Krishna was on Norges podcast a while ago and mentioned that Red Hat would be (not his words) brought to heel with the rest of IBM. IMO, it is a version of the Broadcom/VMware playbook, boil-the-frog style.
Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:
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.
Krishna's words on the podcast you cite were: "Red Hat has not been integrated... yet. [...] Engineering in Red Hat, I actually believe given the open-source nature
of Red Hat, is going to have to be its own function. So, engineering I
will likely not integrate because working at their scale of open source,
maybe that is one where IBM learns from them, and things that are open
source should belong much more in the Red Hat methodology than ours".
Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.
"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.
They are not fully integrating go-to-market. In the podcast Krishna says that the size and organization of Red Hat's GTM was larger than every other acquisition, and they were looking at partial integration only. Since then they actually have moved the sales teams for smaller markets to IBM. Red Hat kept the 20 or so largest markets and the verticals.
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.
> 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?
I think the interpretation is that red hat devs are over-represented in terms of ratios compared to market cap weighting of all companies contributing to linux or similiar
IBM won't entertain your recommended strategy. IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money: the sort of broad-based popularity you hope for has no value at IBM. Governments, banks and monster health care operations are the only customers IBM really cares about for their computing products.
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.
They have more bargaining power now. Lots of people are scrambling to get off vmware after they raised their prices astronomically for seemingly no reason (other than they could, and a lot of groups are leaving VMs for containers). Openshift Virtualization is there with open arms to take those who haven't or won't migrate off of VMs.
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.
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.
RH pandered to shareholders for the entire decade I worked there. It will not disappear as a brand, that is far too valuable for IBM to buy credibility over their bullshit shovelware.
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.
I don't know techrights, and reading about them it does seem as if they have a very strong pro-FOSS, adversarial (to put it nicely) bent. So thank you for educating me there!
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!
Why would they have to shoulder a heavier burden? Anyhow no, if Red Hats ceased to exist, OpenELA would disappear. They are not doing any upstream engineering work.
Red Hat determined this path in 2001, when it started pivoting to enterprise customers only. Everything after that was just the usual progression for a minor enterprise player.
No surprise with this, people who has been following IBM over the years knew this day would come.
>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.
I love NixOS and use it on my work and home machines, but I balk at seriously suggesting anyone pick that as their first choice for a stable Linux distro to move to. It's filled with sharp edges, and more to the point, the project leadership and governance seems mired in drama constantly. Not a system I would feel comfortable suggesting any org should adopt without a lot of consideration, especially if stability and long-term planning are important.
If it’s good enough for the Dutch and French governments to be adopting, it’s good enough for some, but not yet all, corporate orgs (I argue). Sharp edges will get ground down over time. Migration decisions have inertia that is measured in half decades.
It's not just a distro. RedHat used to host quite a bit of free software projects. The mailing lists that used to be now just bounce. Sourceware has been abandoned for GitLab. But I'm not sure if everything else has succesfully migrated away. It would've meant something really good if IBM would just continue to provide services for free software, but I'm not seeing them do that so I guess that means pretty much the exact opposite.
> Security from websites, installable software, physical access?
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.
Being able to visit a web page, open a PDF or download and inspect a git repo without the web page, PDF or git repo's being able to completely pwn the entire machine including the bootloader and the firmware for all the hardware subsystems.
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.
Krishna was on Norges podcast a while ago and mentioned that Red Hat would be (not his words) brought to heel with the rest of IBM. IMO, it is a version of the Broadcom/VMware playbook, boil-the-frog style.
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.
Krishna's words on the podcast you cite were: "Red Hat has not been integrated... yet. [...] Engineering in Red Hat, I actually believe given the open-source nature of Red Hat, is going to have to be its own function. So, engineering I will likely not integrate because working at their scale of open source, maybe that is one where IBM learns from them, and things that are open source should belong much more in the Red Hat methodology than ours".
Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.
Full video:
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.
They are not fully integrating go-to-market. In the podcast Krishna says that the size and organization of Red Hat's GTM was larger than every other acquisition, and they were looking at partial integration only. Since then they actually have moved the sales teams for smaller markets to IBM. Red Hat kept the 20 or so largest markets and the verticals.
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.
> For example, look at kernel committers:
> 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?
I think the interpretation is that red hat devs are over-represented in terms of ratios compared to market cap weighting of all companies contributing to linux or similiar
> tailored with Watson
I think you mean built with Bob
IBM won't entertain your recommended strategy. IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money: the sort of broad-based popularity you hope for has no value at IBM. Governments, banks and monster health care operations are the only customers IBM really cares about for their computing products.
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.
> they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions
Could you expand a bit more on what you’re describing here? Interested to hear more.
Offer paid support for $(whatever redhat project), do all the support stuff, but also cross-sell IBM business solutions.
Yes indeed, that's pretty much what parent poster wrote.
This part:
>$(whatever redhat project)
is what I would like parent poster to expand upon, though.
They have more bargaining power now. Lots of people are scrambling to get off vmware after they raised their prices astronomically for seemingly no reason (other than they could, and a lot of groups are leaving VMs for containers). Openshift Virtualization is there with open arms to take those who haven't or won't migrate off of VMs.
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.
I'm also scared of RH pandering to share holders.
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.
RH pandered to shareholders for the entire decade I worked there. It will not disappear as a brand, that is far too valuable for IBM to buy credibility over their bullshit shovelware.
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.
Untrustworthy blog reposts Twitter message from some person?
Untrustworthy blog? This is literally IBM's modus operandi. Look at what they did to Confluent and Hashi. Confluent is seemingly decimated.
Well, techrights is not exactly reliable. I'd put it on the same level as the Daily Mail.
I don't know techrights, and reading about them it does seem as if they have a very strong pro-FOSS, adversarial (to put it nicely) bent. So thank you for educating me there!
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!
I wonder if the forces behind OpenELA are able to shoulder a heavier burden.
The weakest link at this point would be Oracle. They've bet their future on AI, and it's crushing them.
https://openela.org/
Why would they have to shoulder a heavier burden? Anyhow no, if Red Hats ceased to exist, OpenELA would disappear. They are not doing any upstream engineering work.
My biggest fear (doubt it'd happen, but...) would be seeing this headline "Oracle purchases Red Hat from IBM."
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
Just wait for Watson to be the next AI Leapfrog
That reminds me that the elevators at my work claim they're "Powered by IBM Watson" and I've always been curious what that could possibly mean.
The building was constructed in 2015 I believe, if that's some context.
According to the tweet screenshot, IBM fires AI people! Hmm ...
First they ignore you,
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.
Context for early 2000s RH challenged individuals: It is a homage to the borrowed slogan RH used to have on posters and office walls.
https://avi.alkalay.net/2007/06/you-win.html
Red Hat determined this path in 2001, when it started pivoting to enterprise customers only. Everything after that was just the usual progression for a minor enterprise player.
No surprise with this, people who has been following IBM over the years knew this day would come.
>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.
It took IBM ~0 days to layoff 30% of Confluent upon deal close despite continual reinforcement that any RIFs would be coming months later.
well SUSE, didn't need an IBM for that...
We all knew red hat was going to be consumed right?
Dramatizing the inevitable does what?
For what it's worth:
* 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.
Great opportunity to migrate to NixOS for those needing to decision a migration path.
I love NixOS and use it on my work and home machines, but I balk at seriously suggesting anyone pick that as their first choice for a stable Linux distro to move to. It's filled with sharp edges, and more to the point, the project leadership and governance seems mired in drama constantly. Not a system I would feel comfortable suggesting any org should adopt without a lot of consideration, especially if stability and long-term planning are important.
If it’s good enough for the Dutch and French governments to be adopting, it’s good enough for some, but not yet all, corporate orgs (I argue). Sharp edges will get ground down over time. Migration decisions have inertia that is measured in half decades.
The French government did not adopt it, it's a 250 users POC.
Governments always make such good, long term, well thought through technology decisions. For sure their decisions are great ones to adopt. /sarcasm
It's not just a distro. RedHat used to host quite a bit of free software projects. The mailing lists that used to be now just bounce. Sourceware has been abandoned for GitLab. But I'm not sure if everything else has succesfully migrated away. It would've meant something really good if IBM would just continue to provide services for free software, but I'm not seeing them do that so I guess that means pretty much the exact opposite.
Semi-related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841563
France as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842480
I'll stick with Fedora and RHEL.
From what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
I'll wait until AI has translated all the nix scripts to a more user friendly language, thank you.
You can just use AI to configure Nix. The “user friendly language” is English (or whatever natural language you want to use.)
Last time I evaluated NixOS (Mar 2021) the project didn't care a whit about desktop security. Has that changed?
Fedora at least tries relatively consistently—and has been for decades.
What exactly do you mean by desktop security? Security from websites, installable software, physical access?
> Security from websites, installable software, physical access?
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.
Being able to visit a web page, open a PDF or download and inspect a git repo without the web page, PDF or git repo's being able to completely pwn the entire machine including the bootloader and the firmware for all the hardware subsystems.
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.