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My personal thought on Jim’s IBM-Red Hat Departure
October 28th, 2018. It was a Sunday morning that I woke up with an email notification from the Red Hat “memo-list” with a coworker sharing a Bloomberg article indicating a possible merger between IBM and Red Hat. Many Red Hatters replied to that email threads, expressing their opinions whether that is a rumor or not, but no one could doubt that Bloomberg is a reputable source even when that was a potential rumor. Soon after, other news sources popped up with the similar subject. Few more minutes later, IBM website officially acknowledged the merger and Red Hat website followed suit afterward.
Another interesting incident had happened just few months back. Red Hat brand team had announced the official Red Hat logo will change, stirring the emotions among the long time Red Hatters demanding “bring back the shadowman.” Despite all the initial backlashes and endless memo-list email threads, the emotion eventually had begun to settle in with the Red Hat brand team’s promise that “shadowman” will never die. Then, the even more surprising merger news happened while the brand was undergoing the transformation, and the main topic that had heated the memo-list threads quickly switched to the news about merger. Was this a mere coincidence? The Red Hat brand team had claimed two events are unrelated, backed by a main reason that the old logo is outdated, too old-styled…
