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Comment by bragr | Hacker News Reader

Everyone seems to forget Redhat is owned by IBM, and this is their core business model. IBM doesn't care that this guy is mad, they were never going to make money off him. If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them because of this, and if you make software for banking companies (continuing the example), you'll pay up for the licensees to test your software on.

If you're open to moving to another distro (Rocky, Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, etc), you were probably never to going to license Redhat anyways.

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This is patently false. Redhat is making bank off of this guy. Jeff has written 100s of Ansible roles for free and made them widely available. I've used dozens of his roles as a contractor for F500 companies to help get projects off the ground quickly.

Now instead of giving him free binary compatible OSes to develop his roles against, he'll probably just drop support because there's too much hassle. The next time I go to install an OS, it'll be Debian, because most of the tools I'll use won't have packages for RHEL like OSes.

This is so dumb it hurts, Redhat won't recover from this. It'll cripple their package ecosystem over the next decade.

> It'll cripple their package ecosystem over the next decade.

but in a way that's really hard to measure and doesn't show up on a bean-counter's spreadsheet. So that means corporate will consider it "good business" and will just blame something else for the immeasurable failures a decade later.

>This is patently false. Redhat is making bank off of this guy. Jeff has written 100s of Ansible roles for free and made them widely available.

Firstly, creating value is not the same thing as creating revenue.

Second, people aren't licensing Redhat for access to these. People license Redhat so when they have a bug that affects them, it gets fixed right away with guarantees. Unless that guy is getting paid to do those fixes, I don't see how this affects Redhat customers.

You'd be surprised how many paying RHEL customers use community-contributed Ansible roles because there's no way for a company even as large as IBM to employ experts in all the various software RHEL users install to maintain integrations.

That's the long-term effect of starving the wider community: you lose having 'great' integrations, and you end up with poorly-written and barely-maintained integrations for anything that's not extremely mainstream, and so you start losing the customers who use anything outside the core set of products extensively.

I'll just copy paste what I said in another comment:

>I'm not saying this is the morally right, "best" in the long term sense, or otherwise socially optimal choice, I'm just saying it's the standard IBM choice.

Ah, missed that ;)

You make it sound as if it's without doubt that a) a significant number of RedHat users require Ansible and b) those users will stop using RedHat if this Ansible integration becomes unavailable.

I highly doubt both. I don't have numbers to back it up, but neither do I see any indication that it will matter to RedHats baseline.

>IBM doesn’t care that this guy is mad

No, but they should. Jeff Geerling is one of these guys: https://xkcd.com/2347/

IBM might not make money off you or me, but they absolutely make money off people like Jeff. In some regards, that’s kinda their whole business

IBM is a big company. They can pay one their 300,000 employees less than one average support license to replace all the work he does for them indirectly, and if he's opensourcing his software, it's not like he can stop them from using it even if he is mad.

I'm not saying this is the morally right, "best" in the long term sense, or otherwise socially optimal choice, I'm just saying it's the standard IBM choice.

> They can pay one their 300,000 employees less than one average support license to replace all the work he does for them indirectly

I bet they can’t. He’s hardly some code monkey churning out generic lines of code.

xd they definitely can't. maybe with a small team they could replace some.

Even if this causes RedHat to trend towards oblivion and 0 usage IBM will continue to make a shitload of money in the interim and IBM will trot out an army of MBAs with spreadsheets to explain why this change earned the company more money even if it caused the demise of RedHat.

You see, you are just being sentimental about trying to save something you're nostalgic for. This MBA army can clearly justify with mountains of spreadsheets why this was the Correct Thing To Do to maximize shareholder value and profit.

My first Linux installation was a copy of Red Hat 4 (not RHEL 4, RedHat 4), circa 1996-ish. I remember bugging my mother for weeks to drive me to CompUSA and buy a copy. I am deeply nostalgic.

> If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them because of this

Not sure if it ever happened, but when I was at BofA there was definitely interest from up high on going to Oracle Linux

Out of the frying pan and into....

The IBM owners / shareholders probably aren't enthusiastic. Unless short like Chanos https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/94584-jim-chanos-on-hedgeye...

It's ironic my org switched from AIX + websphere to Red Hat + Jboss I believe due to licensing.

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