This was to be expected. Red Hat had no future as an independent company. Their flagship product RHEL still dominates their revenue 20 years later... But they have already saturated the enterprise Linux server market, and that market is in decline. All attempts to diversify have failed. Openshift and Ansible have potential, but compared to the decline of their core business, it’s too little too late. The current CEO is a peacetime CEO: he managed a successful business competently in fair wheather, but is not fit to navigate the rough seas ahead. This allows him to leave on a victory (“the largest software acquisition ever!”) and go on a book tour or something. Meanwhile IBM can delude themselves a few more years until they’ve finished milking Red Hat’s products for easy growth. Then they will have to face the reality of their situation: they have no real answer to Big Cloud eating their lunch. For now, though, they can pretend this is it.
I think the implication is that Canonical are in the same, shrinking market. Whilst I assume Ubuntu Server has a smaller market share (though I have no figured to back this up), are they not going to end up in the same spot where they can't really progress?
Well, Canonical was never a successful business in the first place. Red Hat on the other hand has revenue in the billions... which is huge! It’s just not growing fast enough to keep up with the competition from cloud providers and others. Canonical hasn’t even graduated to that sort of first-class problem (and I doubt they ever will).
