RHEL and IBM and Open Source

Today's news about IBM's acquisition of RedHat is huge for site reliability engineers, sys admins, architects, and open source developers. There are two interesting opinions I wanted to address.

The first topic in many spheres is the impact this acquisition will have on the open source contributions for which Red Hat is the incubator. The concern I have heard is whether IBM will understand why Red Hat pays open source developers to expand and maintain projects that are not part of the Red Hat operating system. I believe that the open source aspect of Red Hat fits nicely into the way IBM positions itself. They have had an open attitude towards open source software in the past. When I worked there there was a committee that moderated an approved list of open source technologies. There was a well known way for developers to request approval of unlisted technologies. I found the process inadequate, but it was part of the culture. We can see a nod to IBM's open source positioning on IBM's open source landing page. Some of this content actually focuses on proprietary cloud technologies like Watson. But this and the general product offerings in IBM Bluemix are good indication that IBM understands the benefits of the expensive shiny box of open source awesome they just purchased for billions of dollars. I assume there will be no immediate impact to Red Hat's open source developers for years to come. It seems clear the open source aspects of Red Hat, and the talented engineers who make them, are a major value proposition of the acquisition.

The second topic I personally am concerned with is how the acquisition of RHEL, by IBM, will impact cloud competitor AWS's long term use of centos as the base for the AWS linux AMI. Even though the Linux base FAQ never mentions Red Hat nor CentOS, we can see that that the AWS package manger is Yum. It is clear that AWS strips out packages that bloat CentOS, and hardens the OS even more. But it seems to be Cent flavored. IBM tends to move slow to change an acquisition, preferring to allow units to comply with a set of compliance guidelines in any way that unit finds to be organic for their culture. It was one of the better lessons I learned at IBM. But having a direct competitor own your base OS could be alarming for AWS. I am curious to see if they switch to Lubuntu or BlackArch as their new base. Lubuntu....try it AWS. It is great.