| From: James Knott via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2018 11:36:12 -0400 Thanks. Apparently the news broke before they had prepared the "messaging" so RH and IBM employees were startled and didn't immediately know what to make of it. I spent the first three days of last week at an IBM-sponsored conference on research partly sponsored by IBM. <https://www-01.ibm.com/ibm/cas/cascon/> It was surprising how infrequently the Red Hat acquisition came up. (BTW, this annual conference is free and they feed you. Its a good way of meeting CS researchers from across Canada and some from the rest of the world. It always seems to be the week after FSOSS.) The takeover seems to be about "cloud". IBM doesn't seem to be as big a cloud player as they need to be. Red Hat hasn't failed here but I would not say that it has been a great success. I'm surprised how Ubuntu seems to have much more share than Red Hat, for very little fundamental work. My opinion isn't worth much in this area: it's just based on reading random things on the web.