Red Hat turns blue

As we were finishing this issue the news broke that IBM was to buy Red Hat. To some of our readers that might mean nothing; to others it could be as earth shifting as the UK government giving fracking companies the green light again.

Red Hat is one of the longestrunning Linux companies in the world. It’s also one of the most successful. But more than that, over the years Red Hat has placed itself right at the heart of many vital open source projects’ development. Gnome, Fedora, CentOS, Libvirt and Systemd are just a few that spring to mind.

It’s this close relationship between the Linux ecosystem and Red Hat that has people rattled, because in recent years IBM hasn’t had the best reputation among some developers. As a magazine we’d say IBM is a friend of Linux and a friend of open source. In the late 1990s it took the strategic decision to support Linux, defending Linux against the SCO lawsuit (that ran into 20181) and in a statement IBM claims Red Hat will remain independent. We hope so. But whatever happens, the GPL, open source development and the community is resilient.

With that major distraction put to one side, it’s back to the ongoing office argument that we’re all living in a simulation, it often feels we’re living in a virtualised world. If you’re not already using virtual systems or containerised applications, then Jonni’s main feature will help you hit the ground running. You’ll get to grips with the all-powerful QEMU, experience 3D acceleration with GPU-passthrough and discover containers, and we take an in-depth look at Flatpak. So enjoy!