Comment by lima

I admire Red Hat as a company for their principled and uncompromising stance on open source. I contribute to many Red Hat open source projects and even promote their products, because they share my values. Their success directly contributes to the open source ecosystem in many ways, and they have a history of doing the right thing (tm).

I'm not sure how I feel about doing the same thing for IBM.

This is either very good news, or very bad. If Red Hat can truly remain independent and preserve their culture and values, they can achieve a lot more with IBM's money, and hopefully change IBM for the better.

If the culture changes for the worse, it's the end. Many, many people work at Red Hat because of the culture, not the pay (which is average), not to mention community contributors. This is particularly true for their top-tier engineers.

Red Hat's leadership is acutely aware of this, so I'm optimistic.

I can only imagine the discussions going on on their internal mailing lists. Friends of mine who are RH employees have fun stories to tell about epic discussions about much more inconsequential decisions :-)