Amidst all the wailing and knashing of teeth here
about the supposedly irrelevant hugely profitable tech company IBM, there are at least a few potentially intriguing possibilities that spring to mind from this significantly expensive takeover.
What about IBM deciding to roll over some of the more impressive and efficient capabilities of AIX into the open source Linux in order to make it even more attractive and useful? Some of their other closely intertwined products too? What if they have projects with seriously viable or at least valuable potential in the desktop or mobile arenas? There's some big fish that could be worried by questions like these, and companies driven back towards IBM products and services if traction gets gained. I have no opinion on whether such a strategy could work or not over time, but the scale of this shows that at least an awful lot of time will have been devoted to such discussions.
In the meantime, the Red Hat staff can get used to the idea of writing Redbooks.