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When it was announced earlier today that IBM intended to acquire Red Hat, it was received with some scepticism. The management was happy with it, but the staff were certainly not. Today, Red Hat’s management is responding in an extensive report on the takeover. Everything seems to be aimed at reassuring people as much as possible.

Paul Cormier, Chairman of the Products and Technologies Department at Red Hat, wrote that today is an important day for open source. This is the largest software transaction in history and an open-source company. Let that affect you for a moment. We’ve made history.

Positive development?

In his blog, Cornier first reflects on the history of Red Hat and then concludes that IBM is investing $34 billion in Red Hat and the open hybrid cloud. According to him, this demonstrates IBM’s commitment to open source, and this acquisition should, on the contrary, dispel any doubts about the continued existence of open source.

Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst also praised in an email to the staff. Open-source is the future of business IT, he began his story. The fact that Red Hat is now joining the IBM family means that the company can grow dramatically and accelerate the expansion of its platform.

After all, there are more resources available and that makes it possible for the company to invest more money in the development of its platform. Working together with IBM makes it possible to already realize what we could only have done in a few years’ time, if we had only had to try it.

Negative development?

Red Hat will also continue to operate as an independent subsidiary within IBM. This enables Red Hat to build the broad ecosystem that enables consumer choice and was integral to the company’s success. But the company needs to grow faster under IBM and that’s exactly what Red Hat staff are worried about.

First of all, there are concerns that the news has already been made public. It wasn’t supposed to be announced until next week, but because it leaked out, Red Hat’s leadership didn’t have a chance to prepare the staff. So this fell cold on the plate of some employees. In addition, IBM’s history with open source is certainly not always a positive one. So the staff are worried, but Whitehurst is trying to take that away by emphasizing that Red Hat will continue to focus on stimulating our culture as part of a new organization. Values such as cooperation, transparency, participation and meritocracy remain central. I hope we can extend this culture to the whole of IBM.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.