Does anyone know how things are going at Red Hat after the IBM's acquisition?

[yesinkatle6]

Not sure whether its rational but I felt very sad when IBM acquired Red Hat. RH was perhaps the only bastion of an open source dream, a proof that you don't necessarily have to go proprietary route to earn money in software, and that open source works as a successful IT business model.

RH getting acquired meant that either they weren't making enough money or weren't big enough to scale or sustain their business.

And I'm also not quite sure about IBM. While they do appear to be an open source ally now, their history is as murkier as Microsoft (or perhaps even more so) when it comes to closing their code and exploiting it. What I don't understand is that if Microsoft is always criticized so much, how come IBM was forgiven for their past sins?

[flozano]

On the contrary, Red Hat was acquired because it was financially very healthy and growing at an accelered rate, more than able to scale and sustain its business. That is precisely what made it an acquisition target for a mega corporation such as IBM, because it provides weapons to compete with other mega corporations such as AWS and Microsoft.

As a Red Hat employee, many months after the acquisition, I am pleased to say that Red Hat is still a bastion of the Open Source dream and that IBM is not harming us but helping and learning from us. The dreamis now a viable model for doing  business. Search for things such as the Open Organization to learn how Open Source is impacting business a lot more than just how they develop and consume software.