By now, I assume many people have heard that IBM will be acquiring RedHat for $34bn US (one of many articles covering this can be found here). This is apparently for the hybrid cloud play and to get control of OpenShift, etc. Of course, this also means getting RHEL, JBoss and other platforms that many of us deploy or use, be it directly or indirectly.
One wonders what the new corporate overlords will do with regards to RedHat's quest to maintain security certifications, such as for FIPS 140-2 and Common Criteria, and how that might affect both the landscape from an industry perspective (with Microsoft being the only OSPPv4+ certified OS), as well as how it might play out on the community side of things, with RedHat essentially having been an integrator and support vendor for open source software.
Of course, IBM and RedHat have years of major collaborations behind them, such as the recent deployment of Summit at Oak Ridge National Labs. Hopefully they don't find new and interesting ways to ruin it like most of what they acquire.
As an aside, out side of the HPC world how much commercial penetration does anyone think SuSE has in the US? Are any of you using it/defending it in industry?
-- wdf//CISSP, CSSLP
