Comment by jacques_chester

If it was a sell-or-die situation IBM wouldn't have offered such a hefty markup over the market price and they would have used less cash and more shares to pay for it.

I think it's been obvious to everyone for a year or two that someone was going to buy Red Hat; I feel that no small part of their share price rising over the last 18 months has priced in that expectation.

Like everyone else I am mostly pleased that they didn't get bought by Oracle.

Disclosure: I work for a competing company, Pivotal, so feel free to treat my observations as motivated by ... I dunno, actually. I'm looking for a cool French word here but "ennui" isn't quite fitting.