Big Blue Buys Itself a Red Hat
ONE OF THE OLDEST FIRMS in the Linux world, Red Hat, becomes a blue chip company in its acquisition by IBM. The move will pit Canonical against IBM in future battles for enterprise open-source market share. But for desktop Fedora and Ubuntu users, very li
It’s difficult to sell something you can get for free. Red Hat managed to do this for nearly two decades. The company took something made freely available—a Linux operating system— and charged a price for it. At the time of writing, International Business Machines just bought Red Hat for $ 34 billion. That’s billion, with a “b.”
If you’re thinking it’s fantastical that one of the oldest companies in computing would buy a Linux vendor for billions of dollars, you’re right. Red Hat ceased being a simple OS vendor some time ago.
Sure, Red Hat made its mark by being the premiere Enterprising Linux distribution. A Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) license bought you support and stability, both of which are critical when running a business. When I was in Iraq, the Blue Force Tracker—an electronic map and messaging system for vehicles that could show where all the other good guys were—ran RHEL. In the consumer space, I often think of Debian or even FreeBSD UNIX as the most stable solution. But when it comes to bulletproof solutions, RHEL is really where it’s at.
But selling support for RHEL isn’t what makes Red Hat worth 34 billion smackaroons. Red Hat, like Canonical and Amazon, has realized that the cloud is where the real money can be made. Even
Wired described Red Hat as an “Open-Source Specialist,” which is right on the money. Red Hat bet big on projects such as OpenStack and Kubernetes. And from the looks of things, the company has been doing pretty well for itself by becoming the premier enterprise open-source expert.
Similarly, IBM has been looking for a way to edge into the cloud business. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all have big cloud divisions. With large mainframes losing relevance, and its PC business long sold off to Lenovo, IBM made a smart move on betting on open source.
To be fair, IBM has been proLinux for a long time. I still remember the commercials where narrators talked about how Linux was new and modifiable, and that the “future was open.” A slightly creepy-looking kid was IBM’s face of Linux, a caricature of how the OS was always learning new tricks. By buying one of the biggest names, IBM really has embraced Linux.
It’s a strange time we live in where IBM is now a services company, and Microsoft loves Linux so much that Redmond is opening up its software patents. Hell, even Linus Torvalds has returned to the Linux Kernel with a freshly minted attitude adjustment.
It leaves one wondering: Is this good for desktop Linux users like you and me? I’m not so sure.
Linux is the most prolific operating system on the planet, but most of those installed instances are on servers and virtual machines. Linux has been great for business because it has lowered the barrier for entry for new companies. But those applications often have little to do with how you and I use computers. Nvidia isn’t making better and faster drivers for the sake of gaming on Linux, after all. It’s the compute applications of CUDA that are the primary driving force behind driver development. Again, in the Linux world, business comes first. Desktop users generally come second.
In the end, IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat will likely have no effect on us as desktop users. Fedora users will still have Fedora, and other distributions will likely continue on as though very little has happened. But in the business world, Red Hat has suddenly become a blue chip company. And if you’re Canonical, you’re taking notice. Alex Campbell is a Linux geek who enjoys learning about computer security.
I still remember the IBM commercials where narrators talked about how Linux was new and modifiable.