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A couple times within the last month, my Big-on-Data bro Andrew Brust has been the one to disrupt my routine with some drop-everything news. First, it was just after taking the phone off airplane mode while landing at Newark, as he texted me about the announcement of the Cloudera-Hortonworks merger that just broke an hour or two earlier. There went that night. And now, just a couple days ago, Brust messed up my Sunday night with news about IBM buying Red Hat, just as I was about to sit down and stream The Romanoffs. Thanks a lot, Andrew.
Armed with Red Hat, IBM launches a cloud war against Amazon, Microsoft and Google
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Larry Dignan have already weighed in on the big picture. This one zooms in on a very small part of that picture. My revenge to Mr. Brust, as it also covers a topic that is dear to both of us: craft brewing.
Hold that thought.
The idea came from a realization that the viability of both the IBM/Red Hat and Microsoft/GitHub deals hinges on their ability to preserve the independence and credibility of their new (or pending) acquisitions. That’s just as global beer giants are doing with the craft brew labels that they are collecting.
Specifically, for Red Hat and GitHub, the market success has been attributed to their Switzerland-type reputations as supporters and central players in the world of community-style open source.
The back story relates to the origins of open source. It provided a new community-based meritocracy for developing software that rebelled against the dominance of commercial ISVs who operated with proprietary models and their associated No Trespassing signs to shoe off independent developers. For the open source community, the rationale was that opening up software development to the community would not only provide more freedom, but also improve software quality as you tapped the world’s largest virtual development team.
IBM to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion | Red Hat leaders praise IBM acquisition, but employees are worried | IBM, Red Hat couple containers for hybrid cloud deployments | IBM Cloud Private for Data preps Red Hat OpenShift certification, queryplex search tool
Over the past decade, open source has moved from the margins to mainstream acceptance. You can credit Linux with opening the door, but today, developers often prefer open source on their resumes because it makes their skills more portable. And their employers now look to open source for commodity technologies that avoid vendor lock-in.