I know Ed was responding kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I thought I would
add on Jerry's response.
Based on my experience, culture is by FAR the more determinant factor to
predict results of a corporate acquisition. Corporate culture very
rarely, if ever, changes over the life of a company (of 4 companies that
I have direct experience where they tried to change the "culture", all 4
failed to change it - that's 100% failure - but, of course, it was only
4 companies - yes, I'm generalizing <g>). Very small companies are the
only ones that have a reasonable chance of culture-changeability, and
IBM is not small.
So, the culture of IBM is definitely NOT in line with open source
software (yeah, yeah, they've donated, blah blah, but their soul has
already been sold <g>). How will that play out? Maybe something like
Java. And that will probably mean new open source distros get branched
off the latest Red Hat prior to IBM's purchase. Or maybe IBM will truly
focus on charging only for support. But my guess is their bean-counters
will not allow much time (cost) be spent on the OS if they are not going
to charge just to buy it. And that means the IBM version of the OS will
probably stagnate.
-Charlie
It could, but it seems unlikely that a culture as entrenched as the one at
IBM will suddenly flip, for better or worse. I would imagine that mainframe
salespeople will still be in their blue suits when pushing big iron to
other corporate behemoths.
-Jerry
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