“Red Hat being acquired by IBM proves that open source software company value has reached a new high water mark”

In a surprising turn of events, tech giant IBM acquired Red Hat to the tune of $34 billion. According to the press release, the “most significant tech acquisition of 2018 will unlock true value of cloud for businesses”.

Earlier this week, we talked to Karthik Ramasamy, co-founder of Streamlio, who thinks that “the acquisition makes clear that the window for additional public cloud platforms to gain traction has passed completely.” When asked if both IBM and Red Hat should keep their JCP EC seats, he said the following

Community and standards bodies almost always benefit from a balance of interests rather than any concentration of power aligned with a single member company, and in that light, it would be wise to have IBM not have greater influence there by virtue of having multiple seats.

Karthik Ramasamy, Streamlio

Read the entire interview here.

It seems that Ramasamy is not the only one who’s worried about the impact the acquisition will have on the JCP EC seats. Paul Fremantle, CTO and co-founder of WSO2 does not think IBM and Red Hat should both keep their seats.

The EC is designed to represent major stakeholders and a representative cross-section of the community. IBM/RedHat are now logically a single stakeholder and one of their seats should make way for another stakeholder.

Paul Fremantle, WSO2

Read the entire interview here.

Our next interviewee is Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab, who weighs in on the impact of the acquisition on the open source ecosystem, the multi-cloud trend and more.

JAXenter: What impact will the acquisition have on the open source ecosystem?

Sid Sijbrandij: Red Hat being acquired by IBM is the largest software company acquisition to date, proving that open source software company value has reached a new high water mark.

JAXenter: Does this mean that OSS is more important than ever? How does this move unlock the future of cloud computing?

Sid Sijbrandij: To avoid lock-in by public cloud providers, companies are insisting on open source services (Docker, Redis, PostgreSQL) and multi-cloud capabilities (Kubernetes, OpenShift, Hashicorp Vault). IBM just went all-in to that future by buying Red Hat.

JAXenter: What impact will the acquisition have on the multi-cloud trend?

Sid Sijbrandij: Multi-cloud is becoming a requirement. DevOps toolchains should be independent of the public cloud provider. GitLab is leading in this trend.

JAXenter: Can IBM make up for lost time with the acquisition of Red Hat or is the race already lost?

Sid Sijbrandij: I believe this move is IBM ceding its stake in the public cloud provider game and focusing on enabling hybrid cloud enterprises through offering both software and hardware.

Thank you!

Last but not least, we’d really like to know how you feel about large tech behemoths acquiring open source companies.

We invite you to participate in this poll.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
asap