8 thoughts on - Would RHEL, CentOS, And Fedora Remain Open Source/Free Software After IBM Buys Red Hat For $34 Billion?

• yes, because closing the code is the same as burning $34 Billion.

• Why do you say so?

• Think of it this way: A company specializing in 10 year support for an operating environment is being bought by a company specializing in 25-30
  year support for an operating environment. Enterprise Linux — and thus any derivative, like CentOS — is not going away any time soon.

  Fedora’s value is far more in the technology aggregation (IMO) than support. IBM isn’t and thus I don’t think the project is any danger, but Fedora would be workably forkable if it really came down to it.

  -jc

• RHEL is open source, but not for free …, think of this;

  Greetings from Austria

• If I heard/remember correctly, AT&T’s UNIX was proprietary but they released it to academic institutions under NDA and were lax in enforcement. We all know what happened. In this case it’s obviously open source, we know what will happen if someone tries something. My main concern is future development, will it remain open source. My real fear is that a certain un-named company is going to feel pressured to buy Canonical.

  My surprise is that no one is commenting on the price IMB is offering, a 60-70% premium, that in and of itself seems risky.

  Leroy Tennison Network Information/Cyber Security Specialist E: leroy@datavoiceint.com
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• Leroy Tennison wrote:

  Well, also that AT&T was forbidden by law from competition in that market, so they really weren’t sure what to *do* with UNIX.

  Does that unnamed company already own Solaris?

  I would think it highly unlikely that they would completely rewrite Linux, to be able to get around the licensing. I expect the same proprietary extensions that upstream does, but not much more.

  And, as I said, I can see them pushing their customers, hard, to migrate, not to another IBM o/s, but to Linux. A huge part of IBM, now, is service and support.

  mark

• I originally thought that this unnamed company (if we’re thinking of the same one) would be an ideal buyer for Red Hat (or, more correctly, that RH would be ideal for them) but IBM got there first.

  That leaves either SUSE or Canonical. Until recently I thought SUSE
  might be next best after Red Hat but I’m beginning to think that Canonical would be their best bet. Canonical would probably be a bargain buy at the moment.

  I’ll probably draw anger for saying this but I actually think they get open source now, and Canonical (or SUSE) would be safe with them. They’d destroy the value of the purchase if they mucked it up or tried to integrate it.

  Time will tell, I guess.

• Remember that the sources to Fedora, RHEL, and CentOS are under a mixture of free (GPL sense) and open source licenses. The copyrights for almost all of these components are owned by the hundreds of thousands of people and organizations who contributed to them, not a single company. While none of us can predict the future, we do know that IBM has been a good partner in many parts of the open source world. They have made and continue to make key contributions to Linux and Fedora, and to open source in general, as cofounding members of the Open Innovation Network, an important entity that protects open source from patent trolls.