Recently, Redhat acquired Ansible, the developer of the famous configuration management software Ansible, apparently for a price of about $100M.Ansible, the software, AFAIK is licensed fully under the GPL. Ansible, the company, does however also develop an extension to the software called Tower that, as I understand it, is basically just a web GUI to the core software.Considering that Redhat could use Ansible for free anyway, and would, I guess, be very well capable of creating their own sort of GUI if that's what they needed, and that even if they bought the company they still have to adhere to the GPL for the core, why on earth would they spend such a huge amount of money on this acquisition?I'd really appreciate if someone could share some wisdom as this is not the first time that such a transaction has left me puzzled.
Redhat acquires Ansible - why?
gpl;commercial
First of all, by acquiring Ansible they not only get the copyright for the software, but most importantly the workforce - the developers who developed the tool. That is much more important than the software in question. So they can in future control the direction the software takes and also use these developers in other projects if needed or useful.Also as Zizouz already pointed out, they also becomes the owner of the intellectual property rights to the software. That seems useless in case of Open Source software - but that is wrong. Indeed everyone can use the software and even makes forks, but only the owner of the intellectual property can also use this source code in closed source projects if they wish.