What effects do you think IBM's acquisition of redhat will have?

@jespersh

CentOS is just as much a product of redhat as fedora.

RH made their 'tres commas' mainly from support, their product is free, but support isn't. And it costs a good penny. And it's fucking worth it bcz I've gotta say it's brilliant!

Dunno about all their products, but most of them are free. RH is fond of FOSS. IBM acquiring rh could do what..? Delete rhel isos? Close gh repos? Really...? I think there are enough forks to keep their products alive.
I can only think of 2 scenarios where ibm could fuck us over:
1. No more rhel support [or prices x5]. But there's no point... Ibm is doing just fine financially, I really doubt they're short on $$. They could afford spending 30bn in cash, so.... No alarms here.
2. Terminate other rh projects. Not much of a biggie though.. Fork their repos in gh and move on. Also, why would ibm do that...? What's there to win?

Nevertheles rh and ibm agreed that rh will keep on living as before: same ceo, same products, etc. And ibm will just.. Umm.. Own rh and everything it makes :)

I don't see what's here to cry about.

As for 'nobody uses rhel' - that's simply incorrect. Centos is cool, just like rhel. But it does not have any enterprise support. Rh support is fucking amazing and serious businesses do know that.

Out of all vendors I've worked with, redhat is #1, ibm is #2 and oracle -- #3. That retarded thing hp provides is just wrong to be called support... [engineers come to wrong location to fix a wrong server with wrong parts. On wrong day. This has happened to me].

@netikras

What's to, "cry about" is the fact that RHEL and CentOS are developed almost entirely by redhat. As the company is acquired and integrated into Big Blue, there will be, as is the case with all acquisitions of small companies by tech giants, a mass exodus of former redhat employees, leaving very few experts to architect, build, and even support RHEL and CentOS.

I have firsthand experience with getting support from IBM for the products of companies they acquired. It's not fun. Lots of excuses, and support cases stay open for a long time, because as the authors and experts are long since departed from the company, IBM's engineers are left to read documentation and basically guess root cause.

I'm not saying that will definitely happen, but I have a hard time envisioning anything else.

@bahua I do not have such experience, thank you for mentioning this possibility.

Experts leaving a newly acquired product is very bad for business. I hope ibm has learnt this lesson and will keep rh folks warm and happy. If rh indeed will have the promissed freedom to continue on their own then I see no reason to worry. Rh even gets to keep their ceo! Question is how much of a backbone he will still have, but it's at least something..

I guess we'll have to wait and see