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.
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.
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.
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.
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
The weakest link at this point would be Oracle. They've bet their future on AI, and it's crushing them.
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.
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.
>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.
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.