How Red Hat Decides Which Open Source Companies To Buy

Posted by Soulskill on Friday June 29, 2012 @09:29AM from the putting-that-dartboard-to-use dept.

darthcamaro writes "You don't really buy an open source company — since the tech is all open. But then again, Red Hat 'buys' open source companies all the time, they just bought one this week. So when does it makes sense for Red Hat to buy a company versus just building it on their own? Apparently, it all comes down to community. 'When you buy an open source company, if the people aren't coming and passionate about staying then you spend a lot of money for what? Because you don't get a lot of intellectual property,' Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said."

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People Red Hat employes is the reason we pick them by ron_ivi · 2012-06-29 14:12 · Score: 3, Interesting

We're a pretty heavy postgres shop, and Red Hat employing one of the top developers of that project (Tom) was the way we chose which distro to use (and actually pay for). Not that we actually needed such support (he gives at least as support on the project mailing list) --- but for marking reasons we needed *a* tier-1 distro with "official" "support" --- so we chose to support them based on them supporting Tom.