IBM Closes its $34 Billion Acquisition of Red Hat: A Monumental Moment for Open Source

In the tech giant’s largest deal ever and one of the biggest deals in US history, IBM closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat on Tuesday July 9, 2019. Red Hat will now be a unit of IBM’s hybrid cloud division and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will join IBM’s senior management team. This event has significant meaning that extends beyond is monetary value: it is a testament to the power of Open Source and the opportunity it offers businesses of all sizes across all industries.

Organizations choose open source because it allows them to build high-quality software faster and more securely than proprietary alternatives. Open source development is more rapid, with updates occurring on a more frequent basis. It is decentralized, so disparate groups from around the world collaborate and build a community where many stakeholders contribute, customizing and improving it for everyone along the way.

The collaborative nature of Open Source fosters rapid innovation as a competitive advantage, with ideas coming from multiple independent sources as opposed to a single proprietary vendor. Open-source software and technology offer advantages in security and reliability, resulting from large deployments and the scrutiny from experts worldwide that open-source code undergoes. Well-designed open-source products and solutions provide:

1. Eliminated risk of vendor lock-in

2. Cost-effective implementation

3. Adherence to community values, ethics.  It’s developed by the same people who use it themselves

4. Fewer vulnerabilities, fixed more rapidly

5. Increased reliability with a worldwide community supporting a code base rather than one team within one company

6. Better security - open source software’s code is often more secure because it is much more thoroughly reviewed and vetted by the community

Pioneers in Open Source & Cyber Security

Dave Wreski, Guardian Digital founder and CEO and passionate open-source community member and contributor, believes that Open Source is where the innovations in technology are occurring. He continues, “If you're developing the next big thing, you're doing it using Open Source.”

Guardian Digital collaborates with many of the same building blocks developed by other Open Source contributors including IBM and Red Hat. Our software is created, developed, and built upon by software engineers freely. This generates more rapid innovation, with ideas coming from multiple independent sources, improving reliability and security compared to proprietary alternatives, which often have a reactive rather than proactive approach to cyber attacks.

Since its inception in 1999, Guardian Digital has recognized that the open-source model provides the best approach to the problem of maintaining security in the relentlessly dynamic environment of the Internet.

The ideals that the open-source community follows and hold dear — community engagement, openness, collaboration — are also the ideals that Guardian Digital holds among its main tenets. It’s a reflection of an environment that is highly collaborative, and where the best solution always comes out ahead. In this environment — where flexibility, choice, and an affordable costs are built into the process — Guardian Digital customers win.

The future is open-source, and email security is no exception!

How is your company using or contributing to Open Source? We’d love to hear about it :-)