[bmicklea]

I run Red Hat's Developer program, our developer tools portfolio and our developer relations team. When I first heard the news I had a similar reaction. But I've worked with IBM'ers in open source projects for years and they've always been great contributors. Perhaps more importantly both IBM and Red Hat are very committed to not changing our open culture and open source development model. That's been the source of our growth and why IBM felt we were worth 34B. Ultimately words are cheap, so if you see Red Hat's actions in the open source community changing please say something - I for one am committed to continuing to work the open source way.

You can read my blog post and comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20391504

[jbob2000]

Open source doesn't make money, you're at IBM now to save their failing cloud business. If you can't do that, expect your time on open source to dry up.

[bmicklea]

Open source creates market share, that's the foundation on which money can be made. Red Hat's business model wasn't charging for the open software, it was charging for the expertise we have in supporting that open software. The more market share the open source software has, the greater the monetary opportunity for us and the more we can put back into the communities. Red Hat has offices in ~40 countries and IBM is in ~175. That's a lot more touch points for us.

[rwmj]

Open source absolutely does make Red Hat money, billions of dollars a year.

[jbob2000]

Open source doesn't make them that money, servicing open source does.

[babarock]

How will they service open source if they stop funding its development?

I'm assuming that you're implying that's what IBM wants?

[jcmoscon]

>Open source doesn't make money Well $34B is a lot of money!