IBM Completes Its Acquisition Of Red Hat

[phoronix]

Phoronix: IBM Completes Its Acquisition Of Red Hat

After announcing the deal last October, IBM today closed on its acquisition of Red Hat...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=IBM-Red-Hat-Acquisition-Done

[Jabberwocky]

I have a lot of respect for Red Hat and their employees. I hope that won't change because of this.

What is the point of buying a company when you state that it "retain its independence and neutrality, continue the same development model" ? They said more or less the same about Whatsapp and look at the top management now. Hoping that won't be the same case in years to come. Good luck IBM/Red Hat!

[etam]

They said more or less the same about Whatsapp and look at the top management now.

It's called "slowly cooking a frog" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog)

I also hope RedHat won't be doing things like this: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledg...sionrules.html (please don't take me too seriously)

[Sethox]

I won't call Red hat the lesser evil but they did accept the deal, only if I see proof/documents of them splitting the money with the employees can I pronounce Red Hat being innocent.

[starshipeleven]

What is the point of buying a company when you state that it "retain its independence and neutrality, continue the same development model" ?

adding RH's half a billion net revenue to their own?

Has SUSE died horribly because the company was sold to someone else (2-3 times in the last decade)?

They said more or less the same about Whatsapp

That's what every company says. Does not mean anything, it can be truth or lie.

[karolherbst]

I won't call Red hat the lesser evil but they did accept the deal

thing is, Red Hat couldn't decline it. Shareholders could have sued because it's missing out a big win on the stocks...

[karolherbst]

anyway, it's up to the owner of Red Hat to decide and the owners are the holders of the shares, not Red Hat.

[Almindor]

I have a lot of respect for Red Hat and their employees. I hope that won't change because of this.

What is the point of buying a company when you state that it "retain its independence and neutrality, continue the same development model" ? They said more or less the same about Whatsapp and look at the top management now. Hoping that won't be the same case in years to come. Good luck IBM/Red Hat!

That's just PR talk. Companies are bought for a reason. IP, tech, skill or aquire and exterminate. In some cases big fish buy small fish that are good in their respective markets where the big fish want to go and use them to get there, eventually replacing the old brand.

I suspect this is what IBM wants, to replace Red Hat with IBM on the Linux/server market side of things slowly. Either way Red Hat is no more.

[starshipeleven]

Either way Red Hat is no more.

*laughing in OpenSUSE*

[L_A_G]

Considering how IBM has for a long time been trying, and failing, to become more of a software company than a hardware company, them buying up Red Hat, or at least trying to, was probably inevitable. Old fashion mainframes used to be their bread and butter, but they've long since been relegated to fairly profitable, but kinda niche uses like retail banking, hence making the move to other things a necessity. If what I've heard from people used to and still work at IBM is anything to go by the internal use software they've been trying to commercialize is so bad they don't even like using it themselves.

However the main benefit of buying a Linux distro maker is that it does give them an edge in the "cloud" services (read: automatically scaling VM service) market. This market is dominated by Linux and even Microsoft's Azure, which introduced Linux instances last year, very recently saw Linux reach a 50% share of what OS instances were running (up from about 40% this spring). Better yet, if Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS is anything to go by it's also a big, profitable and rapidly growing market.

So while I would normally be highly skeptical of IBM here, considering what's going on in the market with the success of "cloud" services I really don't think the horror scenarios people keep painting up are going to pan out. Maybe there's going to be less focus on things that aren't relevant to the "cloud" business (so less resources put on things like graphics drivers), but Red Hat is obviously going to be a prized possession in IBM's portfolio and not something akin to what Saab was under General Motors.