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Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

Y'all are talking to the subsidiary of a Fortune 500 like it has ears, or feelings. It doesn't. It doesn't care about your open source. It doesn't care about logic, or slowly shooting itself in the foot, or alienating its base.

It cares about sales, profits, and the balance sheet. As long as it can make a profit, the people supporting and developing for its platform for free can go fly a kite. And it will continue to burn itself into the ground until it becomes a write-off. Because there is no founder worried about its livelihood to try to right the ship. There is merely an executive VP who needs to jigger the numbers to make it look like they got another win this year so he can make his bonus.

I call this Corporate Source.

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Do not anthropomorphize the IBM.

I always come back to Bryan Cantrill telling me not to stick my arm into a lawnmower.

Amazing talk that's referenced in this thread. Good review of Sun's opensource history, and a hilarious amount of shade thrown at Oracle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

The specific clip starts at 33 minutes but I recommend watching the whole thing. Also Bryan is on HN!

It hates it when you do that.

(1992) https://genius.com/Information-society-where-would-i-be-with...

This is an important point! Corporations don't make decisions - individual people do. A corporation is a piece of paper in a drawer.

and above all, never feed it after midnight

I think the hope is that Red Hat would care about its own long term profitability. That is, the people running Red Hat will realize that they're sacrificing future revenue by prioritizing instant profits and this course is unsustainable. If they're interested in maximizing long term revenue, they should take the long term view.

That is a reasonable idea. Unfortunately, the situation seems to be that the execs making these decisions are taking a pump and dump approach to the brand and don't care if Red Hat is still in business by the end of the decade. They'd rather the certainty of a dollar today than the promise of ten dollars tomorrow.

> I think the hope is that Red Hat would care about its own long term profitability.

They are a public corporation. They only care about the short term sheet as that is all investors care about. As long as the stock market punishes long term thinking this is what you will get. Part of me thinks it is by design... that it is easier to make money in the market if you have a steady flow of companies going public then eventually going out of business.

> As long as the stock market punishes long term thinking this is what you will get.

I hate to have to ask this, but why is this not priced in? In a naive conception of the stock market, public knowledge that a company is screwing itself over is basically free money, and somebody should take that money and thereby push the stock price down. Why, again and again in tech, does that not happen? Is the slow decline simply too slow or what?

There are a few parts to this. The first is, the future is currently extremely uncertain and therefore short term moves make sense. The second is the same as every other industry, if the price of money (interest rates) is super low people accumulate debt leveraging the future for the present and thereby raising the need for immediate return. This second part creates a feedback loop of constantly needing more and more revenue to pay the lenders. The third part of this is that most megacorps become seriously dysfunctional over time. There are a ton of reasons for this, but it mostly comes down to growing bureaucratization. IBM is among the worst in this regard, and many people predicted exactly this future when IBM bought Red Hat.

Personally I see it as an inherent flaw in the corporate model and we should rethink the idea of permanent corporations.

Wait, you're telling me IBM isn't committed to their messaging of Peace Love Linux, 23 years later?

https://linuxgizmos.com/files/peace-love-linux.jpg

You're probably right, but for some of us (certainly me) Red Hat is like an old friend. If there's even a tiny chance we can stop them from running off of a cliff, we have to try. When we see the self-harm they are doing, it pains us.

Now, if there were widespread engineering dissatisfaction and turnover and they started losing some of the top talent and nerd-famous people that work there, I think there's a chance the people at the top would listen. Just a chance of course.

I think the much touted phrase of “free as in press not as in beer” will forever haunt the FOSS community. If you need a good example, take a look at the state of the “free press” and the depths they sink to for relevancy. The entire incentives of the market are at odds with ideals like those of FOSS. All you can do is bury your head in the sand about it, start a “company” that upholds it for a little while, sell or go public when the time is right, then watch it be everything you set it out not to be.

Or never sell, never go public, and fade into obscurity eventually with dignity. Despite how discipled and committed you are, you are mortal. A company is immortal. Even the most ideological of movements (e.g: religions) eventually evolve to resemble nothing of their original callings.

Fade into obscurity with dignity whenever you can.

There are Corporate and then there are IBM.

Some corporations have a working long term plan, even if those plans are are purely about making more money in the future. Can't say the same for IBM.

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