[Wolves] IBM to buy Red Hat

[Adam Sweet]

On 29/10/2018 11:38, Simon Burke via Wolves wrote:
> I'm not overly surprised. Though I am hoping this doesn't go the way of
> Oracle buying Sun.

> I think it's going to be a case of just waiting to see what happens. I
> don't think it will be all bad, but IBM does have a reputation of being the
> place software goes to die (apparently).

I haven't seen any wider community or journalistic commentary on this
yet so I don't know what I haven't thought of on the matter. I have seen
a few people voice their concerns and consider migrating to something
else, but I agree with you, that seems unnecessarily premature.

I hope they don't ruin RH and or attempt to hobble CentOS. It may be
that IBM's ownership of RH offers further security to IT managers
deciding on whether to use Red Hat or not.

>From IBM's point of view, they're a slowly waning market force. They
looked at the present and future and saw that it was cloud. Ubuntu on
AWS and Azure have wiped the floor with IBM's cloud platform (for the
same reason Microsoft loves Linux on Azure) and RH has invested heavily
in cloud tools and infrastructure, but it doesn't have the install base
of Ubuntu on cloud platforms. I admit this is my feeling based on no
research.

Just as Microsoft saw that development was moving away from Visual
Studio to DevOps and cloud tools on Linux and embedded a Linux subsystem
in Windows, IBM needs a strong cloud player to put it back in the game.
RHEL is a strong product which is massive in business and aligns well
with IBM's market and offerings but that alone wouldn't be enough. The
cloud future and the technical talent Red Hat offers is the real sweet
spot for IBM. As I said before, it came as a shock, but then I was
surprised it hadn't happened earlier.

Side point, I recall Jono Bacon (founder of Wolves LUG) mentioned on an
episode of Bad Voltage around the time of the SUSE sale that a well
known Linux company was looking for a buyer. I didn't realise it would
be Red Hat.

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> On Sun, 28 Oct 2018 at 19:17 Adam Sweet via Wolves <
> wolves at mailman.lug.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>>
>> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-is-reportedly-nearing-deal-to-acquire-red-hat.html
>>
>> I haven't given this any thought yet, other than I'm surprised by it, while
>> equally surprised it didn't happen earler.
>>
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