But that’s only if you count the starting year as 1993; Red Hat the actual company seems to have been started in 1995, from what I read. In that case, they would have been 28 years old today.
As a former Red Hat employee this was painful to read. IBM is doing a Sun Microsystems to it, Red Hat used to be such a great company.
I'm a user (of both RHEL and Fedora, although I use RHEL via the free developer license so I am not actually a customer).
I used to be a Sun user in the same way, but when Oracle bought Sun it was really, really obvious that using Sun's stuff was something we should immediately prepare to stop doing.
It's a little less obvious with IBM buying Red Hat, though -- especially to a random user like me.
For one, IBM isn't nestled between Halliburton, Enron, and Juul on the despicability spectrum.
For two, it looks a lot like Apple buying NeXT, at least from the outside. As in old company with a lot of not-looking-so-hot-anymore tech buys the younger upstart with better tech, and the better tech seems to win.
So what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad? E.g. firing the team responsible for developing X, and just milking the dead husk for short-term enterprise deals, or... ??
This is just the customer facing stuff. The internal politics are more painful.
- Got rid of RHV, gave customers no realistic migration path
- Moved an entire BU of employees from Red Hat to IBM with no choice except to GTFO if you didn't wanna become an IBM employee (storage BU)
- Each area of the business is under increased oversight due to IBM beancounters thinking they know better
- IBM interference in product development (IBM has a deal, so they want feature X, even though bugfix Y and Z are more important)
At first it was all "yeah, you red hatters are gonna save IBM", but Red Hat is at the point where OpenShift is being milked by IBM 100%.
IBM hasn’t touched us and they are not doing what Oracle did to Sun. Not yet anyway, but Jim made a bunch of promises to us when we were acquired and they’ve kept them all.
They had 3.4 billion reasons to acquire when they acquired it in 2018, and they had roughly 6 billion reasons not to touch it last year.
Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions?
OK, my previous comment was an overstatement. This is what's happening.
It's just the tech company circle of life, I guess. I wonder what younger tech company might play a similar role as Red Hat has another 30 years from now, and if they even exist yet.
There was hardly any new feature between RHV 4.3 (early 2019) and 4.4 (2020, last non-maintenance release) and there literally wasn't time for IBM to say anything about RHV 4.4, considering that feature work for 4.4 would have started before the acquisition (July 2019).
One thing that is a clear change is that IBM is pushing for having a cheaper workforce, more employees but cheaper and therefore less qualified. Many short term goals of getting quick sales rather than get stuff that is sustainable over time not just technically but also burning people out.
Depecration of CentOS is something that really pissed me off, specially when we had acquired CentOS a few years back.
Some projects have been transfered to IBM. Others without being transferred directly were influenced by IBM in a negative way (I was a software engineer in one that was).
Significant changes in teams that deal with end customers, support has been affected, consulting has been affected. I know sales had some kind of merge as well (I don't any friend in sales but I've heard some stuff), etc...
Also there are loads of ridiculous changes in policy to save costs and they don't even save any money.
Something that really pissed me off were problems in HR. For instance I've seen problems in payslips (once I was paid THREE times with different amounts and the following month I got a discount on my payslip because I was paid too much, I know a guy who got paid 4 times that month and the month after he still got an extra amount because after 4 different payments money was still missing). I've heard of problems and delays doing the paperwork for paternity leave.
First of all let's be clear, the deprecation of CentOS was already in the air when CentOS Stream was started internally. That was IIRC in 2017, anyway before the acquisition. Even before that there had been a serious effort on increasing CI and CD of RHEL. It was a prerequisite to a feasible "rolling release" distro and it naturally led to CentOS Stream. I totally agree that communication sucked there, it was not the first time Red Hat screwed up communication with the community and probably won't be the last. That's sad. On the other hand I like the way Rocky Linux and Alma developed out of CentOS Stream. In exchange for a shorter lifecycle, their developers now have a path towards contributing to RHEL, which they didn't have before.
And just like IBM is incorrectly accused of killing CentOS, the same is probably true of most internal policy changes. Internal communication was always very clear in the rare cases when policy changes were driven by IBM (no details sorry), and there have even been cases in which policy changes have been reverted (unlike CentOS ;)). Both of those things also points towards IBM _not_ being the mastermind here. I was hired when there were 3000 employes and now there's over 20000, it's normal that some policies change. At the same time we had no forced "return to office" after COVID, memo-list still exists and management recognizes their mistakes when they're pointed out.
Likewise, I am not sure what you refer to as "wanting a cheaper workforce", is it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697? Again, not sure why you think IBM was behind it but I'd very much rather have that, than thousands of layoffs Google or Meta style. One comment in there says it all---people are not born as senior engineers and you must start somewhere. Growing junior developers to be open source project maintainers has always been Red Hat's superpower.
And while some projects have been transferred to IBM, notably storage, some projects have been transferred _from_ IBM (the main being OpenShift ACM, and part of the Java team). I have met some of the people who moved from IBM, they are amazing and they quickly embraced being part of Red Hat. And in fact, while I'm not aware of (or did not understand) what you are referring to with respect to customers, support or consulting, I know IBM did a serious effort to educate _their_ customer-facing teams about Red Hat. I mean, it's not like Red Hat pulled a NeXT-style reverse acquisition, but the executive behind the acquisition is now IBM CEO and for some time a former Red Hat CEO was IBM #2. That must mean something.
Over four years have passed since the acquisition was announced, and there has been no massive exodus out of Red Hat. The promise was that "Red Hat would still be Red Hat" and I think they kept it.
Luckily, according to Wikipedia there are two new distros that have popped up to fill this need: RockyLinux and AlmaLinux.
The thinking behind CentOS Stream is different. The idea was not to kill off a free competitor (those were always going to exist, and projects like Rocky and Alma forming was inevitable, and this was obvious). The idea was to create a real community where previously there was not much of one. CentOS was the Android-style "throw it over the wall" model of open source. About the most you could do as an outsider to contribute was file tickets on Bugzilla and package for EPEL. Whereas CentOS Stream provides a place for people to contribute to future versions of RHEL, and therefore, RHEL clones like Rocky and Alma.
So Rocky Linux devs and users, Alma Linux devs and users, CentOS devs and users, Facebook employees (they use CentOS Stream internally), Oracle Linux devs, and whoever else can make and review contributions, which is a more symbiotic relationship than existed before.
It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds.
I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.
I guess a lot of the anxiety surrounding an acquisition is anticipatory, and on some level that can cause culture changes in its own right, if it inspires a fair number of people to look for work elsewhere.
The distro was not created before 1994 either, so looks like they're counting the moment the founders got together as the creation date (before the distro, before the company) ?!
> Red Hat was incorporated on March 26, 1993, by its founders Bob Young and Marc Ewing