Red Hat being phased out of existence?
techrights.org
techrights.org
Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.
There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.
These guys are pursuing the wrong strategy, they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions leveraging existing consulting teams they already have (IBM revenue to hugely reliant on PS, 33%). Basically the largest "forward deployed eng" transition ever, backed by existing very strong open-source software and tailored (with Watson, dear god) as the "AI powered" engine to appease the shareholder gods. You would run over so many startups with poor penetration at the F2000 level.
Could you expand a bit more on what you’re describing here? Interested to hear more.
This part:
>$(whatever redhat project)
is what I would like parent poster to expand upon, though.
Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqrSXiRja4, 6:37 starts discussion about integration, so you can judge exactly what he says.
"The only one we have not fully fully integrated yet, and I will emphasize the "yet" is RedHat".
"on the go to market side, I really believe in full integration".
you already mentioned the engineering teams, and I do think your framing is mostly right. However, I think it unrealistic to say I am going to fully integrate back-office, fully integrate GTM, and somehow engineering is totally untouched.
Right now operations is employed by IBM but still mostly working as they did at Red Hat. We'll see how that changes over the next couple years, as that would be the first look at Red Hat integrating into IBM.
I know IBM has been employing a large number of people to work on Linux. I'm not as concerned about the eventual wind-down of that as I might otherwise be: Linux is the global lifeblood of enterprise computing, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in this world to employ Linux developers. A dispersion of this talent, with the inevitable shift in focus to things that are not strictly IBM's prerogatives, might have a real benefit for Linux.
Past that, software development has suddenly become cheaper in any case: Linux is in the optimal position to benefit greatly from the good parts of that, largely due a legacy of good leadership, so perhaps employed developer headcount doesn't have the importance it has always had.
In any case, I have every faith that Linux's future is not tightly coupled to the fate of whatever Red Hat withers into: there is too much at stake for too many well-resourced entities to permit Linux to suffer at the hands of IBM. If you need evidence for this, consider the outcome of the IBM's attempt to tighten their grip on the RHEL distribution, and the stampede to rapidly established alternatives this induced. If more of that is in Linux's future, so be it.
Well that's the funny thing, the deep pocketed institutional money is by and large using common and popular open source projects (increasingly so).
IBM is hoping for the old mainframe days to come back, but those are long gone. The tech IBM has which companies want to use by and large comes out of redhat today.
I'm reminded of IBM's opposition of C++'s removal of trigrams [1] all because it makes their character encoding system, EBCDIC, incompatible with C++. That's the sort of lock in that IBM is hoping for and it's lock in that no (sane) business tech leader would subscribe to.
Those customers aren't going to place containers on Amazon for their systems.
I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).
I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.
If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.
Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.
Broadcom likely disagrees, lightly snickering all the way to the bank.
https://itdaily.com/blogs/datacenter/broadcom-makes-a-u-turn...
Should be an interesting decade coming up.
Yes...that is exactly the point I'm making.
GP is saying (paraphrased) "I'm not worried about Linux because even if IBM (or Qualcomm, or ...) decides to close down their Linux efforts, the Linux devs will go someplace else and still contribute", which is true as far as it goes. My contention is it might not matter, because the big player can just as easily pay far fewer people to vibecode their own Linux workalike and take back control by displacing OG Linux in their tech ecosystem. When I can leverage all the previous work done to create Linux (aka The Hard Part), leave the licensing behind (not tested in court yet) and have my very own OS that I can vibecode/iterate any way I want independent of the Linux dev community, why would $BIGCOMPANY not consider doing that? How would it be it 'valueless' to one of these players (most of whom chafe at being in bed with the OSS community anyway)? On the contrary, what value would the Linux devs still have? Why would I even consider taking any contributions not from my own little AI playpen, since I'd be able to trivially say "hey AI...those crusty old Linux devs look like they got themselves a good idea...why don't you add that to our own private OS in the next spin. Think of a nifty marketing spin to advertise it and come up with some commercials to promote it. In the style of Micheal Bay this time".
What’s the point?
I think you mean built with Bob
> weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo
What does "weighting commits by market cap" mean? Counting commits from people who work for companies with larger market cap more? Why would that be a useful metric?
It's a reasonable proxy for things like long-term commitment and commits across the stack (e.g. audio and video, not just network and disk).
Microsoft 12 places higher than Canonical.
Going back in time 25 years and telling someone that would have been met with Doc Brown's "who's Vice President, Jerry Lewis?"
Of course, we’re in the timeline where Biff won twice.
https://underjord.io/the-best-parts-of-visual-studio-code-ar...
Not sure why that would have to be an issue, IBM have their own history of significant contributions to the Linux and FLOSS communities. They're not pre-acquisition RedHat but they're not far behind either.
Many F/OSS maintainers care pretty deeply about things like software freedom, taking good care of our digital commons, and leaving their mark on the world in a public way. I imagine that's especially true at Red Hat. You can buy the company, you can change the relationship to the community of "outside" contributors, and you can even release new versions of the software under a proprietary license. You can create upheaval for a lot of people, including the users. But you will often not only fail to walk away with key maintainers on your team, but watch them go on to form your competition on a new fork.
I don't personally know anyone who works at Red Hat, but even from the interactions I've seen recently in issue trackers and PRs to projects maintained in part by Red Hat engineers, I'm inclined to have a bit of faith. The upstream-first culture there still seems pretty strong and pretty quality-oriented to me. I don't think you can reliably keep engineers like that and turn them into drones who don't care about the craft and their impact on users and developers.
Redhat can now charge a lot more and have worse service because some of their main competition now enables it. Whatever replaces kubernetes is slowly being formed and decided on, but there's easy pickings for custom solutions and consultants for now.
Regarding k8s, I am not aware of any emerging technology being developed to replace it.
Sure, by that point vmware would be dead but Broadcom would also be latched into another victim (that it bough for a part of the bloody money) & milking their vendor locked customers.
Rinse and repeat. Or use oil, fire and steel - like you would use on a tick.
Reading the post closer, and looking at their other posts, I don't think this is a blog I'd personally put a lot of trust in as a valuable resource. Maybe fun to read, but yeah. Not super trustable.
> "Today the "badge" says IBM,"
Sure, people are getting moved around.
> But the role changed, there's lots of slop ("hey hi") dross or filler
I'm not sure what "hey hi" means, or filler.
> and everybody at IBM knows what PIPs and RA come next
I've been through multiple "silent" and "loud" IBM layoffs. This is 100% true.
> It's not hard to see that the vast majority of redhat.com blog posts sell slop, not Linux. It helps inflate the share price without accomplishing anything of substance.
I don't really think this is true. I feel like as long as I've read Red Hat's blog posts (less frequently now) they've been high quality.
> It's "fake work", just like slop. It cheats the shareholders, but for how much longer?
Based on the last statement, this too seems like it's at best an exaggeration.
> Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step (one step at a time), and some people altogether quit today (or yesterday), not only in Red Hat but also Nordcloud. Some receive money to leave 'voluntarily'.
This is 100% true. When I joined, people told me I was joining a different Red Hat, and the company was vastly different when I left over a decade later.
> The quantum (vaporware) teams are going "the way of the Kyndryl" via Anderon.
I'm not following quantum stuff closely, so I can't judge this, but based on the crappy performance of the Kyndryl stock I got from the spinoff, I sure hope that .. quantum is getting spun off? I don't know, this seems a little wackadoo.
> IBM is imploding 'creatively'.
Gibberish.
After reading it line by line closely and looking at my reaction .. yeah this is a rag of a blog. :D thanks again for knocking some sense into me!
It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.
Techrights is not a news source. It's propaganda and full of lies.
Hm, care to elaborate? It looks like they've retained most of the engineering team and day-to-day priorities for Confluent / Kafka probably haven't changed much.
But RH disappearing as a brand is far fetched imho, just look at the recent output of their Youtube channel. They're leaning heavily into the Red Hat branding, not IBM.
I'm more worried about the brain drain and drop in morale of the veteran employees. Something posts like this one probably contribute to.
I left shortly after the IBM acquisition was announced, and I'm so happy I did.
The brain drain happened shortly after the announcement. To me it seems like all the driven, ultra-sharp people started leaving in 2019 and in force in 2020 and early 2021. The people I've interacted with Red Hat since 2020 were not anywhere near as sharp as the folks I worked with prior.
EDIT: I was probably too strong on my statement that "all the driven, ultra sharp people". I know that I have a lot of ultra sharp, smart, engaged friends still there. What I meant to say was that I started to see the drain late 2019.
But recently I installed Fedora on my Framework 13 Pro and I really like it a lot. everything 'just works'. Then I installed it on a Chuwi netbook, and again to my surprise everything 'just works'. I am starting to dig dnf over apt, too. I am running Rocky as my domain controller at home (free ipa). Suffice to say I am kinda leanin into the redhat/rpm/fedora ecosysem and will be rebuilding my workstation (Deb 12) on Fedora instead of going to Debian 13.
I still love Debian .. but as a developer the tooling is so much more modern on Fedora stack. COPR is cool too.
First time I tried wayland it was on fedora.
I downloaded a .iso file on /tmp and the screen went black.
Because these days the systemd dev decided that /tmp must be mounted on tmpfs to be fast, so storing a file there obviously triggered the OOM killer that proceded to kill the wayland process, which caused everything to die.
/tmp is mounted on RAM by default these days, by systemd. Apparently not dropping 2000€ on a computer is not a normal configuration.
It does remain one of my regrets that I cashed out my vested stock options much too soon. If I’d held on to them until the IBM buyout I would have done very well for myself!
IBM stock was around $120 for a while, then doubled and went as high as 300. It’s now settled in the low 200s.
Holding Red Hat through IBM was really nice.
In my 15 years at Red Hat, peak time were the Jim Whitehurst years. RHEL was huge, Middleware made relevant products, and OpenShift was born. People loved Red Hat— there was a couple married at Summit, and Shadowman tattoos were not uncommon.
It was a great time at a great company. After Jim, it wasn’t the same.
>Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step
I went through this and it started 5 years after purchase by IBM and it took another 3 or 4 years before everything was completely gone. FWIW, I have sense left IBM.
The only reason I see is that they wanted more vendor lock-in, but that rarely pays in the long run.
More importantly, they want to build an ecosystem around their ecosystem around k8s. They want people publishing their software to work on OpenShift (e.g. in the operator catalog), they have certification processes for software compatibility (e.g. CNI certification), and now that they've come as far as they have they're going after VMWare's lunch, madly scooping up every customer they can get their hands on to try to offer them a user-friendly kubevirt implementation to replace VMWare (and NSX).
If OpenShift was close to k8s then there wouldn't be enough differentiation between the two to make it worth the money so they're building out everything they think that execs and overworked infra teams will be willing to pay for to make k8s migration a workable option (rather than an internal migration project that stagnates and drags on for ten years).
OCP is just RHEL but for Kubernetes, and RHEL has done pretty well over the years all in all. RHEL is "just Linux", but it's "just Linux" with a bunch of RHEL-specific stuff in it and on top of it, and RHEL-specific policies around it, such that you can buy something from a software or hardware vendor that works with and is tested on RHEL and you know it'll work with your systems.
The goal is the same; company sells this software/solution, it runs on OpenShift v4.xx and up; you need RH's mesh and virt operators installed and configured, and then you can install our operator for our software and you're done. Now your whatever, database or CMS or whatever it is, just works. You don't have to customize the charts or define your own ingress gateway, it's all handled already if your system is set up properly. Then you get the meta-control panel that lets you see and manage all of your clusters and etc., so you can get a higher-level view, etc. etc.
They want vendor lock-in to an extent, but they've seen that what customers want isn't "Linux", it's a Linux distribution that gives them enterprise reliability (read: never getting new versions of stuff, only security patches) and compatibility guarantees from vendors. They're just trying to do the same thing with kubernetes. Will it work? Seems like it's going okay so far, I guess we'll see.
Red Hat also does contribute a fair amount back to Kubernetes and CNCF: the Operator pattern, Istio, Ceph, etc.
(I work at Red Hat.)
Then they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win
Then local datacenters move to the cloud
Then you don’t keep up with Amazon
Then you exit to IBM
Then you get used to shovel IBM garbage onto customers
Then you become an irrelevant footnote like vmware and Sun.
Early 2000s red hat was wild and I was glad to be there. I’m still the ‘mikem’ in /etc/sudoers in RHEL and Amazon Linu.
Right. My own experience was that I paid for a copy of Red Hat Linux, shipped in a pretty box and everything, and then within a year or so discovered that that was the end of the line.
Although technically it was supposed to have been possible to switch to Fedora at that point, the rollout and info around that wasn't at all clear.
My reaction was oh well, guess I'll use Debian - and later, at every company I've worked at in the intervening decades, encouraged use of either Ubuntu or Debian, or provider variants like Container-Optimized OS. No-one ever objected to that, because Red Hat was doing the "enterprise sales" thing, and ain't nobody got time for that.
The weakest link at this point would be Oracle. They've bet their future on AI, and it's crushing them.
They certainly have the operational capability to maintain the quality standards of Red Hat.
SUSE cannot replace Red Hat. This is the irony of OpenELA. They are a scavenger that relies on the work Red Hat does. Suse, Oracle, CQI, etc are going to suddenly come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate Red Hat's Engineering team to maintain and develop all of these packages?
No. And you know that.
Either SUSE or Oracle have sufficient funding to do so.
SUSE, which made 50M in profits last year, is going to onboard 5K Software Engineers, develop build systems, cover infrastructure costs, and still make a profit?
So you do know, you just don’t want to admit it.
No.
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
Why is a screenshot of a tweet and a highly speculative unfounded headline in the frontpage? What am I missing?
The building was constructed in 2015 I believe, if that's some context.
Sensor telemetry with a pretty dashboard
It's a system where you select your floor from terminals outside of the elevators on each floor, and that hails it and tells you which one to get on. It seems to work pretty well, but I suppose the tradeoff is it's more expensive to install 2 touchscreen terminals on every floor of the building instead of a single set of buttons inside each elevator.
The side effect is that myself and everyone else who works in the building now enters other elevators and stands around waiting for it to go where we want before remembering you need to select your floor after you get in.
https://play.elevatorsaga.com/
Which, once you start playing, can be very difficult to detox from.
I was a long-time RHCX (Red Hat Certified Examiner). From around 2005 to 2015. When IBM bought Red Hat, I saw the writing on the wall, but I was optimistic it might be a Good Thing™. It wasn't a good thing. Red Hat has been pretty stagnant, as the article says. RH is 90% AI slop today. They'll live on as a brand for a long time, but from a technical perspective, they don't have much to offer.
In the early 2000s, I recommended paying for RH because their technical support was amazing. Now, it's mostly 3rd-party contractors who know less than what you can find with a Google search. Unless you are extremely lucky, you never get to talk to actual RH engineers anymore.
I really like the Red Hat ecosystem and system design. However, I feel like they've petered out and won't recover from where they're headed. (I say, as I type this on my personal laptop running Fedora).
TL;DR: RH went from a super-nerd company to coasting on its former success.
Tell me, where do the source bits from Rocky Linux come from ? ;-)
Dramatizing the inevitable does what?
* Engineering, marketing, and most of sales are still Red Hat (different employer, different benefits etc.)
* IT and some smaller sales teams are moving to IBM
* Over the years some teams were exchanged between the companies, for example AI went from IBM to Red Hat and middleware went the other way round.
You may say this is simply boiling the frog, but Red Hat is still employing thousands of people.
IBM did this correctly.
IBM develops and sells Storage Products, so we are going to take the engineering teams that development and maintain those storage products because, you know, it just makes sense.
We maintain and develop Power, etc. so it only makes sense that we move all development for RHEL, OpenShift, Ansible, Satellite, etc on Power, etc to IBM because, you know, it makes sense.
Why do we have two HR, Legal, etc teams? Those teams are joining Red Hat Jan 1, because, you know, it makes sense.
And so on and so on, and many Red Hatters just said, "Yea that does make sense".
Suddenly, someone pointed out that in a year and half span, 1/4th of the company will move to Red Hat leaving Engineering, Sales, and Support and 1/3rd of Sales is moving as well and, only then, did the rest of Red Hat say, "Holy Shit!"
Fedora at least tries relatively consistently—and has been for decades.
Desktop Linux is very bad at that compared to ChromeOS and MacOS, but some distros are much better than others. For a few decades now, Fedora has been one of the better ones.
All those would be important, but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We could start from the Vulnerability Of The Year: supply chain attacks.
From what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
Actually, we better invert that ratio, dividing by zero doesn't work very well no matter what OS you're using.
I think every server I have ever used at work has been Ubuntu or Debian based. Every time I go to these cons I am always flabbergasted that Redhat has such a presence when even a massive dork like me never uses it.
It's plenty alive, just not as much inside of Silicon Valley itself.