On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 5:22 PM Chris Murphy <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Antonio Trande <anto.trande@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > "IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion" > > > > https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/28/ibm-is-reportedly-nearing-deal-to-acquire-red-hat.html > > > Official press release. > https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-ibm-creating-leading-hybrid-cloud-provider > > The reported deal is $34 billion, and Red Hat's closing market cap on > Friday was ~$20 billion, that's a big price premium. I'm not a lawyer > let alone a securities lawyer, but my guess is if Red Hat management > had refused the deal, I think they'd face shareholder lawsuits. So > anyone looking to be mad, it would be completely understandable, but > this is basically a shareholder driven deal. > > Also, "distinct unit" is vague and next to meaningless. Until > acquisition details are released, there's no way of knowing exactly > what level of autonomy Red Hat is going to have, let alone what it > means for CentOS and Fedora. > > For what it's worth, SUSE and openSUSE have been through a few of > these over the years, and openSUSE is still kicking. > What worries me is precisely that we've never gone through a disaster like what happened with the SUSE Linux community. We've prospered because our corporate sponsor wasn't stabbing us in the back. That's not to say there haven't been periods where Red Hat unintentionally hurts us as a community, but they don't aim to do so. In contrast, post Novell acquiring SUSE, there was a long period of time where openSUSE had nearly no investment by SUSE. There were even rumors that people were told to stay away from openSUSE or lose their jobs. In addition to that, SUSE stopped contributing to KDE and being involved in most upstream communities. That was also the same time they switched from KDE to GNOME. They also laid off a very large portion of their engineering staff. Now, I wouldn't be unhappy if Red Hat decided to switch from GNOME to KDE tomorrow, but the point is, IBM is not an open source company. And they are likely to see little to no value in the open source communities that Red Hat has fostered over the last 25 years. Even the press release worries me, as it seems to indicate that the only part IBM really wants is the OpenShift group. The rest of it could go jump off a cliff for all it cares, and that might mean a loss of investment across the board. Fedora would be toast if that happened, since we have no other means to keep ourselves afloat if Red Hat pulled the plug. We rely very heavily on them to support a lot of the "grunge" work because it's difficult and takes a lot of time to do. We also rely on Red Hat to further develop Desktop Linux and Linux as a platform on the whole. Without that, I don't know what we'll do. Red Hat has been a company I've admired since I got into Linux back in 2000. I genuinely worry that IBM will smother Red Hat and kill one of the largest producers of awesome FOSS with its bureaucratic proprietary-ness. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
