IBM and Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source cloud software, announced today that the companies have reached a definitive agreement under which IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.
With this acquisition, IBM will remain committed to Red Hat's open governance, open source contributions, participation in the open source community and development model, and fostering its widespread developer ecosystem. In addition, IBM and Red Hat will remain committed to the continued freedom of open source, via such efforts as Patent Promise, GPL Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network.
This comes as a surprise, but now that I think about it, Red Hat would've been a great acquisition for a number of cloud providers, including Amazon and Microsoft. Let's hope the second quoted paragraph isn't an empty promise.
The partnership we are announcing today with Red Hat extends our commitment to offer unmatched choice and flexibility in an enterprise-grade cloud experience across the hybrid cloud. With more than 80 percent of the Fortune 500 using Microsoft’s cloud, for us to team with the leader in enterprise Linux allows even more businesses to move to the cloud on their terms. By working with Red Hat, we will address common enterprise, ISV and developer needs for building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software across private and public clouds, including the following.
Only fourteen short years ago:
Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.
What a time to be alive.
Fedora version 21 has been launched. The Fedora project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, has taken a new approach with the new version of the Fedora Linux distribution. Fedora 21 has been split into three separate product offerings: Workstation, Cloud and Server. Each product shares a common base, allowing for software compatibility between the three branches. According to the release announcement, Fedora 21 ships with a number of new administration tools, a new graphical package manager and experimental support for running the GNOME desktop on a Wayland display server. More detailed information on Fedora's latest release can be found in the project's release notes.
The CentOS Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS 7 for x86_64, including images for docker, and various cloud providers. There are many fundamental changes in this release, compared to previous releases of CentOS. Notably the inclusion of systemd, Gnome3, and a default filesystem of XFS. For more information about what makes CentOS 7 stand out, please see our release notes.
CentOS 6 can be upgraded to 7, but that functionality is still being tested.
With great excitement I'd like to announce that we are joining the Red Hat family. The CentOS Project is joining forces with Red Hat. Working as part of the Open Source and Standards team to foster rapid innovation beyond the platform into the next generation of emerging technologies. Working alongside the Fedora and RHEL ecosystems, we hope to further expand on the community offerings by providing a platform that is easily consumed, by other projects to promote their code while we maintain the established base.
Well, that's certainly a different tune from Red Hat. Welcome though!
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