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Comment by jzb | Hacker News Reader

Jim did not sell the company to IBM. It was not Jim's to sell. Jim received an offer from IBM which he conveyed to the board, which put it in front of shareholders, and shareholders accepted the offer. To the tune of 99.5% of shareholders who voted (about 80% of shares cast votes...). [1]

Some people were pissed about switching to Gmail. They were not anything close to a majority of users.

It's fine that you don't share a positive opinion of Jim's tenure as CEO, but the commentary that shows ignorance of how public companies work, petty gripes about switching to Gmail (as if that was Jim's personal project) and grudge-holding about diversity doesn't paint you as someone to take seriously.

[1] https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-sharehol...

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I'm aware of how the acquisition took place. And 80% of shares would have been mostly institutional investors. I think we all know that Jim and the board were actively soliciting buy outs. What individual do you think pocketed the most money from that sale? That's right, Jim. He was paid handsomely to prevent a riot from breaking out after the merger.

> They were not anything close to a majority of users.

You're making my point for me. Jim destroyed the actual spirit of FOSS at Red Hat. It transformed into "Everything we distribute is open source, and that's all we care about." The GPL has been all but abandoned in favor of non copy-left licenses.

"I'm aware of how the acquisition took place."

Are you? Because your comments don't reflect that. "We all" don't "know" that, actually. Maybe they were, but as I understand it IBM's bid was unsolicited.

Do you have a citation for the claim Jim "pocketed the most money" from the sale? I am sure he made plenty, but so did the other execs, so did the shareholders -- the sale price was quite a premium on the share price.

Red Hat was a public company. Too many people have magical thinking about how Red Hat's execs should've run the company according to their ideals when the reality is if Jim ran the company the way you'd have liked it would've probably triggered an investor lawsuit.

If you want ideological purity to the satisfaction of your FOSS standards, then working for a public company is a path to unhappiness every time.

I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.

> I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.

That's the prevailing opinion. It's safe to have. IMO, he's just an empty suit that peddles kool-aid. Red Hat was in a unique position as the top kernel contributor for a long time, meanwhile VMware, Google (android), and AWS ate up all the value.

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