IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

[securitybreach]

There could of been way worse companies, let's hope that IBM carries on the spirit of opensource:

 

IBM intends to acquire enterprise Linux maker Red Hat for $34bn (£27bn).

 

Big Blue announced the deal here, in the past hour, and Red Hat's take is here.

 

IBM made an offer of $190 per issued and outstanding Red Hat share, which was accepted: the current price stands at $116. Presumably the acquisition will have to jump various regulatory hurdles before it is set in stone.

 

"The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer," said IBM boss Ginni Rometty. "It changes everything about the cloud market. IBM will become the world's #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses."

Meanwhile, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst offered: "Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience – all while preserving our unique culture and unwavering commitment to open source innovation."

If you're reading El Reg on Sunday, you know who Red Hat and IBM are: the former produces and supports, for a fee, enterprise flavors of the open-source Linux operating system; the latter, well, no one's quite sure– a curious mix of traditional on-premises gear, mainframes, cloud, and some AI.

 

Big Blue announced the deal here, in the past hour, and Red Hat's take is here.

 

IBM made an offer of $190 per issued and outstanding Red Hat share, which was accepted: the current price stands at $116. Presumably the acquisition will have to jump various regulatory hurdles before it is set in stone.

 

"The acquisition of Red Hat is a game-changer," said IBM boss Ginni Rometty. "It changes everything about the cloud market. IBM will become the world's #1 hybrid cloud provider, offering companies the only open cloud solution that will unlock the full value of the cloud for their businesses."

 

Meanwhile, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst offered: "Joining forces with IBM will provide us with a greater level of scale, resources and capabilities to accelerate the impact of open source as the basis for digital transformation and bring Red Hat to an even wider audience – all while preserving our unique culture and unwavering commitment to open source innovation."

 

If you're reading El Reg on Sunday, you know who Red Hat and IBM are: the former produces and supports, for a fee, enterprise flavors of the open-source Linux operating system; the latter, well, no one's quite sure– a curious mix of traditional on-premises gear, mainframes, cloud, and some AI................

 

https://www.theregis...at_acquisition/

[crp]

holly smokes ...

[Hedon James]

I saw that news and puckered a little....not sure what I think of a large corporate entity purchasing a large Open-Source company? Although I must admit, IBM is pretty linux-friendly, so I'm cautiously optimistic. We'd be having a different conversation if Oracle was the buyer!

[securitybreach]

We'd be having a different conversation if Oracle was the buyer!

 

Yup and they would lose about 3/4 of the developers all at one time if that happened. Look at what happened to open office...

[V.T. Eric Layton]

Big Blue + Red Hat = Big Purple Hat

[raymac46]

Interesting... I could go from FORTRAN IV on a 360 model 40 to Fedora on a Thinkpad 50 years later and IBM would still have something to do with it.

[sunrat]

Big Blue + Red Hat = Big Purple Hat

 

Will we get a Deep Purple supercomputer to play chess? It might play Smoke On The Water when moving to checkmate.

[securitybreach]

A very good breakdown:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puMRgrP5IR8

 

Remember IBM is already the largest contributor to Linux and one of the top contributors at The Linux Foundation. That said they are still a proprietary company, even though they mostly open source everything that they acquire. The whole thing is a mixed bag. The video above really breaks it down.

[raymac46]

It would be nice if the Linux community was self-supporting but when we see the creator of Slackware struggling to make ends meet, we must admit that it's not that way. Without the involvement of for-profit companies like IBM and Intel and AMD the development and security we enjoy wouldn't happen.