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.

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.

> 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?"

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.

> 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?

> tailored with Watson

I think you mean built with Bob

> 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.

> 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.

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.

RedHat Virtualization is pretty expensive too.

Regarding k8s, I am not aware of any emerging technology being developed to replace it.

Employees are talking about it at cons and around town. Both Hashi and RH are being slowly shuttered.

Untrustworthy blog? This is literally IBM's modus operandi. Look at what they did to Confluent and Hashi. Confluent is seemingly decimated.

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.

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.

Even beyond the buyout.

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.

It took IBM ~0 days to layoff 30% of Confluent upon deal close despite continual reinforcement that any RIFs would be coming months later.

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.)

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.

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.

Context for early 2000s RH challenged individuals: It is a homage to the borrowed slogan RH used to have on posters and office walls.

https://avi.alkalay.net/2007/06/you-win.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now the IBM has the majority on FreeDesktop, like they own it. They can "extinguish" everything they ever want to.

Many, many people are still in a state of denial.

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!"

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.

Trigger warning: https://www.redhatsociety.com/

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.

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.

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.

Semi-related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841563

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.

As interesting as watching Gentoo being compiled.

[dead]

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?

They had $67 billion in revenue last year, which was up 7% from the previous year. Not exactly out of business.

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.