[dba-Tech] Open Source being bought up

Jim Lawrence accessd at shaw.ca
Fri Nov 2 20:12:56 CDT 2018


There is a wave of Open Source companies being bought up. Open Suse or SUSE, the open source software company, was sold to a Swedish private equity firm for a modest 2.5 billion. It is interesting to note that Microsoft designed its Hyper-V server from open source code garnered from Suse. Microsoft recently acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion, one of the core development for all open source products...at least there is still GitLab. 

Now Redhat has been bought up by the highest bidder, IBM, for a respectable $34 billion. Other bidders reportedly were Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle. As objectionable as the thought of Redhat going under the IBM banner, the possibility of the other bidders mentioned above, placing the winning bid, leaves me relieved...under the circumstances. But where does this leave related distributions like Fedora and CentOS?

My fears are that the next big player, Canonical, the writer of Ubuntu and the core of dozens of various distributions like Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint etc etc is next...and then by association where does that leave Debian. 

There is of course, now, the obvious danger of being too successful. An open source, highly creative world, built on a system of sharing that has become so successful that it is now considered the global OS. Such a system can not flourish within a purely Capitalistic profit driven environment. 
 
Jim  


More information about the dba-Tech mailing list