It's not just a distro. RedHat used to host quite a bit of free software projects. The mailing lists that used to be now just bounce. Sourceware has been abandoned for GitLab. But I'm not sure if everything else has succesfully migrated away. It would've meant something really good if IBM would just continue to provide services for free software, but I'm not seeing them do that so I guess that means pretty much the exact opposite.
I love NixOS and use it on my work and home machines, but I balk at seriously suggesting anyone pick that as their first choice for a stable Linux distro to move to. It's filled with sharp edges, and more to the point, the project leadership and governance seems mired in drama constantly. Not a system I would feel comfortable suggesting any org should adopt without a lot of consideration, especially if stability and long-term planning are important.
I used to think techrights was biased but told the truth about the biased slice of things it did cover. Then the Freenode hostile take-over happened and I was right in the middle of it and techrights lied repeatedly about it.
Techrights is not a news source. It's propaganda and full of lies.
Hm, care to elaborate? It looks like they've retained most of the engineering team and day-to-day priorities for Confluent / Kafka probably haven't changed much.
Oh yeah I'm almost certain the brand is Kone (I'm not at the office now to double check but that logo looks immediately familiar)
It's a system where you select your floor from terminals outside of the elevators on each floor, and that hails it and tells you which one to get on. It seems to work pretty well, but I suppose the tradeoff is it's more expensive to install 2 touchscreen terminals on every floor of the building instead of a single set of buttons inside each elevator.
The side effect is that myself and everyone else who works in the building now enters other elevators and stands around waiting for it to go where we want before remembering you need to select your floor after you get in.
Krishna was on Norges podcast a while ago and mentioned that Red Hat would be (not his words) brought to heel with the rest of IBM. IMO, it is a version of the Broadcom/VMware playbook, boil-the-frog style.
Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:
weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.
There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.
These guys are pursuing the wrong strategy, they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions leveraging existing consulting teams they already have (IBM revenue to hugely reliant on PS, 33%). Basically the largest "forward deployed eng" transition ever, backed by existing very strong open-source software and tailored (with Watson, dear god) as the "AI powered" engine to appease the shareholder gods. You would run over so many startups with poor penetration at the F2000 level.
Krishna's words on the podcast you cite were: "Red Hat has not been integrated... yet. [...] Engineering in Red Hat, I actually believe given the open-source nature
of Red Hat, is going to have to be its own function. So, engineering I
will likely not integrate because working at their scale of open source,
maybe that is one where IBM learns from them, and things that are open
source should belong much more in the Red Hat methodology than ours".
Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.
When we were purchased by IBM (admittedly it's been a while), our separate HR, finance, IT and legal groups were gone before we knew it. Engineering got integrated over the first year (when I left), but with a pretty light touch, and AFAIK took into the second year to complete. Apparently things got increasingly more "IBM-ified" over the years, but a suprising number of the core folks have stayed, so it can't be all misery. Maybe RH won't be completely crushed.
IBM won't entertain your recommended strategy. IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money: the sort of broad based popularity you hope for has no value at IBM. Governments, banks and monster health care operations are the only customers IBM really cares about for their computing products.
I know IBM has been employing a large number of people to work on Linux. I'm not as concerned about the eventual wind-down of that as I might otherwise be: Linux is the lifeblood of the cloud, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in that world to employ Linux developers. A dispersion of this talent, with the inevitable shift in focus to things that are not strictly IBM's prerogatives, might have a real benefit for Linux.
Past that, software development has suddenly become cheaper in any case: Linux is in the optimal position to benefit greatly from the good parts of that, largely due a legacy of good leadership, so perhaps employed developer headcount doesn't have the importance it has always had.
In any case, I have every faith that Linux's future is not tightly coupled to the fate of whatever Red Hat withers into: there is too much at stake for too many well-resourced entities to permit Linux to suffer at the hands of IBM.
Well that's the funny thing, the deep pocketed institutional money is by and large using common and popular open source projects (increasingly so).
IBM is hoping for the old mainframe days to come back, but those are long gone. The tech IBM has which companies want to use by and large comes out of redhat today.
I'm reminded of IBM's opposition of C++'s removal of trigrams [1] all because it makes their character encoding system, EBCDIC, incompatible with C++. That's the sort of lock in that IBM is hoping for and it's lock in that no (sane) business tech leader would subscribe to.
Yes, I don't argue that IBM's ways are advisable. The revenue of the top ten big tech companies are all 2-10x greater than IBM, which is ~21 on that list.
You should update yourself on how those mainframes power z/OS UNIX, Aix and Linux workloads, alongside their older OS personalities just like VMS/Windows have done, including cloud workloads with containers even, at the usual traditional customers.
Those customers aren't going to place containers on Amazon for their systems.
The interview I linked higher in this thread specifically calls out targeting non F2000 type customers with point solutions and not taking their traditional sales motion everywhere. I think this will be quite difficult for them to do, but will see.
I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).
I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.
If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.
Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.
We'll see how that works in a world where someone/something with enough cash/tokens can say "hey there little AI buddy...why don't you code me up something that works exactly like Linux without all those pesky licensing things while I grab a beer". Personally, I think that's going to be kinda inevitable in the corporate world since I could say thing like "...oh, and add these 5 things Linux doesn't do, and don't reimpliment anything that isn't in this widget we want to sell. And write it in rust, because I heard that's cool." and instantly get a slimmed down, bespoke chunk of software that I/the corp/evil people can (so far?) claim ownership of.
...and have it fail spectacularly when deployed in an environment that requires reliability performance and high availability. Yes, I honestly can't wait to see those horror comedies unfold, but hopefully far away from me. :)
GP is saying (paraphrased) "I'm not worried about Linux because even if IBM (or Qualcomm, or ...) decides to close down their Linux efforts, the Linux devs will go someplace else and still contribute", which is true as far as it goes. My contention is it might not matter, because the big player can just as easily pay far fewer people to vibecode their own Linux workalike and take back control by displacing OG Linux in their tech ecosystem. When I can leverage all the previous work done to create Linux (aka The Hard Part), leave the licensing behind (not tested in court yet) and have my very own OS that I can vibecode/iterate any way I want independent of the Linux dev community, why would $BIGCOMPANY not consider doing that? How would it be it 'valueless' to one of these players (most of whom chafe at being in bed with the OSS community anyway)? On the contrary, what value would the Linux devs still have? Why would I even consider taking any contributions not from my own little AI playpen, since I'd be able to trivially say "hey AI...those crusty old Linux devs look like they got themselves a good idea...why don't you add that to our own private OS in the next spin. Think of a nifty marketing spin to advertise it and come up with some commercials to promote it. In the style of Micheal Bay this time".
> weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo
What does "weighting commits by market cap" mean? Counting commits from people who work for companies with larger market cap more? Why would that be a useful metric?
> Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it
Not sure why that would have to be an issue, IBM have their own history of significant contributions to the Linux and FLOSS communities. They're not pre-acquisition RedHat but they're not far behind either.
One thing I hope IBM understands here is that healthy F/OSS projects aren't really the kind of thing you can buy and proprietarize even by "forking"/re-licensing your own code. Ages ago, Oracle learned this when they bought Sun, particularly with the birth of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice. More recently, Hashicorp is facing the same phenomenon with the departure of the chief maintainer of Terraform to work on OpenTofu at Spacelift.
Many F/OSS maintainers care pretty deeply about things like software freedom, taking good care of our digital commons, and leaving their mark on the world in a public way. I imagine that's especially true at Red Hat. You can buy the company, you can change the relationship to the community of "outside" contributors, and you can even release new versions of the software under a proprietary license. You can create upheaval for a lot of people, including the users. But you will often not only fail to walk away with key maintainers on your team, but watch them go on to form your competition on a new fork.
I don't personally know anyone who works at Red Hat, but even from the interactions I've seen recently in issue trackers and PRs to projects maintained in part by Red Hat engineers, I'm inclined to have a bit of faith. The upstream-first culture there still seems pretty strong and pretty quality-oriented to me. I don't think you can reliably keep engineers like that and turn them into drones who don't care about the craft and their impact on users and developers.
IT (at least the folks I know) moved to IBM today, and the director-level person I talked to said their entire team has given up.
So many in sales have either left or given up because they're sick and tired of being second fiddle to their IBM counterparts. I know I was sick of the IBM "dump a bunch of cloudpaks and disappear and leave Red Hat to pick up the pieces" sales play when I was there.
It doesn't matter if Red hat is employing thousands of people if they're now operating under the IBM software model.
IBM develops and sells Storage Products, so we are going to take the engineering teams that development and maintain those storage products because, you know, it just makes sense.
We maintain and develop Power, etc. so it only makes sense that we move all development for RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible, Satellite, etc on Power, etc to IBM because, you know, it makes sense.
Why do we have two HR, Legal, etc teams? Those teams are joining Red Hat Jan 1, because, you know, it makes sense.
And so on and so on, and many Red Hatters just said, "Yea that does make sense".
Suddenly, someone pointed out that in a year and half span, 1/4th of the company will move to Red Hat leaving Engineering, Sales, and Support and 1/3rd of Sales is moving as well and, only then, did the rest of Red Hat say, "Holy Shit!"
Red Hat determined this path in 2001, when it started pivoting to enterprise customers only. Everything after that was just the usual progression for a minor enterprise player.
You might be right. Ubuntu and Shuttleworth certainly captured the void left for a polished Linux distro after the pivot. I think there was value to something being used personally and at work.
> I think there was value to something being used personally and at work.
Right. My own experience was that I paid for a copy of Red Hat Linux, shipped in a pretty box and everything, and then within a year or so discovered that that was the end of the line.
Although technically it was supposed to have been possible to switch to Fedora at that point, the rollout and info around that wasn't at all clear.
My reaction was oh well, guess I'll use Debian - and later, at every company I've worked at in the intervening decades, encouraged use of either Ubuntu or Debian, or provider variants like Container-Optimized OS. No-one ever objected to that, because Red Hat was doing the "enterprise sales" thing, and ain't nobody got time for that.
No surprise with this, people who has been following IBM over the years knew this day would come.
>Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step
I went through this and it started 5 years after purchase by IBM and it took another 3 or 4 years before everything was completely gone. FWIW, I have sense left IBM.
They have more bargaining power now. Lots of people are scrambling to get off vmware after they raised their prices astronomically for seemingly no reason (other than they could, and a lot of groups are leaving VMs for containers). Openshift Virtualization is there with open arms to take those who haven't or won't migrate off of VMs.
Redhat can now charge a lot more and have worse service because some of their main competition now enables it. Whatever replaces kubernetes is slowly being formed and decided on, but there's easy pickings for custom solutions and consultants for now.
Things like Cloudflare Workers, boxd.sh, fly.io's sprites, etc. Just different takes on how much needs to be packaged into a container with a pipeline and how deploys work. I think that especially with AI, we're going to see a lot quicker method of code -> prod. Right now there's a lot of overhead with kubernetes that most customers I know don't really benefit from.
Oh Broadcom has very solid reasons for what they are doing to vmware customers - in many cases they have total vendor lock in & can milk those customers dry for years before they can finally flee.
Sure, by that point vmware would be dead but Broadcom would also be latched into another victim (that it bough for a part of the bloody money) & milking their vendor locked customers.
Rinse and repeat. Or use oil, fire and steel - like you would use on a tick.
OpenShift Virtualization by itself is much cheaper than vSphere is core-for-core. Part of the reason for this is that Broadcom now requires customers to purchase their VCF bundle which includes a lot of useful stuff but is massively overkill for people who just need virtualization.
Also, OpenShift runs on Kubernetes; no plans to change that as far as I know!
But RH disappearing as a brand is far fetched imho, just look at the recent output of their Youtube channel. They're leaning heavily into the Red Hat branding, not IBM.
I'm more worried about the brain drain and drop in morale of the veteran employees. Something posts like this one probably contribute to.
RH pandered to shareholders for the entire decade I worked there. It will not disappear as a brand, that is far too valuable for IBM to buy credibility over their bullshit shovelware.
I left shortly after the IBM acquisition was announced, and I'm so happy I did.
The brain drain happened shortly after the announcement. To me it seems like all the driven, ultra-sharp people started leaving in 2019 and in force in 2020 and early 2021. The people I've interacted with Red Hat since 2020 were not anywhere near as sharp as the folks I worked with prior.
Why would they have to shoulder a heavier burden? Anyhow no, if Red Hats ceased to exist, OpenELA would disappear. They are not doing any upstream engineering work.
SUSE cannot replace Red Hat. This is the irony of OpenELA. They are a scavenger that relies on the work Red Hat does. Suse, Oracle, CQI, etc are going to suddenly come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate Red Hat's Engineering team to maintain and develop all of these packages?
Oracle? Who is laying off people and bleeding money due to their over zealous AI spending?
SUSE, which made 50M in profits last year, is going to onboard 5K Software Engineers, develop build systems, cover infrastructure costs, and still make a profit?
Don't worry, Oracle is well on its way to junk bond status and when it gets there it won't be able to afford the interest on borrowing enough to let it do anything interesting or terrible.
I hope not. I love Fedora, and it's kind of heavily reliant on Red Hat being a good citizen (as are many other distros). Red Hat is still the (benevolent?) king of the Linux world.
I've been a diehard Debian user for most of my life. Swag. T-shirts. Case badges. Virtually every cloud server, VPS or dedicated box in my homelab is Debian or Debian-based (proxmox). My first install was in the Etch days.
But recently I installed Fedora on my Framework 13 Pro and I really like it a lot. everything 'just works'. Then I installed it on a Chuwi netbook, and again to my surprise everything 'just works'. I am starting to dig dnf over apt, too. I am running Rocky as my domain controller at home (free ipa). Suffice to say I am kinda leanin into the redhat/rpm/fedora ecosysem and will be rebuilding my workstation (Deb 12) on Fedora instead of going to Debian 13.
I love Debian for servers still but man Bazzite (atomic Fedora) has been a dream these past years for my gaming PC and laptop. Astoundingly it “just works” in every regard and is rock solid. With the advent of LLMs automating away all the minutiae of caring for a desktop environment I feel like I have died and gone to heaven.
Real. With Claude/Codex any trivial issue you have on Linux is solved in like 2 minutes flat. I run CachyOS on my gaming rig (12700k, 7900xtx) and it has worked flawlessly (Arc Raiders, Titanfall, Palworld, Robocop, Cyberpunk) but I will probably play with bazzite some day just to dogfood it.
Yeah! And I honestly feel like I am learning a ton more as I go. I love looking at the traces and it removes that burden of toiling for hours with little gain. I am glad to have known the before-time, but the future is nigh.
Funny I started with switching my Debian/Ubuntu servers to Fedora coreos first, then that got me installing Bazzite on my gaming PC, and now I have some variant of Fedora atomic on all my machines.
I downloaded a .iso file on /tmp and the screen went black.
Because these days the systemd dev decided that /tmp must be mounted on tmpfs to be fast, so storing a file there obviously triggered the OOM killer that proceded to kill the wayland process, which caused everything to die.
/tmp is mounted on RAM by default these days, by systemd. Apparently not dropping 2000€ on a computer is not a normal configuration.
On the other hand, imagine going back in time to 1985 and telling people that one day AAPL would have over 10x the profit and 20x the market cap of IBM.
Essentially every single electronic financial transaction that you do (outside of crypto exchanges) involves an IBM mainframe. A huge number of businesses run on top of IBM I (like Costco).
It's plenty alive, just not as much inside of Silicon Valley itself.
At one point I respected Red Hat a lot, they did a lot for Linux initially. But they also sponsored the people who have come to destroy it as of late. Can't say I'll miss them.
I spent a few years at Red Hat. Great company back in those days, I wonder how mucb IBM has changed it but some of my former colleagues are still there, years later, so it can’t be too bad!
It does remain one of my regrets that I cashed out my vested stock options much too soon. If I’d held on to them until the IBM buyout I would have done very well for myself!
As a Senior Engineering Manager, I can tell you that, per my directive, we've actively standardized on Rocky Linux. We're moving away from everything else, including RHEL.
I was a long-time RHCX (Red Hat Certified Examiner). From around 2005 to 2015. When IBM bought Red Hat, I saw the writing on the wall, but I was optimistic it might be a Good Thing™. It wasn't a good thing. Red Hat has been pretty stagnant, as the article says. RH is 90% AI slop today. They'll live on as a brand for a long time, but from a technical perspective, they don't have much to offer.
In the early 2000s, I recommended paying for RH because their technical support was amazing. Now, it's mostly 3rd-party contractors who know less than what you can find with a Google search. Unless you are extremely lucky, you never get to talk to actual RH engineers anymore.
I really like the Red Hat ecosystem and system design. However, I feel like they've petered out and won't recover from where they're headed. (I say, as I type this on my personal laptop running Fedora).
TL;DR: RH went from a super-nerd company to coasting on its former success.
I think the last time I ran anything Redhat based was Fedora in 2014 or so? I remember facing some issues with my graphics driver rendering Gnome and so I ditched it and went to Arch.
I think every server I have ever used at work has been Ubuntu or Debian based. Every time I go to these cons I am always flabbergasted that Redhat has such a presence when even a massive dork like me never uses it.
If you are running closed source licensed/paid "enterprise applications" on Linux, Red Hat still makes a lot of sense as a successor to the earlier RISC-based Unixes. No?
120 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 85.3 ms ] threadFrom what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
Techrights is not a news source. It's propaganda and full of lies.
Hm, care to elaborate? It looks like they've retained most of the engineering team and day-to-day priorities for Confluent / Kafka probably haven't changed much.
Sensor telemetry with a pretty dashboard
It's a system where you select your floor from terminals outside of the elevators on each floor, and that hails it and tells you which one to get on. It seems to work pretty well, but I suppose the tradeoff is it's more expensive to install 2 touchscreen terminals on every floor of the building instead of a single set of buttons inside each elevator.
The side effect is that myself and everyone else who works in the building now enters other elevators and stands around waiting for it to go where we want before remembering you need to select your floor after you get in.
https://play.elevatorsaga.com/
Which, once you start playing, can be very difficult to detox from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbDnxzrbxn4
Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.
There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.
These guys are pursuing the wrong strategy, they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions leveraging existing consulting teams they already have (IBM revenue to hugely reliant on PS, 33%). Basically the largest "forward deployed eng" transition ever, backed by existing very strong open-source software and tailored (with Watson, dear god) as the "AI powered" engine to appease the shareholder gods. You would run over so many startups with poor penetration at the F2000 level.
Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.
I know IBM has been employing a large number of people to work on Linux. I'm not as concerned about the eventual wind-down of that as I might otherwise be: Linux is the lifeblood of the cloud, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in that world to employ Linux developers. A dispersion of this talent, with the inevitable shift in focus to things that are not strictly IBM's prerogatives, might have a real benefit for Linux.
Past that, software development has suddenly become cheaper in any case: Linux is in the optimal position to benefit greatly from the good parts of that, largely due a legacy of good leadership, so perhaps employed developer headcount doesn't have the importance it has always had.
In any case, I have every faith that Linux's future is not tightly coupled to the fate of whatever Red Hat withers into: there is too much at stake for too many well-resourced entities to permit Linux to suffer at the hands of IBM.
Well that's the funny thing, the deep pocketed institutional money is by and large using common and popular open source projects (increasingly so).
IBM is hoping for the old mainframe days to come back, but those are long gone. The tech IBM has which companies want to use by and large comes out of redhat today.
I'm reminded of IBM's opposition of C++'s removal of trigrams [1] all because it makes their character encoding system, EBCDIC, incompatible with C++. That's the sort of lock in that IBM is hoping for and it's lock in that no (sane) business tech leader would subscribe to.
[1] https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf
Those customers aren't going to place containers on Amazon for their systems.
I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).
I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.
If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.
Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.
Broadcom likely disagrees, lightly snickering all the way to the bank.
https://itdaily.com/blogs/datacenter/broadcom-makes-a-u-turn...
Should be an interesting decade coming up.
Yes...that is exactly the point I'm making.
GP is saying (paraphrased) "I'm not worried about Linux because even if IBM (or Qualcomm, or ...) decides to close down their Linux efforts, the Linux devs will go someplace else and still contribute", which is true as far as it goes. My contention is it might not matter, because the big player can just as easily pay far fewer people to vibecode their own Linux workalike and take back control by displacing OG Linux in their tech ecosystem. When I can leverage all the previous work done to create Linux (aka The Hard Part), leave the licensing behind (not tested in court yet) and have my very own OS that I can vibecode/iterate any way I want independent of the Linux dev community, why would $BIGCOMPANY not consider doing that? How would it be it 'valueless' to one of these players (most of whom chafe at being in bed with the OSS community anyway)? On the contrary, what value would the Linux devs still have? Why would I even consider taking any contributions not from my own little AI playpen, since I'd be able to trivially say "hey AI...those crusty old Linux devs look like they got themselves a good idea...why don't you add that to our own private OS in the next spin. Think of a nifty marketing spin to advertise it and come up with some commercials to promote it. In the style of Micheal Bay this time".
What’s the point?
I think you mean built with Bob
> weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo
What does "weighting commits by market cap" mean? Counting commits from people who work for companies with larger market cap more? Why would that be a useful metric?
Microsoft 12 places higher than Canonical.
Going back in time 25 years and telling someone that would have been met with Doc Brown's "who's Vice President, Jerry Lewis?"
Of course, we’re in the timeline where Biff won twice.
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
Not sure why that would have to be an issue, IBM have their own history of significant contributions to the Linux and FLOSS communities. They're not pre-acquisition RedHat but they're not far behind either.
Many F/OSS maintainers care pretty deeply about things like software freedom, taking good care of our digital commons, and leaving their mark on the world in a public way. I imagine that's especially true at Red Hat. You can buy the company, you can change the relationship to the community of "outside" contributors, and you can even release new versions of the software under a proprietary license. You can create upheaval for a lot of people, including the users. But you will often not only fail to walk away with key maintainers on your team, but watch them go on to form your competition on a new fork.
I don't personally know anyone who works at Red Hat, but even from the interactions I've seen recently in issue trackers and PRs to projects maintained in part by Red Hat engineers, I'm inclined to have a bit of faith. The upstream-first culture there still seems pretty strong and pretty quality-oriented to me. I don't think you can reliably keep engineers like that and turn them into drones who don't care about the craft and their impact on users and developers.
Dramatizing the inevitable does what?
* Engineering, marketing, and most of sales are still Red Hat (different employer, different benefits etc.)
* IT and some smaller sales teams are moving to IBM
* Over the years some teams were exchanged between the companies, for example AI went from IBM to Red Hat and middleware went the other way round.
You may say this is simply boiling the frog, but Red Hat is still employing thousands of people.
So many in sales have either left or given up because they're sick and tired of being second fiddle to their IBM counterparts. I know I was sick of the IBM "dump a bunch of cloudpaks and disappear and leave Red Hat to pick up the pieces" sales play when I was there.
It doesn't matter if Red hat is employing thousands of people if they're now operating under the IBM software model.
IBM did this correctly.
IBM develops and sells Storage Products, so we are going to take the engineering teams that development and maintain those storage products because, you know, it just makes sense.
We maintain and develop Power, etc. so it only makes sense that we move all development for RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible, Satellite, etc on Power, etc to IBM because, you know, it makes sense.
Why do we have two HR, Legal, etc teams? Those teams are joining Red Hat Jan 1, because, you know, it makes sense.
And so on and so on, and many Red Hatters just said, "Yea that does make sense".
Suddenly, someone pointed out that in a year and half span, 1/4th of the company will move to Red Hat leaving Engineering, Sales, and Support and 1/3rd of Sales is moving as well and, only then, did the rest of Red Hat say, "Holy Shit!"
then they laugh at you,
then they fight you,
then you win
Then local datacenters move to the cloud
Then you don’t keep up with Amazon
Then you exit to IBM
Then you get used to shovel IBM garbage onto customers
Then you become a footnote like vmware.
(I’m the ‘mikem’ in /etc/sudoers in RHEL and Amazon Linux)
https://avi.alkalay.net/2007/06/you-win.html
Right. My own experience was that I paid for a copy of Red Hat Linux, shipped in a pretty box and everything, and then within a year or so discovered that that was the end of the line.
Although technically it was supposed to have been possible to switch to Fedora at that point, the rollout and info around that wasn't at all clear.
My reaction was oh well, guess I'll use Debian - and later, at every company I've worked at in the intervening decades, encouraged use of either Ubuntu or Debian, or provider variants like Container-Optimized OS. No-one ever objected to that, because Red Hat was doing the "enterprise sales" thing, and ain't nobody got time for that.
>Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step
I went through this and it started 5 years after purchase by IBM and it took another 3 or 4 years before everything was completely gone. FWIW, I have sense left IBM.
Redhat can now charge a lot more and have worse service because some of their main competition now enables it. Whatever replaces kubernetes is slowly being formed and decided on, but there's easy pickings for custom solutions and consultants for now.
Regarding k8s, I am not aware of any emerging technology being developed to replace it.
Sure, by that point vmware would be dead but Broadcom would also be latched into another victim (that it bough for a part of the bloody money) & milking their vendor locked customers.
Rinse and repeat. Or use oil, fire and steel - like you would use on a tick.
Also, OpenShift runs on Kubernetes; no plans to change that as far as I know!
Source: I work at Red Hat.
But RH disappearing as a brand is far fetched imho, just look at the recent output of their Youtube channel. They're leaning heavily into the Red Hat branding, not IBM.
I'm more worried about the brain drain and drop in morale of the veteran employees. Something posts like this one probably contribute to.
I left shortly after the IBM acquisition was announced, and I'm so happy I did.
The brain drain happened shortly after the announcement. To me it seems like all the driven, ultra-sharp people started leaving in 2019 and in force in 2020 and early 2021. The people I've interacted with Red Hat since 2020 were not anywhere near as sharp as the folks I worked with prior.
The weakest link at this point would be Oracle. They've bet their future on AI, and it's crushing them.
https://openela.org/
They certainly have the operational capability to maintain the quality standards of Red Hat.
SUSE cannot replace Red Hat. This is the irony of OpenELA. They are a scavenger that relies on the work Red Hat does. Suse, Oracle, CQI, etc are going to suddenly come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate Red Hat's Engineering team to maintain and develop all of these packages?
No. And you know that.
Either SUSE or Oracle have sufficient funding to do so.
SUSE, which made 50M in profits last year, is going to onboard 5K Software Engineers, develop build systems, cover infrastructure costs, and still make a profit?
So you do know, you just don’t want to admit it.
No.
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
But recently I installed Fedora on my Framework 13 Pro and I really like it a lot. everything 'just works'. Then I installed it on a Chuwi netbook, and again to my surprise everything 'just works'. I am starting to dig dnf over apt, too. I am running Rocky as my domain controller at home (free ipa). Suffice to say I am kinda leanin into the redhat/rpm/fedora ecosysem and will be rebuilding my workstation (Deb 12) on Fedora instead of going to Debian 13.
First time I tried wayland it was on fedora.
I downloaded a .iso file on /tmp and the screen went black.
Because these days the systemd dev decided that /tmp must be mounted on tmpfs to be fast, so storing a file there obviously triggered the OOM killer that proceded to kill the wayland process, which caused everything to die.
/tmp is mounted on RAM by default these days, by systemd. Apparently not dropping 2000€ on a computer is not a normal configuration.
It's plenty alive, just not as much inside of Silicon Valley itself.
It does remain one of my regrets that I cashed out my vested stock options much too soon. If I’d held on to them until the IBM buyout I would have done very well for myself!
IBM stock was around $120 for a while, then doubled and went as high as 300. It’s now settled in the low 200s.
Holding Red Hat through IBM was really nice.
I was a long-time RHCX (Red Hat Certified Examiner). From around 2005 to 2015. When IBM bought Red Hat, I saw the writing on the wall, but I was optimistic it might be a Good Thing™. It wasn't a good thing. Red Hat has been pretty stagnant, as the article says. RH is 90% AI slop today. They'll live on as a brand for a long time, but from a technical perspective, they don't have much to offer.
In the early 2000s, I recommended paying for RH because their technical support was amazing. Now, it's mostly 3rd-party contractors who know less than what you can find with a Google search. Unless you are extremely lucky, you never get to talk to actual RH engineers anymore.
I really like the Red Hat ecosystem and system design. However, I feel like they've petered out and won't recover from where they're headed. (I say, as I type this on my personal laptop running Fedora).
TL;DR: RH went from a super-nerd company to coasting on its former success.
Tell me, where do the source bits from Rocky Linux come from ? ;-)
Why is a screenshot of a tweet and a highly speculative unfounded headline in the frontpage? What am I missing?
I think every server I have ever used at work has been Ubuntu or Debian based. Every time I go to these cons I am always flabbergasted that Redhat has such a presence when even a massive dork like me never uses it.