by Chris Rommel, October 2018
IBM is a long-time supporter of open source, cloud, and Red Hat…so when first hearing the announcement of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, most people probably had the same reactions as me:
1) That makes sense. Cool.
2)
Wow. IBM paid a lot of money.
We have all long since gotten past inhibitions about the sustainability of open source business models and market capitalization multiples – even if it could be argued that Red Hat is the only open source company to do it well enough to earn a billion dollar market cap.