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Hasz 15 hours ago [-]
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.
bonzini 14 hours ago [-]
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.
kjs3 12 hours ago [-]
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.
"The only one we have not fully fully integrated yet, and I will emphasize the "yet" is RedHat".
"on the go to market side, I really believe in full integration".
you already mentioned the engineering teams, and I do think your framing is mostly right. However, I think it unrealistic to say I am going to fully integrate back-office, fully integrate GTM, and somehow engineering is totally untouched.
bonzini 14 hours ago [-]
They are not fully integrating go-to-market. In the podcast Krishna says that the size and organization of Red Hat's GTM was larger than every other acquisition, and they were looking at partial integration only. Since then they actually have moved the sales teams for smaller markets to IBM. Red Hat kept the 20 or so largest markets and the verticals.
Right now operations is employed by IBM but still mostly working as they did at Red Hat. We'll see how that changes over the next couple years, as that would be the first look at Red Hat integrating into IBM.
whimblepop 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sippingabonedry 13 hours ago [-]
> For example, look at kernel committers
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?"
BobbyTables2 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah - between that, WSL itself, and VS Code being free and actually pretty good would have been hard to imagine.
Of course, we’re in the timeline where Biff won twice.
saghm 13 hours ago [-]
> For example, look at kernel committers:
> 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?
elikoga 13 hours ago [-]
I think the interpretation is that red hat devs are over-represented in terms of ratios compared to market cap weighting of all companies contributing to linux or similiar
Hasz 13 hours ago [-]
basically. Comparing a company with google resources (and needs) is not really the same as RH resources (and needs). Basically, what percentage of rev/resources/profit/engineering headcount are you spending on linux?
saghm 12 hours ago [-]
I don't feel like this answers the last part of my question: why would that be a useful metric? If the claim is that I should be concerned with the future of kernel development because of the future of Redhat, why should dollar amounts matter rather than directly inferring from proportion of the development they do independent of dollars?
xylophile 3 hours ago [-]
Because percentage of investment indicates how central Linux is to their business. If Linux disappeared overnight, Google would find another way to sell ads, but RedHat would disappear.
It's a reasonable proxy for things like long-term commitment and commits across the stack (e.g. audio and video, not just network and disk).
htrp 14 hours ago [-]
> tailored with Watson
I think you mean built with Bob
zozbot234 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
topspin 14 hours ago [-]
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 global lifeblood of enterprise computing, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in this 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. If you need evidence for this, consider the outcome of the IBM's attempt to tighten their grip on the RHEL distribution, and the stampede to rapidly established alternatives this induced. If more of that is in Linux's future, so be it.
Hasz 13 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 13 hours ago [-]
> IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money
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.
kjs3 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Should be an interesting decade coming up.
smackeyacky 9 hours ago [-]
If they can vibe code that then so can anybody, it makes it a valueless exercise.
kjs3 7 hours ago [-]
If they can vibe code that then so can anybody
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".
jasomill 7 hours ago [-]
Mantaining a private vibecoded Linux clone sounds like a source of expenses and headaches, not value.
What’s the point?
pferde 12 hours ago [-]
...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. :)
stackghost 15 hours ago [-]
> they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions
Could you expand a bit more on what you’re describing here? Interested to hear more.
toast0 14 hours ago [-]
Offer paid support for $(whatever redhat project), do all the support stuff, but also cross-sell IBM business solutions.
stackghost 14 hours ago [-]
Yes indeed, that's pretty much what parent poster wrote.
This part:
>$(whatever redhat project)
is what I would like parent poster to expand upon, though.
scottyah 14 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway7356 15 hours ago [-]
Untrustworthy blog reposts Twitter message from some person?
0xbadcafebee 11 hours ago [-]
Employees are talking about it at cons and around town. Both Hashi and RH are being slowly shuttered.
quietsegfault 14 hours ago [-]
Untrustworthy blog? This is literally IBM's modus operandi. Look at what they did to Confluent and Hashi. Confluent is seemingly decimated.
bonzini 13 hours ago [-]
Well, techrights is not exactly reliable. I'd put it on the same level as the Daily Mail.
quietsegfault 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know techrights, and reading about them it does seem as if they have a very strong pro-FOSS, adversarial (to put it nicely) bent. So thank you for educating me there!
Reading the post closer, and looking at their other posts, I don't think this is a blog I'd personally put a lot of trust in as a valuable resource. Maybe fun to read, but yeah. Not super trustable.
> "Today the "badge" says IBM,"
Sure, people are getting moved around.
> But the role changed, there's lots of slop ("hey hi") dross or filler
I'm not sure what "hey hi" means, or filler.
> and everybody at IBM knows what PIPs and RA come next
I've been through multiple "silent" and "loud" IBM layoffs. This is 100% true.
> It's not hard to see that the vast majority of redhat.com blog posts sell slop, not Linux. It helps inflate the share price without accomplishing anything of substance.
I don't really think this is true. I feel like as long as I've read Red Hat's blog posts (less frequently now) they've been high quality.
> It's "fake work", just like slop. It cheats the shareholders, but for how much longer?
Based on the last statement, this too seems like it's at best an exaggeration.
> Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step (one step at a time), and some people altogether quit today (or yesterday), not only in Red Hat but also Nordcloud. Some receive money to leave 'voluntarily'.
This is 100% true. When I joined, people told me I was joining a different Red Hat, and the company was vastly different when I left over a decade later.
> The quantum (vaporware) teams are going "the way of the Kyndryl" via Anderon.
I'm not following quantum stuff closely, so I can't judge this, but based on the crappy performance of the Kyndryl stock I got from the spinoff, I sure hope that .. quantum is getting spun off? I don't know, this seems a little wackadoo.
> IBM is imploding 'creatively'.
Gibberish.
After reading it line by line closely and looking at my reaction .. yeah this is a rag of a blog. :D thanks again for knocking some sense into me!
qlte 12 hours ago [-]
I had to re-read the (very short) linked blog post several times thinking I skipped over an actual nugget of information that would connect it to the title. I didn't find it but noticed the weird uncanny valley writing style that became less clear the closer I tried to read.
It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.
Apocryphon 12 hours ago [-]
You're thinking of The Register.
shadow28 10 hours ago [-]
> Confluent is seemingly decimated
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.
superkuh 12 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 8 hours ago [-]
Hashicorp didn't really have a moat IMHO.
INTPenis 14 hours ago [-]
I'm also scared of RH pandering to share holders.
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.
quietsegfault 14 hours ago [-]
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.
EDIT: I was probably too strong on my statement that "all the driven, ultra sharp people". I know that I have a lot of ultra sharp, smart, engaged friends still there. What I meant to say was that I started to see the drain late 2019.
christophilus 12 hours ago [-]
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.
whalesalad 12 hours ago [-]
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 still love Debian .. but as a developer the tooling is so much more modern on Fedora stack. COPR is cool too.
goolz 11 hours ago [-]
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.
elesiuta 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
whalesalad 10 hours ago [-]
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.
goolz 5 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 8 hours ago [-]
You could just use debian testing?
whalesalad 2 hours ago [-]
I’m afraid
Reason077 11 hours ago [-]
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!
Lucasoato 9 hours ago [-]
I really don’t understand why they positioned Openshift so far from the open source K8s project. It’s even more opinionated than AKS/EKS, and this says a lot.
The only reason I see is that they wanted more vendor lock-in, but that rarely pays in the long run.
nunez 6 hours ago [-]
Red Hat wants to position OpenShift as a complete, batteries-included application platform. To do that, they had to make Kubernetes a lot more accessible to engineers who were scared of/uninterested in touching that stuff (back when Kubernetes was more novel). At its core, though, it's pretty much Kubernetes with a LOT of add-ons and (appreciated) security hardening.
Red Hat also does contribute a fair amount back to Kubernetes and CNCF: the Operator pattern, Istio, Ceph, etc.
(I work at Red Hat.)
danudey 8 hours ago [-]
Their goal is to create a system that's easy to run and manage even if you don't really know much about k8s - which I guess is a common thing, since k8s is a nightmare to manage directly until you learn everything about everything.
More importantly, they want to build an ecosystem around their ecosystem around k8s. They want people publishing their software to work on OpenShift (e.g. in the operator catalog), they have certification processes for software compatibility (e.g. CNI certification), and now that they've come as far as they have they're going after VMWare's lunch, madly scooping up every customer they can get their hands on to try to offer them a user-friendly kubevirt implementation to replace VMWare (and NSX).
If OpenShift was close to k8s then there wouldn't be enough differentiation between the two to make it worth the money so they're building out everything they think that execs and overworked infra teams will be willing to pay for to make k8s migration a workable option (rather than an internal migration project that stagnates and drags on for ten years).
OCP is just RHEL but for Kubernetes, and RHEL has done pretty well over the years all in all. RHEL is "just Linux", but it's "just Linux" with a bunch of RHEL-specific stuff in it and on top of it, and RHEL-specific policies around it, such that you can buy something from a software or hardware vendor that works with and is tested on RHEL and you know it'll work with your systems.
The goal is the same; company sells this software/solution, it runs on OpenShift v4.xx and up; you need RH's mesh and virt operators installed and configured, and then you can install our operator for our software and you're done. Now your whatever, database or CMS or whatever it is, just works. You don't have to customize the charts or define your own ingress gateway, it's all handled already if your system is set up properly. Then you get the meta-control panel that lets you see and manage all of your clusters and etc., so you can get a higher-level view, etc. etc.
They want vendor lock-in to an extent, but they've seen that what customers want isn't "Linux", it's a Linux distribution that gives them enterprise reliability (read: never getting new versions of stuff, only security patches) and compatibility guarantees from vendors. They're just trying to do the same thing with kubernetes. Will it work? Seems like it's going okay so far, I guess we'll see.
6thbit 11 hours ago [-]
I don't get it, why is one person quitting/layed off implying anything about redhat?
Why is a screenshot of a tweet and a highly speculative unfounded headline in the frontpage? What am I missing?
plorkyeran 2 hours ago [-]
He didn't quit/get fired/etc. His badge switched from saying Red Hat to saying IBM as part of an internal step towards integrating RH into IBM.
chasil 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder if the forces behind OpenELA are able to shoulder a heavier burden.
The weakest link at this point would be Oracle. They've bet their future on AI, and it's crushing them.
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.
chasil 11 hours ago [-]
SUSE is an ELA member, and maintains Liberty Linux.
They certainly have the operational capability to maintain the quality standards of Red Hat.
brightball 15 hours ago [-]
Just wait for Watson to be the next AI Leapfrog
hbn 14 hours ago [-]
That reminds me that the elevators at my work claim they're "Powered by IBM Watson" and I've always been curious what that could possibly mean.
The building was constructed in 2015 I believe, if that's some context.
Which, once you start playing, can be very difficult to detox from.
wormius 14 hours ago [-]
My biggest fear (doubt it'd happen, but...) would be seeing this headline "Oracle purchases Red Hat from IBM."
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
danudey 7 hours ago [-]
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.
asawfofor 7 hours ago [-]
So instead of two different badge making machines, now there’s 1?
23ahGa17 15 hours ago [-]
According to the tweet screenshot, IBM fires AI people! Hmm ...
nailer 14 hours ago [-]
First they ignore you,
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 an irrelevant footnote like vmware and Sun.
Early 2000s red hat was wild and I was glad to be there. I’m still the ‘mikem’ in /etc/sudoers in RHEL and Amazon Linu.
nialse 14 hours ago [-]
Context for early 2000s RH challenged individuals: It is a homage to the borrowed slogan RH used to have on posters and office walls.
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.
nailer 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pelcg 11 hours ago [-]
Why though? Isn’t RHEL fully supported and used heavily in production?
mmh0000 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jmclnx 14 hours ago [-]
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.
quietsegfault 13 hours ago [-]
It took IBM ~0 days to layoff 30% of Confluent upon deal close despite continual reinforcement that any RIFs would be coming months later.
mococa 11 hours ago [-]
They was acquired by IBM... I don't need to say more.
MadrasTh0rn 15 hours ago [-]
We all knew red hat was going to be consumed right?
Dramatizing the inevitable does what?
bonzini 14 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth:
* 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.
13 hours ago [-]
hadi77ir 8 hours ago [-]
Now the IBM has the majority on FreeDesktop, like they own it. They can "extinguish" everything they ever want to.
pelasaco 13 hours ago [-]
well SUSE, didn't need an IBM for that...
roncesvalles 12 hours ago [-]
IBM's stock price being over $150 is the most clear indicator that we're in a stock market bubble that's bound to pop.
icedchai 11 hours ago [-]
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.
smm11 11 hours ago [-]
Are you listening, Canonical?
0xbadcafebee 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jasonvorhe should apply for a job at the NFL - the "no fun league".
toomuchtodo 15 hours ago [-]
Great opportunity to migrate to NixOS for those needing to decision a migration path.
tosti 15 hours ago [-]
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.
ddellacosta 14 hours ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 14 hours ago [-]
If it’s good enough for the Dutch and French governments to be adopting, it’s good enough for some, but not yet all, corporate orgs (I argue). Sharp edges will get ground down over time. Migration decisions have inertia that is measured in half decades.
ufmace 3 hours ago [-]
What's the ratio of press releases announcing their intention to switch to actual computers running NixOS being used by low-level bureaucrats reliably for their day-to-day work?
Actually, we better invert that ratio, dividing by zero doesn't work very well no matter what OS you're using.
mrbn100ful 14 hours ago [-]
The French government did not adopt it, it's a 250 users POC.
cpburns2009 7 hours ago [-]
How many German governments have announced they're mirgrating to Linux over the years only for them to reverse course?
ltbarcly3 13 hours ago [-]
Governments always make such good, long term, well thought through technology decisions. For sure their decisions are great ones to adopt. /sarcasm
notnullorvoid 15 hours ago [-]
I'll stick with Fedora and RHEL.
From what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
I'll wait until AI has translated all the nix scripts to a more user friendly language, thank you.
stargrazer 9 hours ago [-]
Well, actually, some recent articles are indicating that AI is coming up with its own idiom of communicating. Something incomprehensible to humans. So, which will it be, AI sharing with humans, or AI hogging the ball and keeping everything private between agents?
antonvs 13 hours ago [-]
You can just use AI to configure Nix. The “user friendly language” is English (or whatever natural language you want to use.)
hollerith 15 hours ago [-]
Last time I evaluated NixOS (Mar 2021) the project didn't care a whit about desktop security. Has that changed?
Fedora at least tries relatively consistently—and has been for decades.
chronogram 15 hours ago [-]
What exactly do you mean by desktop security? Security from websites, installable software, physical access?
j1elo 15 hours ago [-]
> Security from websites, installable software, physical access?
All those would be important, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We could start from the Vulnerability Of The Year: supply chain attacks.
hollerith 15 hours ago [-]
Being able to visit a web page, open a PDF or download and inspect a git repo without the web page, PDF or git repo's being able to completely pwn the entire machine including the bootloader and the firmware for all the hardware subsystems.
Desktop Linux is very bad at that compared to ChromeOS and MacOS, but some distros are much better than others. For a few decades now, Fedora has been one of the better ones.
marcus9999 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
noosphr 10 hours ago [-]
Redhad has done more damage to open source Linux than Microsoft did. Dying is the best thing it can do.
commandersaki 11 hours ago [-]
I hope so, never liked Red Hat, even before IBM acquisition. It was essentially Microsoft-lite.
Danox 12 hours ago [-]
IBM, are they still in business? I thought they were comatose like Xerox, and Kodak. :)
wmeredith 12 hours ago [-]
They had $67 billion in revenue last year, which was up 7% from the previous year. Not exactly out of business.
xxpor 11 hours ago [-]
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.
tombert 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqrSXiRja4, 6:37 starts discussion about integration, so you can judge exactly what he says.
"The only one we have not fully fully integrated yet, and I will emphasize the "yet" is RedHat".
"on the go to market side, I really believe in full integration".
you already mentioned the engineering teams, and I do think your framing is mostly right. However, I think it unrealistic to say I am going to fully integrate back-office, fully integrate GTM, and somehow engineering is totally untouched.
Right now operations is employed by IBM but still mostly working as they did at Red Hat. We'll see how that changes over the next couple years, as that would be the first look at Red Hat integrating into IBM.
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.
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.
> 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?
It's a reasonable proxy for things like long-term commitment and commits across the stack (e.g. audio and video, not just network and disk).
I think you mean built with Bob
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.
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 global lifeblood of enterprise computing, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in this 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. If you need evidence for this, consider the outcome of the IBM's attempt to tighten their grip on the RHEL distribution, and the stampede to rapidly established alternatives this induced. If more of that is in Linux's future, so be it.
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.
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
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 $BIGCOMPANY not consider doing that? How would it be it 'valueless' to one of these players (most of whom chafe at being in bed with the OSS community anyway)? On the contrary, what value would the Linux devs still have? Why would I even consider taking any contributions not from my own little AI playpen, since I'd be able to trivially say "hey AI...those crusty old Linux devs look like they got themselves a good idea...why don't you add that to our own private OS in the next spin. Think of a nifty marketing spin to advertise it and come up with some commercials to promote it. In the style of Micheal Bay this time".
What’s the point?
Could you expand a bit more on what you’re describing here? Interested to hear more.
This part:
>$(whatever redhat project)
is what I would like parent poster to expand upon, though.
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.
Reading the post closer, and looking at their other posts, I don't think this is a blog I'd personally put a lot of trust in as a valuable resource. Maybe fun to read, but yeah. Not super trustable.
> "Today the "badge" says IBM,"
Sure, people are getting moved around.
> But the role changed, there's lots of slop ("hey hi") dross or filler
I'm not sure what "hey hi" means, or filler.
> and everybody at IBM knows what PIPs and RA come next
I've been through multiple "silent" and "loud" IBM layoffs. This is 100% true.
> It's not hard to see that the vast majority of redhat.com blog posts sell slop, not Linux. It helps inflate the share price without accomplishing anything of substance.
I don't really think this is true. I feel like as long as I've read Red Hat's blog posts (less frequently now) they've been high quality.
> It's "fake work", just like slop. It cheats the shareholders, but for how much longer?
Based on the last statement, this too seems like it's at best an exaggeration.
> Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step (one step at a time), and some people altogether quit today (or yesterday), not only in Red Hat but also Nordcloud. Some receive money to leave 'voluntarily'.
This is 100% true. When I joined, people told me I was joining a different Red Hat, and the company was vastly different when I left over a decade later.
> The quantum (vaporware) teams are going "the way of the Kyndryl" via Anderon.
I'm not following quantum stuff closely, so I can't judge this, but based on the crappy performance of the Kyndryl stock I got from the spinoff, I sure hope that .. quantum is getting spun off? I don't know, this seems a little wackadoo.
> IBM is imploding 'creatively'.
Gibberish.
After reading it line by line closely and looking at my reaction .. yeah this is a rag of a blog. :D thanks again for knocking some sense into me!
It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.
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.
Techrights is not a news source. It's propaganda and full of lies.
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.
EDIT: I was probably too strong on my statement that "all the driven, ultra sharp people". I know that I have a lot of ultra sharp, smart, engaged friends still there. What I meant to say was that I started to see the drain late 2019.
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 still love Debian .. but as a developer the tooling is so much more modern on Fedora stack. COPR is cool too.
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!
The only reason I see is that they wanted more vendor lock-in, but that rarely pays in the long run.
Red Hat also does contribute a fair amount back to Kubernetes and CNCF: the Operator pattern, Istio, Ceph, etc.
(I work at Red Hat.)
More importantly, they want to build an ecosystem around their ecosystem around k8s. They want people publishing their software to work on OpenShift (e.g. in the operator catalog), they have certification processes for software compatibility (e.g. CNI certification), and now that they've come as far as they have they're going after VMWare's lunch, madly scooping up every customer they can get their hands on to try to offer them a user-friendly kubevirt implementation to replace VMWare (and NSX).
If OpenShift was close to k8s then there wouldn't be enough differentiation between the two to make it worth the money so they're building out everything they think that execs and overworked infra teams will be willing to pay for to make k8s migration a workable option (rather than an internal migration project that stagnates and drags on for ten years).
OCP is just RHEL but for Kubernetes, and RHEL has done pretty well over the years all in all. RHEL is "just Linux", but it's "just Linux" with a bunch of RHEL-specific stuff in it and on top of it, and RHEL-specific policies around it, such that you can buy something from a software or hardware vendor that works with and is tested on RHEL and you know it'll work with your systems.
The goal is the same; company sells this software/solution, it runs on OpenShift v4.xx and up; you need RH's mesh and virt operators installed and configured, and then you can install our operator for our software and you're done. Now your whatever, database or CMS or whatever it is, just works. You don't have to customize the charts or define your own ingress gateway, it's all handled already if your system is set up properly. Then you get the meta-control panel that lets you see and manage all of your clusters and etc., so you can get a higher-level view, etc. etc.
They want vendor lock-in to an extent, but they've seen that what customers want isn't "Linux", it's a Linux distribution that gives them enterprise reliability (read: never getting new versions of stuff, only security patches) and compatibility guarantees from vendors. They're just trying to do the same thing with kubernetes. Will it work? Seems like it's going okay so far, I guess we'll see.
Why is a screenshot of a tweet and a highly speculative unfounded headline in the frontpage? What am I missing?
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.
The building was constructed in 2015 I believe, if that's some context.
Sensor telemetry with a pretty dashboard
https://play.elevatorsaga.com/
Which, once you start playing, can be very difficult to detox from.
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
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 an irrelevant footnote like vmware and Sun.
Early 2000s red hat was wild and I was glad to be there. I’m still the ‘mikem’ in /etc/sudoers in RHEL and Amazon Linu.
https://avi.alkalay.net/2007/06/you-win.html
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.
>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.
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.
Actually, we better invert that ratio, dividing by zero doesn't work very well no matter what OS you're using.
From what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
Fedora at least tries relatively consistently—and has been for decades.
All those would be important, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We could start from the Vulnerability Of The Year: supply chain attacks.
Desktop Linux is very bad at that compared to ChromeOS and MacOS, but some distros are much better than others. For a few decades now, Fedora has been one of the better ones.
It's plenty alive, just not as much inside of Silicon Valley itself.
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.