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Comment by Aloha

7 years ago

IBM has been very open source friendly over the last 20 years, more so as of recently.

Many companies are OSS friendly, but I think being OSS friendly is different than building your whole organization on OSS. RH does the latter, many-many companies are the former.

The problem (as an ex-IBMer) is that that friendlyness is only in parts of the company; much of IBM is open-source hostile.

  • As a result of this news, though, wouldn't you be inclined to suspect that the hostile faction just took a massive blow?

"IBM further says, "Upon closing of the acquisition, Red Hat will join IBM's Hybrid Cloud team as a distinct unit, preserving the independence and neutrality of Red Hat's open source development heritage and commitment, current product portfolio and go-to-market strategy, and unique development culture. Red Hat will continue to be led by Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Jim Whitehurst also will join IBM's senior management team and report to Ginni Rometty. IBM intends to maintain Red Hat's headquarters, facilities, brands and practices.""

  • In other words, RH is too big to merge quickly. When it's all said and done (in at most 3 years), expect a new post talking about "increased synergy" where RH will go through major a reorg to be merged into the borg.

    This is all very sad.

Show me a single core product IBM have open sourced.