Red Hat acquisition by IBM officially completed

Announced on the settlement of all formalities and the official completion of the sale of the Red Hat business to IBM. The deal was approved at the level of the antimonopoly services of the countries in which the companies are registered, as well as shareholders and boards of directors. The deal was worth approximately $34 billion, at $190 per share (Red Hat shares are currently is 187 dollars, and at the time of the announcement of the transaction was 116 dollars).

Red Hat will continue to operate as a separate, independent, and neutral entity within the IBM Hybrid Cloud group, and will retain all existing partnerships. The new division will be led by former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and Red Hat's current management team. Elements of the Red Hat brand will be retained. Together, IBM and Red Hat plan to release a next-generation hybrid cloud platform based on Linux and Kubernetes. It is expected that this platform will allow the combined company to become the largest provider of hybrid cloud systems.

IBM will maintain Red Hat's open development model and will continue to support the community that has developed around Red Hat products. In particular, participation in various open projects, in the development of which Red Hat was involved, will continue. In addition, IBM and Red Hat will continue to advocate for free software by providing patent protection and the ability to use their patents in open source.

Joining Red Hat to IBM will help reach a new level of development and attract additional resources to increase the influence of open source, as well as provide an opportunity to bring Red Hat technologies to a wider audience. At the same time, it will saved Red Hat's corporate culture and commitment to the open source development model. The company will continue to be dominated by values ​​such as collaboration, process transparency and meritocracy.

Fedora and CentOS project leaders assured communitythat the mission, management model and goals of the projects remain the same. Red Hat will participate in the development of upstream projects, just as it was done before. No changes are foreseen, including Fedora and CentOS developers employed at Red Hat will continue to work on their previous projects, and sponsorship of all previously supported projects will be retained.

Source: opennet.ru