IBM acquires Red Hat

This is no trick, and whether it's a treat remains to be seen: IBM and Red Hat executives announced Monday that IBM is acquiring the open source software and cloud services company in a $34 billion cash deal.

Red Hat will remain a standalone business unit within IBM, and an IBM spokesperson said that IBM "will remain committed to Red Hat’s open source ethos, its developer community and its open source community relationships." Red Hat will maintain its current leadership team and remain in its current headquarters and facilities. The culture will remain as well—though it's possible IBM and Red Hat may cross-pollinate a bit more than they have in the past.

In a webcast, IBM Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Arvind Krishna and Red Hat Executive Vice President and President of Products and Technologies Paul Cormier echoed the spokesperson's statement, stating that all of Red Hat's existing partnerships with other cloud providers and all of Red Hat's open source development projects—including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the OpenShift implementation of Kubernetes-based containers, and the OpenStack cloud computing platform—would continue as before. Likewise, Krishna said that IBM would continue its partnerships with other Linux distributions.