Does this acquisition open up the market for a Linux company to move into the Linux enterprise space?
Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.
Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.
With the cloud, especially containers, there is little future in a business that involves paying for operating systems licenses.
Most interesting is probably supporting legacy versions of operating systems for customers who value compatibility to be able to continue to run existing applications with the minimum changes.
I'm pretty sure since like 2 years they're working on at least the second, but the purchase of Ubuntu too doesn't sound that absurd to me. What really concerns me is their power as a big corporation, which could play a role in attracting a growing Linux user base to their distro. This could lead to disasters should Microsoft pollute their OS with proprietary extensions: developers writing software for Linux on a MS branded Linux would create software that "runs better" there or wouldn't run at all on others.
No conspiracies here, this happens every day in all offices when printers refuse to work with non same brand ink cartridges; so let's say tomorrow Microsoft ports a significant part of their windowing object model to Linux - to their Linux - as a closed linkable blob, then update their development systems so that one can develop full desktop linux applications with the same graphics interface model of the Windows ones. Technical issues aside, how many developers would resist the temptation? And how many of them would keep dual booting when they could build a career by working exclusively on Microsoft Linux?
This is pure speculation of course, but I have this feeling that Microsoft becoming a top Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation was the corporate way of slowly getting to the captains chair.
This sounds like something right out of a dystopian nightmare I might have had in the early 2000s.
Quite literally!
For some context you can read the email our CEO sent out to the whole company today: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/jim-whitehurst-email-red-hatt...
Thing is, IBM has been around for a long time and has a long history of acquisitions. They've done it enough that there's a process. My suggestion would be to go through this list and decide which one looks most like the situation in which you find yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
If you were feeling like a little research, you could probably even find the names of some folks in a job role like yours who were there at the time and see what happened to them post-acquisition.
Oh, man, wouldn't it be pretty to think so?
In all seriousness, this is an INSANELY naive statement. It doesn't matter what IBM says, and it matters less what the Red Hat CEO says. You got bought. They can, and will, do whatever they want, regardless of what lip service they pay to independence or preserving culture or whatever.
Can you point to any acquisition EVER where the acquired company remained "independent" for a meaningful amount of time? Or where the smaller firm retained their own culture? It doesn't happen.
The old management maxim will hold true:
If nothing will change, why fuck with the formula?
Of course Redhat under Big Blue will change, considerably.
I'd really suggest finding one of your colleagues that's seen IBM's track record with acquisitions and pick their brain a bit. They'll have much more relevant information for you than your old CEO.
Canonical is already in that market and has been for a long time. I work for Pivotal, we have a contract which gives us all-the-gold support for Ubuntu, because that's what we're shipping to our customers.
Disclosure: Pivotal competes with Red Hat/IBM in the cloud platform market.
Enterprise is hard though, for total outsiders.