ZD Net reported that IBM‘s acquisition of Red Hat is the biggest business deal to hit the open source market in history. For those of us who have grown up with Red hat’s distributions alongside releases like Ubuntu and Mandrake, seeing them being acquired by a powerhouse like IBM bodes well for the company. Red Hat is a flagship in the world of Linux and it’s unlikely that IBM will change the name since it risks losing the brand loyalty of hundreds of thousands of users. However, this acquisition could have a lot more far-reaching consequences for the tech world at large and for Red Hat directly.
Open Shift May Be Coming into Its Own
One of the notable things that IBM has been angling for is the presentation of Open Shift, Red Hat’s comprehensively developed Kubernetes interface. In recent years, Red Hat’s marketing of Kubernetes has put them on the radar of a lot of major firms and quite a lot of these companies have adopted the open source solution. Companies such as IBM’s direct cloud competitors fall into this group. However, Open Shift was not nearly as well marketed as Kubernetes, despite it being just as well-designed and implemented as its more popular cousin. As Information Week notes, this could mean a significant impact on how IBM delivers their cloud services and allows them to compete more closely against Amazon AWS and Microsoft’s Azure. These technologies can be combined to build a formidable cloud service backed by two hugely popular names in technology.
Fear Over the Potential Collapse of Red Hat
While Red Hat is still a popular distribution, Computer Weekly states that if IBM were to go the way of making Red Hat into proprietary software, it could drive loads of users away from the distribution and effectively kill the spirit of Linux that still resides in the distribution . While the nay-saying and speculation still exists in a number of different Internet fora and even on Reddit, IBM hasn’t announced anything nearly as drastic as yet, and these theories can be put down to people expecting the worst from a corporate giant like IBM. Red Hat is likely to remain a major force in IBM’s quest for market dominance on the cloud while still being easily accessible by regular, everyday users.
The Cloud Is IBM’s Aim
Red Hat’s numbers haven’t been so good prior to the acquisition, and this course of action is probably the best thing for the company since it allows for a fresh injection of capital to spur more developmental efforts. However, thanks to IBM’s focus on the cloud, a lot of this development will be focused on providing functionality to Cloud software as a server or improving interfaces with IBM’s cloud servers. IBM does state that Red Hat will be maintained as a separate business entity, but in the wider scheme of things, will it still be the same Red hat we know and love? it’s highly unlikely.
Remember the Past and Hope for a Bright Future
If IBM does throw Red Hat into the scrap heap, it won’t be the first time a tech giant acquired a Linux distribution and cannibalized it for spare parts. One can easily recall the days of Sun Microsystems, and how it was digested by Oracle upon acquisition. It’s not too far a stretch to think that IBM could do this to their new acquisition. Red Hat will continue to live on as a nostalgic experience for many older users. A lot of current Linux users started off with Red Hat as their first distro and no matter how IBM changes it, it’ll still remain that way in our minds and hearts. As for how the newer versions of Red Hat will be in terms of user experience and accessibility, we can only hope that IBM leaves well enough alone.