What's going to happen to Fedora if IBM buys Red Hat? [closed]

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Without wanting to sound negative, 'unknwon' is the answer. The Fedora project is sponsored by RedHat, which btw holds the trademark for it. The question here is obviously to what extent the new owner IBM will continue sponsoring the project. I do not speak for RedHat nor for IBM, I have worked for both of these companies and I can say that they have a different way of work.

As Fedora has proved to be a successful upstream test platform for things to end up in a production RHEL environment, I would imagine that it would be in the best interest of IBM to continue the sponsorship of the project, as the Fedora community feeds directly into one of their own core products (RHEL is the foundation for many of the cloud computing projects). Having said that, the swallowing of the entire RedHat portofolio by a company (even) of the size of IBM will be a difficult task to perform. IBM contributed to Linux from the very early days is one thing, maintaining the flavor of a distro ecosystem that took years to form is another.

If I was a community leader in Fedora, I would be quick to clarify the situation with RedHat management. Even if IBM pulls the plug (again, I hope and imagine that they won't), there is a body of users large enough to create an impetus to fork the project.

I'm knowing "Big Blue" (IBM) very-well for about thirty years, especially the midrange and mainframe sectors. I have worked for IBM and for some of their big customers. This is my point of view: One fact is clear: IBM is strongly enterprise and business-solution-service oriented and is not known as a "cash-burn-engine". The new conglomerate will be consolidated very fast and existing "dead horses" will be eliminated as soon as possible. The new strategy with RedHat will focus among others on cloud-services for enterprise customers at a very high level. All of the future activities must serve this strategy. Open-source and proprietary software will be trimmed to form effective business solutions, that is what their customers are interested in and they pay for it. There will be no ideological war between open-source and proprietary software. In my opinion the Fedora project will survive, if it fits into the holistic strategy of both enterprises and if it will contribute to the long-term success of the new conglomerate. The form of sponsorship will probably be changed. High-quality will be one of the main criteria for the evaluation of sponsorship. I give a "pure" community driven (without RedHat) fork of Fedora no chance for the future.