Red Hat’s CTO took to Reddit this week to reassure fans that the company would stick to its open source knitting after the firm absorbed by IBM earlier this month AND that their Red Hat swag could be worth a packet in future .

The first question to hit in Chris Wright’s Reddit AMA regarded the effect on Red Hat’s OpenShift strategy. The short answer, was “no effect”.

“First, Red Hat is still Red Hat, and we are focused on delivering the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform,” Wright answered “Second, upstream first development in Kubernetes and community ecosystem development in OKD are part of our product development process. Neither of those change. The IBM acquisition can help accelerate the adoption of OpenShift given the increase scale and reach in sales and services that IBM has.”

Asked whether IBM’s aim with the Red Hat buy was to shift its focus “to  include more “*aaS focus”, Wright replied.

“I can’t really comment on that.  But I can say that IBM’s sees value in running their products on OpenShift across any footprint where OpenShift runs (on premises or across public cloud providers).

Inevitably, there was concern over Red Hat’s continued backing for open source projects like Fedora and Gnome under the new regime. Wright sought to calm fears.

“Red Hat will remain committed to the upstream work we do across the board.  It is a fundamental part of how we develop our sw products. Things like Network Manager create desktop usability, and can even be the impetus behind more core distro improvements.  The IBM acquisition doesn’t change this at all. I see the future of Red Hat as staying focused on our core mission and continuing to evolve with (upstream first!) open source and our customers needs.”

Inevitably, there was concern over Red Hat’s continued backing for open source projects like Fedora and Gnome. Wright sought to calm fears.

Ultimately, the really pressing question was will those Fedora-alike head coverings and other swag Red Hat gives away at conferences change colour? “No, Red is Red. We just announced the evolution of our logo in May, no plans for any other changes. We like the new logo and so do the associates who already got tattoos of it!”

He added, “So, hang onto your swag…since we refreshed our logo, you may have some collectors items! ;)” Though the superfans might have been better advised to have invested some cash in Red Hat shares, rather than storage space for conference swag. Or indeed getting inked in the firm’s image.

You can see Wright’s full online chat here.