In June 2018, Microsoft announced plans to buy GitHub, the platform used by millions of developers and companies, including Google and Walmart, to host popular open source projects, for $7.5 billion. Four months later, IBM said it will buy Red Hat, a company that open sources all of its products, for $34 billion, one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history.
The Red Hat and GitHub acquisitions overshadowed some smaller deals that in another year would have been big news in the open source community, including Salesforce’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Mulesoft, which helps companies move applications to the cloud; Adobe’s $1.68 billion acquisition of ecommerce company Magento; and AT&T’s acquisition of Alien Vault, which makes an open source security management system, for an undisclosed amount.
It’s not that these companies are new to open source. AT&T, for example, released an open source AI platform last year.
https://www.wired.com/story/why-2018-breakout-year-open-source-deals/
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