Comment by Jedd

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.