Preserving the Red Hat developer experience

Editor’s note: Today, we announced the close of Red Hat’s acquisition by IBM.

In the months since the Red Hat acquisition by IBM was announced, I have been asked numerous times if this deal changes things for Red Hat’s Developer Program and Developer Tools group.

My answer then and now is “no.”

As has been stated elsewhere, Red Hat will remain independent because IBM appreciates our unswerving dedication to open source, our open culture, and our neutrality. Neither IBM nor Red Hat has any desire to change these foundational values.

My group, which covers developer evangelism, the developer program and our developer tools, will remain independent from IBM’s developer group. This means that…

You’ll still bump into our fantastic Red Hat developer relations team at events, meetups and keynotes (if you see Burr Sutter, ask him how much goes into our live cross-portfolio Red Hat Summit demos!)

The Red Hat Developer program—including the site, blog, and our social media channels—will remain independent.

If you’re a member of the Developer program, you’ll continue to enjoy free access to Red Hat software downloads, eBooks, events and great content.

If you’re not yet a member, please check out the Developer program at developers.redhat.com. By signing up you will receive our newsletter, which will keep you up to date as we move forward.

I also invite you to check out the IBM Developer Program, which includes great additional developer content and events. If you’re a member of the Red Hat Developer program and want to take advantage of the IBM Developer Program, you’ll have to sign up separately, since we won’t be merging the two different programs.

As is true elsewhere in Red Hat, we are committed to an open development model and to maintaining a neutral market position. We collaborate across the industry, and that will not change. Our Red Hat Developer tool product roadmaps will continue to be independent of IBM.

Similarly, our tools mission is unchanged — to make development more efficient and enjoyable by:

Working in open source communities for an improved developer experience.

Improving the tools that developers already use for today’s evolving applications.

Making it a joy to develop applications, functions and services with Kubernetes and OpenShift.

Bringing attention to innovative developer projects like Quarkus (which makes Java sing in a serverless deployment model) and Eclipse Che (the market’s first Kubernetes-native IDE).

As part of this, we will continue to grow our Red Hat CodeReady tools portfolio and build on and add to our popular IDE plugins for Microsoft’s VS Code, Eclipse IDE and the JetBrains portfolio of IDEs including IntelliJ. These plugins span a variety of key technologies like Java, Apache Camel, Kubernetes YAML, JBoss and OpenShift.

I’m personally excited about this change. Over the past several decades, Red Hat and IBM have collaborated in many open source communities around Linux, Java, Eclipse IDE and now Kubernetes, Knative and Tekton. Long before the acquisition announcement, my team worked with IBM contributors on community projects for developers. My experience with the IBMers has shown them to be smart, collaborative and, most importantly, community-focused people. I’m looking forward to meeting more of them.

May all your PRs be merged!

Brad Micklea is the senior director of Red Hat’s Developer Evangelism, Program and Tools Group

To learn more about what this acquisition means for the IBM Developer Program, check out this blog from Todd Moore, VP of Open Technology at IBM. Also read the IBM + Red Hat FAQ for Communities post by Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer (CTO) at Red Hat.