On: IBM Closes Acquisition of Red Hat for $34B

[babarock]

"IP acquisition"? Honest, if all the code that RH writes is open source, how can this be an IP acquisition?

[sverige → babarock]

Well, there's probably some intimate knowledge of RH's customer base, their needs, their goals, etc., plus whatever processes RH uses to service them. It's not tech, but not all intellectual property is tech.

[adrianratnapala → sverige]

I think is what people might call "knowledge capital", "intellectual capital" or some such vague term.

In my experience IP corresponds specifically to legally recognised property in otherwise copyable information.

[SkyMarshal → babarock]

Maybe it's more of an infrastructure + customer acquisition then. Or maybe it's about eliminating one of the few cloud competitors that IBM is capable of eliminating (not AWS, Azure, GCP).