I remember taking the bus to the local bookstore to buy the Red Hat Linux 5.2 CD-ROMs. It must have been 1998. Ten years later, Red Hat acted as an inspiration for starting my own Open Source business.

While it's a bit sad to see the largest, independent Open Source company get acquired, it's also great news for Open Source. IBM has been a strong proponent and contributor to Open Source, and its acquisition of Red Hat should help accelerate Open Source even more. IBM has the ability to introduce Open Source to more organizations in a way that Red Hat never could.

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote that 2018 is a breakout year for Open Source businesses. The acquisition of Red Hat truly cements that, as this is one of the largest acquisitions in the history of technology. It's very exciting to see that the largest technology companies in the world are getting comfortable with Open Source as part of their mainstream business.

Thirty-four billion is a lot of money, but IBM had to do something big to get back into the game. Public cloud gets all the attention, but hybrid cloud is just now setting up for growth. It was only last year that both Amazon Web Services and Google partnered with VMware on hybrid cloud offerings, so IBM isn't necessarily late to the hybrid cloud game. Both IBM and Red Hat are big believers in hybrid cloud, so this acquisition makes sense and helps IBM compete with Amazon, Google and Microsoft in terms of hybrid cloud.

In short, this should be great for Open Source, it should be good for IBM, and it should be healthy for the cloud wars.

PS: I predict that Jim Whitehurst becomes IBM's CEO in less than five years.

While IBM is not using Mollom (maybe they should?), many of the targeted blogs and community websites are, which is how we discovered this problem. Watch the video below for more details. This problem is not specific to IBM. We found hundreds of similar spam pages on Google Sites, Yahoo, Amazon.com, Wordpress.com, Ning, Tripod.com, Xanga.com and more.

I recorded this video last week, and notified IBM about the existence of these spam pages several days ago. We're happy to help IBM fix this problem.

Microsoft was quick to reply with a press release announcing new tools that will help IBM Lotus Notes users migrate to Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

So we have Microsoft SharePoint 2007 versus IBM's Lotus Connections. But how is IBM going to compete with SharePoint's many third-party hosted service providers? Or with Google for that matter (think Google calendar, Google spreadsheets, Google's Blogger, Google search, Google pages, Google wiki/JotSpot, ...)?

With that in mind, now consider this. Many organizations have been experimenting with Drupal and see real benefits from using it. They are begging for reliable support. One or two years from now, they'll be begging for better integration with their existing tools and platforms.

It doesn't take a whole lot of IBM'ers to get Drupal to talk with Lotus Connections, to get Drupal up to par with SharePoint, or for IBM to become the world's premier Drupal support company. It is a small investment for a win-win situation.

IBM embraced Linux so they know how to do this, and they know how well that worked. It helped IBM turn around some of its business and strengthened their position in the server market. The battle has since moved up the stack and Lotus is to Drupal what AS/400 was to Linux. It will be interesting to see if IBM is going to repeat history and embrace an Open Source alternative.

This is the twelfth article in IBM's series entitled Using open source software to design, develop, and deploy a collaborative website that focuses exclusively on Drupal. If you are an aspiring Drupal developer, these articles are a must read.

(Idea: if you are a publisher, get in touch with IBM, and see if you can work with them to make a Drupal book out of their Drupal articles?)

As mentioned in the Drupal forums: IBM's articles have been a great help; technically speaking as well as to help me 'sell' Drupal to my bosses. IBM backing still goes a long way.

In the series, IBM's Internet Technology Group team describes a fictitious organization that requires a website that includes document storage, discussion groups, specialized workgroups, conference scheduling, etc. Because no turnkey solution is available they are faced with the task to extend and customize one of the available Open Source content management systems. After reviewing numerous Open Source packages such as Typo3, Mambo, Ruby on Rails, Movable Type and Wordpress, IBM decided to use Drupal to illustrate the creation of this website:

Drupal is a relative youngster compared to other content management systems. However, we got the impression the framework was well written, robust, very extensible, and seemed to have a thriving development community that was generating a lot of adoption and support ...

We did have to invest some time to learn the Drupal way, and the framework just seemed to make sense. We also felt that Drupal provided the right combination of framework and flexibility to break out of the framework when needed to get the job done. With all things considered, we decided to use Drupal.

What makes this series invaluable is that the articles are written around the basic premise that customization is a necessity. It reinforces that, if we want to create the best content management system in the world, we should focus on making Drupal (i) easier to use, (ii) easier to develop for, and (iii) easier to theme.