Comment by Apocryphon
7 years ago
I figured bringing up that Tumblr will get flagged or at least downvoted, but it is amusing to ponder what would be the biggest, most high-profile acquisition in tech to merit an entry. Doubly funny when the firms involved aren't Silicon Valley startups but old enterprises.
I guess any publicly traded company is by definition at risk of being bought (or merged in this case) without notice or even much public speculation -- but this one feels particularly surprising as I'd been assuming much of Red Hat's value for its customers was its corporate-friendly support arrangements combined with its apparent independence from the traditionally-perceived excessively-corporate heavyweights.
The arguably customer-hostile licensing changes at Red Hat over the last few years are possibly an indicator of a shift in company culture.
On the other side, I've actually felt positively towards IBM since the 1990's when they started to commit heavily to a lot of free software efforts.