IBM has purchased Red Hat for the small amount of 34 Billion dollars at 190$ per share. So, this raises the question what does this mean for the Linux world and what does this do to the small business market? The press release states that nothing will change at this time, Red Hat will remain a separate entity and continue as usual. Red hat will remain an opensource enterprise operation system, pricing will remain the same, cloud operations and support will also remain the same at this time.
From what we know there will be no changes, IBM will probably take advantage of the patents REHL owns and implement more cloud options potentially at a cheaper cost to IBM, not businesses thus increasing profit margins. Will this drive more companies away from REHL and more to CentOS, or will CentOS change and fork even further away from REHL? Only time will give answers to these questions, as we all must be patient with this acquisition.
What does this mean for small business? I think as far as small business goes, REHL out prices themselves for virtualization, on Bare metal a different story. REHL may make sense if it is required for a software product, otherwise CentOS is your best bet. Why pay for a Linux server operating system? Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, CentOS are all free, unless you need support.
We don’t often see Linux installed in small environments, I think most small business owners hear the word Linux and become scared, even though they don’t realize that website they are paying for hosted in the cloud is being ran on a custom Linux distro. Linux should be pushed into the small business arena, why? Its cost effective and doesn’t break like windows does. Though windows has gotten much better over the years, it still requires the same amount of administration if not more.
The most impact this could potentially make is in the medium to large businesses. They are the ones that pay for cloud products or willing to purchase REHL enterprise to run custom applications or web servers. But this cost will more than likely be passed on to the clients/consumers.
At the end of the day, we will be paying for it somehow, and some way. Even though a small business owner may not think they are going to be impacted by this purchase they more than likely will be in some form.
If you want some more viewpoints check out Slashdot comments on the matter –
Stay tuned for more blog post…….
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