With the cloud, especially containers, there is little future in a business that involves paying for operating systems licenses.
Most interesting is probably supporting legacy versions of operating systems for customers who value compatibility to be able to continue to run existing applications with the minimum changes.
I sort of agree with this. Either Microsoft will purchase Ubuntu outright from Shuttleworth or they will just create Microsoft Linux, in whatever form that is, probably something more container focused than a general purpose OS.
"Microsoft will purchase Ubuntu outright from Shuttleworth or they will just create Microsoft Linux"
I'm pretty sure since like 2 years they're working on at least the second, but the purchase of Ubuntu too doesn't sound that absurd to me. What really concerns me is their power as a big corporation, which could play a role in attracting a growing Linux user base to their distro. This could lead to disasters should Microsoft pollute their OS with proprietary extensions: developers writing software for Linux on a MS branded Linux would create software that "runs better" there or wouldn't run at all on others.
No conspiracies here, this happens every day in all offices when printers refuse to work with non same brand ink cartridges; so let's say tomorrow Microsoft ports a significant part of their windowing object model to Linux - to their Linux - as a closed linkable blob, then update their development systems so that one can develop full desktop linux applications with the same graphics interface model of the Windows ones. Technical issues aside, how many developers would resist the temptation? And how many of them would keep dual booting when they could build a career by working exclusively on Microsoft Linux?
This is pure speculation of course, but I have this feeling that Microsoft becoming a top Platinum Member of the Linux Foundation was the corporate way of slowly getting to the captains chair.
Hello from Redmond. It's all good old NT under the hood. NT is in Azure, XBox, anything which MS builds really. What is interesting is that Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 will actually run a Linux kernel in a VM. I guess implementing a syscall emulation layer for all of Linux was too much, but they still did a very impressive job.
WSL 1 allows for more security. What they should have done was map WSL users 1:1 to Windows users (Wine users work like that). setuid(), seteuid() and/or capability elevations would raise an UAC prompt as if they were called from Windows.
I have thought and wondered about this for a while. It would make things interesting if Ubuntu had the resources of Microsoft but would be allowed to be independent in regards to the OS itself. If they wanna push Azure thats ok. You dont necessarily need to use Azure to use Ubuntu if you dont want to.
Red Hat's business model and open culture isn't changing. We will remain independent and I look at this as an opportunity for more people to engage with our stellar support and field teams.
I remember a very similar email from my company's CEO during a merger. Within months he had retired with millions and everything had changed. I sincerely wish Red Hat and your work doesn't fall victim to a similar fate, but IBM literally owns you as of today.
The CEO doesn't have full control over everything. Plenty can (and did) change even without a change in the CEO. Again - they are literally owned by IBM now. I'd be optimistic if Red Hat really were to be fully independent with respect to products. But unless IBM made this investment purely as a financial strategy, they will absolutely begin interfering.
Wish you luck, but strongly suggest you remain realistic about how this dance goes, simply for your own sake.
Thing is, IBM has been around for a long time and has a long history of acquisitions. They've done it enough that there's a process. My suggestion would be to go through this list and decide which one looks most like the situation in which you find yourself.
If you were feeling like a little research, you could probably even find the names of some folks in a job role like yours who were there at the time and see what happened to them post-acquisition.
"Red Hat's business model and open culture isn't changing. We will remain independent "
Oh, man, wouldn't it be pretty to think so?
In all seriousness, this is an INSANELY naive statement. It doesn't matter what IBM says, and it matters less what the Red Hat CEO says. You got bought. They can, and will, do whatever they want, regardless of what lip service they pay to independence or preserving culture or whatever.
They've just spent $34billion for what is essentially a culture and a customer base (all the software is open source, and the building are leased), so yes they absolutely can do whatever they want but burning it all to the ground is going to cause some interesting questions about exactly how that increased shareholder value. It could all fall apart but IBM management have a massive incentive to make it work.
Having worked for a company that got bought out for the "culture and employees", I can tell you that's a lie. You got bought out for the partnerships and technology, and everything else is a bonus. You will fall in line with the IBM culture, or you will be phased out. If you're not a salesperson, I'd suggest you spread your resume around.
No. Individual managers at IBM have strong incentives to meet their own comp plan incentives, and that's it.
Can you point to any acquisition EVER where the acquired company remained "independent" for a meaningful amount of time? Or where the smaller firm retained their own culture? It doesn't happen.
This seems like wishful thinking. These are exactly the same things that are always said. You may be fine for a few weeks, a few months, or even a few years, but IBM will inevitably interfere enough to cause a serious culture shift (or collapse).
Red Hat culture hasn't been anything to brag about. They basically maintain an outdated version of Linux that companies only pay for to get support and shift liability, but there is nothing innovative about Red Hat Linux.
I'd really suggest finding one of your colleagues that's seen IBM's track record with acquisitions and pick their brain a bit. They'll have much more relevant information for you than your old CEO.
Canonical is already in that market and has been for a long time. I work for Pivotal, we have a contract which gives us all-the-gold support for Ubuntu, because that's what we're shipping to our customers.
Disclosure: Pivotal competes with Red Hat/IBM in the cloud platform market.
Ubuntu is making a lot of money from cloud and they probably see that as the future rather than enterprise. (They get a few pennies for every Ubuntu VM spun up on AWS etc).
I think the market is probably there regardless. It's not necessarily an easy market, but it's a class of service that fulfills needs and I think demand will be there if you identify and solve the right problems.
Maybe Ubuntu could pivot into this space.