IBM Announces Deal To Acquire Red Hat At $34 Billion

[Weasel]

Maybe IBM can finally bring some quality to Gnome

Rather hopefully this will end up killing Gnome somehow. Then maybe we can get much more market share on Linux since people won't be traumatized by that garbage (and sadly it's what non-techies get "by default").

[tuxd3v]

Did you miss the part where SUSE is getting sold?

Suse is getting a revamp , and with this , will help it..
Also Canonical will be helped too.

Moreover, Oracle that was expected to dump, Solaris by 2020-2021, will now think twice, and looking to the chess board, I will advance that solaris will stay, or a new partnership will be done with Suse, and Canonical..

The sparc processors, are not so competitive,outside Oracle, but Oracle is trying to move its clients to linux+sparc, with attractive contracts on Databases..and its working..
Now with RedHat departing, as a free company...Maybe Solaris could stay in some niches of market...as a safe guard..

[Cape]

Terrible news...

The only good outcome out of this situation could be a LibreOffice-like migration of developers from RedHat/IBM to something else (Suze? Kanonikal?). Actually, this would be awesome since it could help with the fragmentation of major distributions... though i see it unlikely.

Most probably, we are just going to see the decline of Gnome...

[STiAT]

Oh yeah, they'll do as they did with other (good) software, outsource development and produce buggy and half finished software and compensate loss of customers making it more expensive for the stock customers they still have. I seriously hope they won't, but track record has - they will.

And I expect "non important" development for things which are not core business (X-Stack, Wayland, Gnome) being stopped as it makes no money.

[bregma]

Now we just have to see if Ubuntu gets bought out by Jeff Bezos.

More like Satya Nadella, but you never know. Either one would make a good synergy, speaking business-wise.

[Delgarde]

More like Satya Nadella, but you never know. Either one would make a good synergy, speaking business-wise.

Yeah, an MS acquisition would be much more likely, since Canonical already has a good relationship with them.

I think that if Amazon were looking to get into this space, they wouldn't be looking at a big distro like RedHat... they don't need a distro that does so many different things. I'd look for them to either build their own platform optimised for the requirements of a cloud provider, or acquire existing smaller players in that space... distros that make a good base for lightweight containers and VMs, etc...

[rbmorse]

Maybe IBM can finally bring some quality to Gnome

Like they did to Lotus.

[duby229]

IBM has been having trouble re-inventing itself and investors are losing patience.

Worst case scenario is that Red Hat could get dragged down with the sinking ship that is the husk of IBM.

Also, IBM corporate culture could infect Red Hat.

You don't know what your talking about. IBM has a very profitable business model. What husk? IBM has made hundreds of billions of dollars. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon, they still make more money than most companies can dream of and they still have soooo much equity in assests. They could could come up with 100 billion dollars in cash if they wanted to right now.

[mmhorda]

This is good news for Suse
This is also bad news for Intel and specially for AMD( because intel made some provisions in advance and had clear linux ..), AMD, needs to join again with Suse, and fast..

RedHat support for x86 will be down the toilet in next years..
I can't say that it wasn't unexpected...because it was expected!

IBM come to cpus again in force, it loose the Aix OS race to linux + amd64, they already acknowledged that publicly...

IBM is investing in Linux, and taking it has a big player...what IBM needs?

Yes a Good expertise on the market about linux, a OS for Compete with intel( clear linux), discontinuing with time RedHat os in X86, and ofcourse, take RedHat userbase, to power technology, why?
because x86 its it major concurrent, that's why.

They killed several rabits, with only one shoot!!

Intel is safe guarded with clear linux, AMD is not..

Actually it looks like AMD already teamed up with IBM. W8 for January 8th

[Vistaus]

Is there any benefit at all to IBM buying out the largest open source company, I mean... at all?

Depends on what you call "largest".

https://www.cnet.com/news/worlds-big...ompany-google/
"Red Hat is generally credited as the industry's leading open-source company, but it's a distinction that is as meaningless as it is incorrect. While Red Hat's revenue directly derives from the open-source software it develops and distributes, other companies like Sun, IBM, and Google actually write and contribute far more open-source code."

And if you're only looking at contributors rather than the total amount of code...
https://www.infoworld.com/article/31...microsoft.html
"According to GitHub's latest data, Microsoft has surpassed open source stalwarts like Facebook and Google to become the world's top open source contributor with 16,419 contributors. Facebook, by contrast, employs 15,682, while Google has 12,140. Red Hat, the company most often touted as the world's largest open source company, doesn't even make the top 10."