IBM buying Red Hat for $34 billion took many by surprise, including none other than the company’s senior vice president of Customer Experience and Engagement, Marco Bill-Peter.

Speaking at the Red Hat Forum 2018 in Sydney, Bill-Peter explained that the acquisition “shocked” the company’s employees, suggesting that this takeover should take place smoothly in order to leave the open-source culture untouched.

Otherwise, Red Hat’s mission would be altered and this could eventually lead to en-masse departures from the company.

“At Red Hat we have like 13,000 people. If the open source culture gets impacted, trust me, many of those 13,000 people will leave,” he was quoted as saying.

“For me being in engineering, different things are more important. It's commitment to open source. Because we truly believe that open source and the open source way leads to better products, better innovation.”

IBM has the resources to support Red Hat’s push for open source

Bill-Peter went on to state that it’s critical for IBM to allow Red Hat to operate independently, and while the new leadership could dictate the new direction of the company, it shouldn’t be substantially different from where it’s heading to today.

“They want to keep Red Hat as the independent Switzerland - guess where I'm from? What this means is if they were to just make us a part of IBM, a lot of our clients or partners - like Amazon or Google -they wouldn't collaborate with us on the next open hybrid cloud. That's why being that Switzerland of IT for Red Hat is really important.”

While IBM hasn’t yet outlined its plans for Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO, said in a statement announcing the takeover in late October that IBM could help the company “accelerate the impact of open source” given its resources.

Red Hat has long been a target for tech giants, and while the IBM takeover took many by surprise, people familiar with the matter revealed many years ago that talks over a potential acquisition involved several other companies, including software firm Microsoft and Google.