Ubuntu founder talks about IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat: a good thing for Ubuntu

The Ubuntu founder shared his thoughts on IBM’s acquisition of RedHat in a short and sharp blog post. The free software fan believes the deal marks “an important moment for open source to enter the mainstream.” We have no objection to Mark Shuttleworth’s view – after all, for a long time, everyone just regarded open source as an obvious choice. Now, thanks to companies like Red Hat and Canonical, open source has gradually become the de facto choice.

While Ubuntu is also a competitor to Red Hat, Shuttleworth is optimistic about Ubuntu’s status as a Red Hat competitor. Especially in the field of cloud computing (IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat reflects its main market momentum).

Shuttleworth wrote: “The decline in RHEL growth contrasted with the acceleration in Linux more broadly is a strong market indicator of the next wave of open source. Public cloud workloads have largely avoided RHEL.”

Shuttleworth says that in the enterprise world, from the Internet of Things, the public cloud and Kubernetes to machine learning and artificial intelligence, Ubuntu has an “accelerated momentum” behind it – and all departments of IBM and Red Hat hope that the two sides can combine to get more market share from it.

In Shuttleworth’s view, many companies don’t just use Ubuntu, but they choose Ubuntu, which is another confidence that won’t be defeated by IBM’s deal:

“We are determined that Ubuntu is judged as the world’s most secure, most cost-effective and most faithful vehicle for open source initiatives. We look forward to helping them all deliver the innovation on which their future growth depends.”

Although Mark Shuttleworth’s point of view is not very relevant to desktop issues, his views are worth reading. The good news is that they feel that Ubuntu still has a lot of value to offer, rather than suggesting or being pessimistic about the biggest deal in open source history.