IBM Is Destroying Red Hat and Red Hatters Are Leaving | Hacker News Reader

IBM Is Destroying Red Hat and Red Hatters Are Leaving

techrights.org

58 pointsURfejk46 comments

I work for Red Hat.

This article doesn't match (my) reality. I can speak only for myself, but very little has changed, and what changes there have been, are more easily attributable to the leadership shuffles after Jim moved up, than anything else.

Two thing that they are absolutely wrong about, is the claim that there were layoffs last year which included Red Hat, which didn't happen... and the truly lol-worthy claim that (quote) "the Fedora project is being outsourced to Microsoft and AWS", because many repositories are on Github and some of the build infrastructure is hosted on Amazon.

"tech rights" has a bit of a ... reputation. I would perhaps take their claims with a shaker full of salt.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/4541p6/can_we_not_po...

I left Red Hat less than a month ago. No relation at all with IBM, in my experience they have been welcoming and pretty aligned with the goals my team had. Great company.

Sorry if I gave them ammo by leaving and inflating the numbers, but it was only a coincidence, I swear.

Thank you very much for this clarification.

You have to read Techrights with a pinch of salt. They are often very hyperbolic.

You work for Red Hat, nice! Would you give us any hint or bit of information if IBM has any plans to release an affordable POWER system similar to BlackBird entirely designed by IBM from processor to OS?

Former IBMer here. It would be impossible for IBM to release an affordable Power system for many reasons including culture and margins. If you want Blackbird go ahead and buy it.

I have no idea what IBM is up to, honestly. It doesn't impact me. It's not something I would be in any position to talk about even if I did, though.

IBM doesn't make workstations or PCs anymore. They gave that business (along with expertise) to Lenovo.

I recently left Red Hat (Feb 2021). I joined from the CoreOS acquisition in 2018. For the most part I enjoyed working at Red Hat. Honestly the real reason I left because of GME but there where a few things that convinced me to move:

1) Killing CentOS/CoreOS. Replacing these two stable OSs with unstable upstreams in CentOS Stream/Fedora CoreOS.

2) So many container tools that have overlapping tasks yet perform in completely different manners (podman, buildah, cri-o, skopeo, tekton, openshift, quay, libpod). Interoperability between all these projects was a constant struggle.

3) Forced usage of IRC. I shouldn't have to run my own bouncer to get features like history, push notifications, identity services. I cannot comprehend how in 2021 at a major corporation I would receive irc messages from usernames like "cloudpizza9000" or "m0use" and be expected to know who these people are and take things seriously enough to work together. It seemed like I was in a 90s chat room with a bunch of strangers.

> Forced usage of IRC. I shouldn't have to run my own bouncer to get features like history, push notifications, identity services. I cannot comprehend how in 2021 at a major corporation I would receive irc messages from usernames like "cloudpizza9000" or "m0use" and be expected to know who these people are and take things seriously enough to work together. It seemed like I was in a 90s chat room with a bunch of strangers.

That sounds great! Would love to work for company like that. Meanwhile in my company we are now migrating to Teams from Lync and Slack and general IT infrastructure is usual MS-shitshow...

I'm also in RH. Our team is on Google Chat for some years now. Ironically, I preferred IRC as I could run my own instance of Weechat continuosly on a server and logged all conversations, so could extract information from history by grep et al. The hist search UI in gchat is much more cumbersome.

Where did you work in RHT? In the openshift org everyone is on slack, i haven't touched to my IRC client for a long time (for work stuff at least)

The older engineering orgs are on IRC, partially because many of the upstream communities were on IRC. It's slowly changing for the same reason (IRC falling out of favor in the broader community).

There's a mix of IRC, Slack, RocketChat, and GChat.

(Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat)

Please pay attention to the previous submission about RH from this platform. The author seems to have an agenda and likes to stir controversy.

Nothing in his post matches my experience.

>AWS is about learning and memorising GUIs, not real skills, and those ‘skills’ become useless anyway as soon as you move to a customer/server that doesn’t have AWS

This is not my experience with AWS or Red Hat whatsoever. Most, if not all AWS users I've worked with use languages like terraform and emphasize importance of Infrastructure as Code, _not_using the GUI. Cloud concepts are more important than the GUI.

The same goes for the core concepts behind Ansible/Openshift. Both are not only available free, but they emphasize IaC over GUI.

Yeah I was following along with the article up until that point. Pretty dumb thing to say by someone that probably has never run production workloads on a public cloud

This was confusing to me. I’ve never met anyone who uses the GUI for anyone substantial. And know quite a few folks who never use the GUI and either solely use the API or use some framework that uses the API.

If anything AWS skills are more portable because of all the reverse engineered APIs and whatnot.

I enjoyed the "Fedora is being outsourced to Microsoft and AWS" line, turns out they mean Fedora uses github and aws.

The "layoffs" link implies layoffs at Red Hat but the linked story talks about layoffs at microsoft(!) and IBM (ok at least thats closer but "IBM is gutting Red Hat by maybe possibly could-be laying off IBM staff" is a weird logical leap)

So just another attempt to drive clicks via a shock headline and a nothing story.

(Edit: my spelling is terrible)

Not sure I really believe anything in this article. Especially given this site's reputation for Fox News style "reporting"(meaning made up BS).

It's all bullshit.

This is very very sad and may jeopardize the future of linux. IBM produces POWER processors, they could buy or mimic Raptor Computing Systems and offer an entirely IBM-designed system from processor to OS; something that today only apple can offer. It is very sad to see such great potential wasted.

When IBM bought Red Hat, many people were waiting an inverse buy out, something like when apple bought NeXT. It looks like that is not what is happening.

No, this would be likely positive for Linux. The centralization of decision power about the linux ecosystem via Redhat lead to net negative developments like systemd adoption, X11 being left to rot under Redhat leadership in favour of a Wayland solution that still does not work properly, and Gnome 3 being pushed as the mainstream linux solution. If Redhat really would implode the natural, likely more decentralized development efforts would gain weight and prevent errors like those. The article even mentions that with the abstraction as sale argument remarks.

Are you still salty about systemd? Let it go, let it go.

Does systemd still have binary logs? There is your answer.

Unsurprising, really. I wonder if they can ever pull a SuSE and get out of IBM again, just as SuSE got out of Novell.

I don’t think there’s anything stopping Redhat folks from starting a new enterprise and building another commercial version off of CentOS. If successful, they could strip mine IBM for the useful Redhat talent and leave IBM with the cruft.

That might be difficult though, with IBM retaining the brand that people aren't fired for purchasing.

IT would know to go with the Redhat talent, but would management go with it?

RedHat has good enterprise relations, but it doesn't seem to be a no-brainer brand the way old school IBM was or the way Microsoft more recently has been.

If they can get some decent enterprise sales, support, and profesional services folks as well as developers, they’ll do fine.

I'm not so sure there. RedHat is what you pick to check a box somewhere that says "OS supported with this software/hardware/whatever". There isn't really a technical argument to pay for RedHat over CentOS, beyond box-ticking. Now a RedHat-replacement would first have to get all software and hardware vendors to support their new no-name distro. And given that this has even been hard on Oracle, I'm sceptical in general...

That might be difficult though, with IBM retaining the brand that people aren't fired for purchasing.

The MariaDB guys pulled it off

My experience someone who work for Red Hat, I had only (engineering) good relationship with the IBM people, i never heard anything about lay off or projects that needs to be killed or other devil things IBM people may do because of IBM , they are rather nice most of them actually.....

The article talks quite a lot about comments here: https://www.thelayoff.com/t/17y7dQRz#replies

But I don't see much of anything there. One negative comment from "anonymous".

This was the plan all along. Because IBM is a services company they actually make more money when they have lower quality employees. It is better to bill people out at 300/hour who are going to screw things up and make the project twice as long rather than bill people out at 500/hour when they are going to be able to finish early or scrap the project entirely because it was vaporware to begin with.

IBM is in the process of spinning off the entire consulting / services side of the company so that IBM proper can focus on "hybrid cloud", so this theory makes zero sense.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/10/ibm-t...

The article may or may not be accurate, but it's my personal opinion that I'm to small to go anywhere near IBM or Oracle.

So RedHat may still be a paradise for employees, I still can't afford it.

I've been at 3 startups so far that couldn't afford Redhat when we were small and so we hand rolled everything ourselves in house. By the time we could, it didn't matter anymore. IBM/Redhat is relevant only to old-school banks and such. Not really relevant for YC/HN crowd.

If only there was some way this could have been predicted. Perhaps using Watson?

Meanwhile https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/17/ibm_exec_payouts/

“IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec-chairwoman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved.”

This article says “AWS is... an exploiter of Free software” and I think this is a misleading choice of words because exploit has a connotation that someone is being taken advantage of.

Using free software as it was designed and explicitly allowed isn’t “exploiting.”

I know there’s a discussion and debate and all that, but using this kind of non-settled language casually in a sentence makes me less likely to find an article genuine and accurate.

IBM IBM's.

It's has and will continue happening forever as far as I can tell.

What a bunch of crap.

My first hint that things were starting to go sideways was the extended delay in bringing out CentOS 7, followed by a kernel bug that affected my CPU, where a fix was quickly available to RHEL users, and slow in coming to CentOS users. The final straw was trying to keep ZFS built; after one last time where the next kernel's ZFS module failed to build, it was out with CentOS on my home file server, and in with Ubuntu Server. I haven't looked back. I have one last CentOS box, running Asterisk, that I'm about to switch to Debian.

Then, it seemed like, all too often, I'd look up a question about CentOS, and get a link to a paywalled page on access.redhat.com for my trouble. Thanks, guys...

CentOS 8 came after even worse delays than 7, and, when I spun it up in a VM for a test drive, none of my preferred desktops were available. I said NOPE and moved on.

And now, we have this mess. What a shame it had to end this way.

You do remember that, a couple years ago, CentOS was a community project with no relation with Red Hat that went rather out of its way to avoid mentioning Red Hat and drawing trademark ire?

Also it costs $40/year to get access to the paywalled docs.

Anyway, what a shame it is that Red Hat was acquired by IBM. With customers like you, it's baffling that Red Hat thought they couldn't stay profitable on their own....

The personal attack is uncalled for. Not to mention, is Red Hat really interested in an individual running a home-built file server? I'm not a huge enterprise.

Normally, I'm self-supporting enough with my home network that I'd never need a support contract in the first place, and the workaround for my kernel bug was to run an older kernel until the fix was in place.

> Also it costs $40/year to get access to the paywalled docs

Documentation should never be paywalled. It kills SEO and usability, and is very user hostile.

Why are you under the impression that GP is or wants to be a customer? I'm not a customer of Google for writing Go code, or of Microsoft for using VS Code, or of Sentry for self-hosting their awesome product. Using FOSS CentOS doesn't make anyone a customer of RH, and that's why the latter screwed the former by abandoning CentOS8 and going back on the announced support lifecycle.

Well, if neither you nor the GP are willing to be customers of Red Hat, didn't you get exactly what you paid for? Of course putting docs behind a paywall is hostile to non-paying users! So am I!

(it's also empirically untrue that it kills SEO, given how frequently the docs in question show up in search results.)

Like there are two clear options. You can contribute your own labor to a community distro like pre-acquisition CentOS or to Debian, or you can pay for the software you use - and it costs very little money to pay for it. If you do neither, and you lament that things are going poorly for you, you might want to rethink your expectations. Things are going very well for others.

An independent CentOS probably could have survived if people were willing to put in the work of release engineering. Unfortunately, there ended up just being one user of CentOS who cared enough to put in the work - and that customer ended up being Red Hat itself. That's why they acquired it.

Scientific Linux is also dead. The RHEL SRPMs are still there, just as they have been for decades. Anyone can step up to the plate and make their own community-run rebuild of RHEL if they're unhappy with how things are going.

IBM and Oracle are going neck and neck for the crown of most self-destructive technology company.

My brother-in-law in consulting has told me several stories of people getting fired for buying IBM in recent years.

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