Re: So long and farewell RedHat
Not exactly accurate. Big Blue promoted the sh*t out of Notes, required all its partners to use Notes to do business with IBM divisions, and generally caused the software to live on a decade longer than it should have. The big differences are that RHEL and associated products are open source and their devs at the center of the Linux universe. Lotus was an innovative company, but not an industry leader, and its tech was the classic walled garden. It had nothing like the influence RHAT does through its employees involvement in the oss stack.
That said, bean counters and egomaniacal execs being what they are, if the RHATters don't wind up taking over IBM a la TW/AOL in a very short time then this could be a very sad end to a good company. What was it that Feynman said? "Nature cannot be fooled."
Competence cannot be faked.
At least not for very long.