was made specifically to take a huge bite out of the sector and place control in IBM's hands.It's the smart move for IBM as they were going to be struggling to survive. Now they will have a piece of most cloud offerings at the base level.

Amazing how Red Hat created this much valuation out of free software.

It was all due to Enterprise support. I was involved in putting together a partnership agreement to develop software on the RHE platform in the early 2000s in a company that got acquired by IBM in the early 2010s.

Enterprise support brings incredible value in the business space. With that support, RHE is probably the number one platform for internet based server systems in the world.

When I was working in the tower back in Raleigh a couple years ago they had a development team of some sort there from IBM. Never heard anything warm and fuzzy about them. After all the henky crap IBM has been involved in over the years, not least of which to include screwing over both Sony and Toshiba on the PS3 architecture development, I cannot say that this news makes me at all pleased. Still getting RHEL 7 certified, because, well, I need a JOB given I feel a powerful need to eat eventually, but this makes me sad for the future of Red Hat, or now more accurately, IBM Linux.

That was Sony and Toshiba's bad decision for expecting IBM to do something differently than they always had done. You cant fault someone else for a bad business decision. It was Sony who wanted an insanely powerful chip and was willing to eat the cost of most of that. That has always been standard practice for consoles up to that generation. They realized they pushed things too far and it bit them in the back side and so this gen they moved to a console that didnt cause them loss on each one. At least Sony learned from their mistake, you cant say that about a lot of companies out there.

I'll not rush to judgement, but I'm not enthused by the prospects of this acquisition. Fedora remains my favourite desktop distribution and to this point I haven't really minded beta testing for RHEL. Depending on IBM's motivation and implementation of this acquisition, that could absolutely change. It'll be interesting to see how my workplace handles this as well. We're a RHEL shop so it'll be interesting to see if IBM is serious about allowing Red Hat to maintain the autonomy it needs to continue providing their excellent enterprise component.

Wow - IBM catching up by buying Red Hat... and after putting so much work into OS/2 which was a truly great OS itself.

I think they made a good choice though - will be very interesting to see what they do with it. Have they already ported loads of tools over to Linux?... Not really followed IBM since moving from OS2 to Windows. I did an experiment last year and loaded Warp4 on my PC - runs incredibly fast!

Will be looking to see what they do. Very interesting.

This has exactly 0 to do with the distros, and everything to do with the API, DevOps, and Cloud suite of tools RH wrote or acquired which are used so pervasively across every cloud provider.

IBM isn't buying them for the revenue or to change their roadmap (they won't touch that), but to gain visibility, insight, and most importantly access to customers to cross sell and improve their other (awful) products.

This guy gets it.

I'm not super enthused by this, mostly because it seemed many technology naive orgs were finally getting out from under the thumb of IBM et. al., and I don't get the warm and fuzzies here. However, I've had to give M$ some credit in some ways lately for not being absolutely terrible and we always need to reevaluate based on the facts as they change.