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doctor_eval

Such a great quote in the comments to that article:

> Silent|Storm said...

> Q: What do you get when a company merges with IBM?

> A: IBM.

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Heh, I remember when Oracle bought Sun too. Suddenly the team working on Linux accessibility (namely the Orca project) vanished.

I was actually surprised Oracle didn't outright kill MySQL, OpenOffice, and a bunch of other FOSS projects they/we inherited. They/we even pivoted internally to using Jabber for IMs (with Pidgin!!), because one of those projects was some sort of integrated calendaring/Jabber suite and it was mandated as standard. I could even use Thunderbird rather than Outlook, and any Linux I wanted.

Obviously all the major projects were eventually mismanaged.

yeah the IM was not that great. Sending images in IM was not working correctly. Had to create rooms for group messages etc. Zimbra email had only 5 to 10 GB storage.

They switched to using office 365 for mail and slack for IM's 5 years ago. The user experience with office 365 and slack was far better.

One of my companies was purchased by IBM. It's now IBM.

Also a totally wrong "hot take". This decision was made by Red Hat alone.

Sure, but the perception exists - whether you like it or not.

People have wrong ideas about all sorts of things, that doesn't mean we need to perpetuate them.

Just like people feel entitled to use for free, stuff that only exists because, Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, ARM, Intel, AMD, NVidia,.... put engineering time to make it happen in some form or function.

Then they come to online forums, 70's style, showing the finger to the man, while taking the fruits of that work.

Yes, they don't do it out of interest for the community, rather as a path to shepherd devs into their ecosystems.

Yet, angry forks of their products usually die a slow death, as bills have to be paid and doing long nights isn't for everyone.

Because like it or not, many FOSS products only exist thanks to big corps money.

Even GNU/Linux itself, only really took off, as big corps decided it was a cheaper way to develop UNIX like OSes, than their own, and not tainted by BSD lawsuit.

So what? I have been through some big company mergers -- the absorbed (or should I say assimilated) company managers would immediately start enforcing the larger company's stereotype policies, out of self-censorship... because they guessed, often correctly, that the writing was on the wall. E.g. managers would start firing to make their units appear to be more profitable, or remove work-from-home policies, etc. way before the merger was completed, in an effort to avoid being the first units to get the axe by the new parent.

If IBM tells Red Hat to do something, Red Hat will do it.

If IBM tells Red Hat to not do something, Red Hat will not.

That's the difference between being enslaved and being an independent entity.

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