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Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →In a May 17, 2019 interview, Red Hat’s then-CEO Jim Whitehurst said IBM’s proposed acquisition was a major vote of confidence in open source, but argued that Red Hat needed to remain independent and neutral among technology providers. He also described Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu as serving overlapping but distinct enterprise roles. These were his views while the deal was still under regulatory review; IBM completed the acquisition on July 9, 2019.
What did Jim Whitehurst say about IBM buying Red Hat?
Whitehurst presented IBM’s proposed purchase as an endorsement of open source and a chance to accelerate Red Hat’s work. In the interview, he said, “This is really IBM betting its future on open.”
His central qualification was that Red Hat had to preserve its independence and neutrality. He said, “To be a successful infrastructure software vendor you have to be neutral and agnostic.” In his view, Red Hat needed credibility with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google as well as with IBM, rather than being perceived as serving only its new owner.
Whitehurst described customer reactions as mixed but generally cautiously optimistic. He said customers wanted to understand the practical value IBM and Red Hat could deliver together. That was his account of customer conversations, not the result of an independent survey. The comments were made before the acquisition closed, so they express expectations about integration rather than a report on its later results. Read the May 17, 2019 interview with Whitehurst.
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When did IBM complete the acquisition, and what were the terms?
IBM announced that it completed the acquisition on July 9, 2019. Its completion notice reported consideration of $190 per share in cash and approximately $34 billion in total equity value. That completion valuation should be distinguished from the approximately $34 billion enterprise value used when the transaction was announced in 2018.
In the October 28, 2018 joint announcement, Whitehurst, then Red Hat’s president and CEO, said: “Open source is the default choice for modern IT solutions, and I’m incredibly proud of the role Red Hat has played in making that a reality in the enterprise,” IBM’s completion announcement records the closing and terms; the joint announcement describes the original deal.
How did Whitehurst compare Red Hat with SUSE and Ubuntu?
Whitehurst described Red Hat and SUSE as competitors with neighboring but differentiated roles, and identified Amazon Linux as a major competitor. He characterized Ubuntu as generally addressing different workloads and offering a different value proposition. These were his competitive assessments in 2019, not a neutral head-to-head product evaluation or a current comparison of distribution features.
Red Hat’s enterprise value proposition in his account
Whitehurst tied Red Hat’s enterprise proposition to the work around a distribution as well as the software itself: downstream sustaining engineering, lifecycle commitments, binary compatibility, and backporting. Those practices matter to organizations that prioritize maintaining supported systems and compatibility over simply taking the newest upstream changes. His remarks describe how he positioned Red Hat in that interview; they do not establish current product lifecycle terms.
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Ubuntu’s publisher offered a different view
In response to the proposed acquisition in October 2018, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth said Red Hat customers had selected Ubuntu and that Ubuntu’s enterprise momentum was growing. That is Canonical’s corporate perspective, not independently measured adoption or market-share evidence. The cited material does not establish a reliable comparative market-share figure for Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Canonical’s response to the IBM–Red Hat deal provides its position.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What should readers take from the interview today?
The interview is most useful as a record of the strategic questions surrounding the acquisition: whether Red Hat could remain credible across competing cloud and technology providers, what IBM might add, and how enterprise Linux vendors differentiated themselves. It does not by itself establish which distribution is the right choice now.
For a present-day selection, assess the target workload and platform, the support and lifecycle commitments available for the specific product, the need for binary compatibility or backported fixes, and the organization’s cloud strategy. Verify those details against current vendor documentation rather than treating Whitehurst’s 2019 characterizations as current product specifications.
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