[tw04]

I hate to break it to you, you are no longer a red hatter, you are an ibm’er and at the mercy of their board of directors. You’ll remain open source right up until the moment they decide that’s not the best way to utilize their recent acquisition.

I hope for all of us that doesn’t happen anytime soon, but IBM acquired Redhat, not the other way around... plenty of sun folks learned that the hard way.

[Doubleslash]

I bet the same has been said about VMware, GitHub and LinkedIn. They are all still doing pretty well today, last I checked. And they weren't acquisitions that required the acquiring company to get investors in to close the deal.

[oblio]

The long history of corporate acquisitions disagrees with you. Those are outliers, not the norm.

[sachinag]

I'm new to IBM (last four months), but it's clear that everyone knows not to mess with what makes Red Hat special.

[RickJWagner]

Red Hatter here. I'm very glad to hear this! Thanks for saying it.

P.S. I also agree with other people posting here. Red Hat is chock full of people who are absolutely looney about Open Source. It's at the heart of everything we do.

[wademealing]

I think that IBM know if they get their hands dirty in Red Hat, they wont have much ROI from their investment.

[outside1234]

I think you are a little too confident in IBM's management.

[thawaway1837]

Is there any reason to believe IBM hasn’t been a good open source citizen?

Arguably a lot of OS progress that we are seeing today, especially in the enterprise, is a direct result of IBM’s decades old investments in tools like Eclipse, which was probably the first enterprise grade open source development software, but more importantly, by promoting OS in the enterprise in the late 90s and early 2000s at a time when MS FUD about Linux was at an all time high.

[mixmastamyk]

Didn’t they also support Linux development before it was fashionable?

[ibotty]

Yes, they did.