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Comment by bob33212 | Hacker News Reader

My Condolences. RedHat was an awesome company and helped make Linux and open source a success. I hope the bluewashing goes slow and you are able to have a good experience there for quite a while.

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Different Red Hat employee here, that said, this opinion is my own and I have no real authority to say anything beyond my experience. I, in my job, have a lot of contact with IBM folks now for obvious reasons, but I think it's a slow Red washing rather than the other way around. The independence of Red Hat is fiercely defended and is largely respected, even by IBM. I think we all want this to work as it is, rather than make huge changes, especially culturally.

I'm sure RedHat can stave it off longer, but a fair amount of the Softlayer folks were optimistic at first too.

IBM never had a Softlayer president (and also paid an order of magnitude less than for Red Hats).

So it's becoming Big Red instead of Blue Hat? That's encouraging.

IBM employee here, can confirm (the Red-washing) after having developed a product that HAS to be running on OpenShift and HAS to go through RedHat's horrible scanning and catalog system. Of course this is in addition to IBM's existing horrible scanning and catalog registries. It's a red layer on top of existing blue layers of tape. It's multi-colored bureaucratic tape all the way down.

Red Hat employee here as well. Didn't feel any difference, it's still a great place to work, but I don't usually interact with IBM folks.

One could argue it’s already finished. I was hearing almost identical versions of “no, really, IBM is serious about cloud and that’s obvious from buying us” about a month after SoftLayer closed their deal. I’m starting to wonder if that messaging is in the acquisition welcome packet because the similarities to what my SoftLayer friends argued is remarkable (implying the next step, if history is predictive, is for half of Red Hat to leave and IBM to rename cloud offerings again).

I overheard that Rackspace exited the hybrid market entirely rather than accept IBM terms, which says a lot if true, but it’s watercooler chat and not worth much. It’s plausible because in an “architecture by strategic acquisition” endeavor one courts the cheap options first.

It always takes about 2 years for the corporate hegemony to take over a major acquisition, during which time they have been keeping the new staff under the impression that they bought them to change the acquirers culture not the other way around... then the real re-orgs start.

As an outsider interacting with folks from IBM and Red Hat, if I didn't know about the acquisition, I wouldn't have noticed any major change in their behaviours. So far IBM-in-the-large have been admirably hands off.

So far IBM-in-the-large have been admirably hands off.

Key words "so far". I'm sure people from Truven and all the other acquired companies that make (made?) up Watson Health would have said the same thing initially as well. Right up until they all got laid off...

Sure, but "yesterday's weather" is about a good a prediction as can be made.

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