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:

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.

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.

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.

Untrustworthy blog reposts Twitter message from some person?

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!

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'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.

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?

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)

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.

https://openela.org/

Just wait for Watson to be the next AI Leapfrog

Why though? Isn’t RHEL fully supported and used heavily in production?

According to the tweet screenshot, IBM fires AI people! Hmm ...

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.

They was acquired by IBM... I don't need to say more.

Are you listening, Canonical?

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.

We all knew red hat was going to be consumed right?

Dramatizing the inevitable does what?

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.

well SUSE, didn't need an IBM for that...

Great opportunity to migrate to NixOS for those needing to decision a migration path.

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 hope so, never liked Red Hat, even before IBM acquisition. It was essentially Microsoft-lite.

Redhad has done more damage to open source Linux than Microsoft did. Dying is the best thing it can do.

IBM, are they still in business? I thought they were comatose like Xerox, and Kodak. :)

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.