[awill]

Respectfully, I think you are being overly optimistic. I worked at a company acquired by HP several years ago. They bought us because we were beating them, and yet, they still thought they knew better, and intefered. You can guess how things ended up.

I am certain IBM will think they know better than Red Hat, and will intefere. It is in their culture. The HPs and IBMs of the world no longer innovate. They acquire innovation and sqaunder it.

[chr15p]

34billion is a lot of money to mess around with so hopefully they will at least thing twice before trying anything too dramatic, plus Jim Whitehurst (Red Hat CEO) is going to be reporting directly in to Ginni Rometty (IBM CEO) which should help provide some aircover. In the end it will probably depend on a) Red Hat continuing to grow and make money, because why would you kill a golden goose, and b) how good Jim Whitehurst is at the inevitable corporate politics

[wayoutthere]

At that level of a company like IBM, everyone is purely political. The CEO can’t necessarily force specific changes, and has to work with other senior executives who have clauses in their contracts that allow them to exit with huge payoffs if certain job responsibilities are taken away from them. Those senior executives (esp at IBM) have immense power; and will easily be able to kill RedHat by a thousand cuts or just parcel out the talent at the company.

Just poach a few key folks internally from RedHat to lead “strategic initiatives” and backfill their roles with IBM lifers. The culture will degrade accordingly.