I run Red Hat's Developer program, our developer tools portfolio and our developer relations team. When I first heard the news I had a similar reaction. But I've worked with IBM'ers in open source projects for years and they've always been great contributors. Perhaps more importantly both IBM and Red Hat are very committed to not changing our open culture and open source development model. That's been the source of our growth and why IBM felt we were worth 34B. Ultimately words are cheap, so if you see Red Hat's actions in the open source community changing please say something - I for one am committed to continuing to work the open source way.

You can read my blog post and comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20391504

Open source doesn't make money, you're at IBM now to save their failing cloud business. If you can't do that, expect your time on open source to dry up.

Open source creates market share, that's the foundation on which money can be made. Red Hat's business model wasn't charging for the open software, it was charging for the expertise we have in supporting that open software. The more market share the open source software has, the greater the monetary opportunity for us and the more we can put back into the communities. Red Hat has offices in ~40 countries and IBM is in ~175. That's a lot more touch points for us.

Open source absolutely does make Red Hat money, billions of dollars a year.

Open source doesn't make them that money, servicing open source does.

How will they service open source if they stop funding its development?

I'm assuming that you're implying that's what IBM wants?

>Open source doesn't make money Well $34B is a lot of money!

I have no specific bad feelings about IBM, but I don't like the constant drive towards consolidation.

It makes us worse off, I feel. Nearly all these big mergers are about cornering markets, reducing competition and avoiding innovations. At best they're about finance shenanigans.

It's not as if redhat customers are likely to be excited about this.

I agree. I think there's enough evidence at this point in time to show that corporate consolidation after a point is no longer beneficial to our society.

After a certain point, it's pretty clear to me that consolidation only benefits a few significantly invested shareholders and no one else. I suspect this is somewhere greater than the "big 4-5" we've become accustomed to accepting in every sector, when economies of scale stop showing significant sizable benefits to consumers and the market at large. Instead, it turns into pure financial strategy to maximize the few most significant investors' ROI which becomes significantly disproportionate to their contribution to society.

Antitrust cases are quite slow to react to these circumstances, be it intentional (financial influence in government) and or structural (government intentionally moves slowly).

Antitrust can't be left in the hands of courts. For one thing, the practices legally defined as "trust" behaviour are, to an extent, specific to time, place and time and industry. Laws made for railroad and raw material trusts are not really applicable to operating systems or social media.

A second reason is that practices evolve around legal limitations. Monopolies can stay on one side of the legal letter, and that evolves over time.

To actually deal with trusts requires legislation specifically tailored to the monopolistic tendencies of (for example) the 2019 tech sector. Maybe "data share" needs to be a concept like market share is/was.

Where is this evidence you are talking about?

This acquisition has the potential of IBM using RH to disrupt the cancer of putting everything on AWS/GCE/Azure by pushing open source-based models.

If there is one thing that’s obvious, it’s that people in this thread have very little imagination of the benefits of teamwork and conjoined efforts. The only thing this is evidence of is the shocking ignorance about businesses.

In the future, considering that it hasn't happened yet.

What are you talking about? GP said there is already “enough evidence”.

At least it wasn't Oracle?

All companies will end up sucking in the end, because they're all in it for the money, and you can always make a little more money acting unscrupulously. Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google - they're all essentially one company, at heart.

---

I like the Walrus best," said Alice, "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters."

"He ate more than the Carpenter, though," said Tweedledee. "You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise."

"That was mean!" Alice said indignantly. "Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus."

"But he ate as many as he could get," said Tweedledum.

This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, "Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—

I agree that all profitable companies share similar characteristics and have a similar baseline for malice driven by profit, however, there do exist worse companies. I feel like Blackwater was a much worse company than Oracle will ever be and Oracle is much worse than most of the companies on that list.

+1 for storytime

That I feel is just hyperbole, too many people tend to think this deal is some kid of death warrant to Red Hat, but in reality it is only going to strengthen it by adding more and providing support, both financial and managerial to any dearth of resources that may come around ope source companies, that is if IBM can keep their hands out of the technology and management of Red Hat. I think and hope they will be wise about handling things and learn from companies like Oracle who are now infamous for obliterating good technology.

>I think and hope they will be wise about handling things and learn from companies like Oracle who are now infamous for obliterating good technology.

That's the problem with your thinking and people like you in this thread: you're entirely banking on faith that IBM won't ruin RH, even when you cite a great example here about Oracle making similar acquisitions and running them into the ground. Seriously, what makes you think IBM is going to be any different?

Just their word, and I also said I hoped they kept their word.

I'm just trying to be optimistic in this case, although I agree with how acquisitions always run into the ground regardless of the company, but something tells me IBM would think twice about doing something remotely like that to RH. For one thing, they contribute excellent work into the kernel and some of their senior engineers have had pivotal roles in adding components to the kernel which may have been a significant factor in improving it, and a minor testament that they care about the system as a whole. That doesn't guarantee anything but it is quite evident from their perspective that they are just looking to both increase their foothold in the industry and improve the base system.

There is little reason to compare IBM to Oracle, they have a very long history of their own acquisitions. I make no claim to understand what most of these are or how they have fared, but the list is public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

and the purchase was made on the costs of employees performance. a major reduction of people movements, bonus, enchanges, etc. happened at the exact cost of the declared purchased (internally it was reported 18bi, now it is published 34bi). whole european workforce was impacted.

I mean, Red Hat has 12,000 employees already (granted IBM has 200K - edit 350K, see reply). Red Hat is not a small start-up.

ibm has 350k employees.

Yes, I am shocked too.

Who will be developing the lion share of what makes "the Linux desktop?"

If IBM wants to ever make money of this deal, the only way available for them is to kick everybody, but support people, and crank up fees to the max from big corporate clients.

Ubuntu has certainly stole the crown of "the server linux" as being built on a more sound foundation, and being more conservative in bringing disruptive novelties — something that just any sysadmin likes.

Red Hat's commitments to the open source projects it works on from linux, to kubernetes, to java, and many others will remain unchanged.

Without a timeframe, that statement is worthless.

And that timeframe might be shorter than you'd think. My guess would be "days".

> And that timeframe might be shorter than you'd think. My guess would be "days".

Any evidence to back up your guess, or is it just the hunch of some dude on the internet?

Unless those commitments are in the form of formal contracts, written down, then I would not place a great deal of faith in them. Unless they have legal obligations to abide by them, then IBM don't need to keep them.

I hope so, but how will IBM make money then?

Red Hat is already making money with the current business model.