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.
When we were purchased by IBM (admittedly it's been a while), our separate HR, finance, IT and legal groups were gone before we knew it. Engineering got integrated over the first year (when I left), but with a pretty light touch, and AFAIK took into the second year to complete. Apparently things got increasingly more "IBM-ified" over the years, but a suprising number of the core folks have stayed, so it can't be all misery. Maybe RH won't be completely crushed.
"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
basically. Comparing a company with google resources (and needs) is not really the same as RH resources (and needs). Basically, what percentage of rev/resources/profit/engineering headcount are you spending on linux?
I don't feel like this answers the last part of my question: why would that be a useful metric? If the claim is that I should be concerned with the future of kernel development because of the future of Redhat, why should dollar amounts matter rather than directly inferring from proportion of the development they do independent of dollars?
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.
The interview I linked higher in this thread specifically calls out targeting non F2000 type customers with point solutions and not taking their traditional sales motion everywhere. I think this will be quite difficult for them to do, but will see.
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.
We'll see how that works in a world where someone/something with enough cash/tokens can say "hey there little AI buddy...why don't you code me up something that works exactly like Linux without all those pesky licensing things while I grab a beer". Personally, I think that's going to be kinda inevitable in the corporate world since I could say thing like "...oh, and add these 5 things Linux doesn't do, and don't reimpliment anything that isn't in this widget we want to sell. And write it in rust, because I heard that's cool." and instantly get a slimmed down, bespoke chunk of software that I/the corp/evil people can (so far?) claim ownership of.
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.
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 hope not. I love Fedora, and it's kind of heavily reliant on Red Hat being a good citizen (as are many other distros). Red Hat is still the (benevolent?) king of the Linux world.
I've been a diehard Debian user for most of my life. Swag. T-shirts. Case badges. Virtually every cloud server, VPS or dedicated box in my homelab is Debian or Debian-based (proxmox). My first install was in the Etch days.
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 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 had to re-read the (very short) linked blog post several times thinking I skipped over an actual nugget of information that would connect it to the title. I didn't find it but noticed the weird uncanny valley writing style that became less clear the closer I tried to read.
It doesn't even link out to the Linkedin post from the screenshot as far as I can tell.
I used to think techrights was biased but told the truth about the biased slice of things it did cover. Then the Freenode hostile take-over happened and I was right in the middle of it and techrights lied repeatedly about it.
Techrights is not a news source. It's propaganda and full of lies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
> 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 you mean built with Bob
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.
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.
Should be an interesting decade coming up.
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.
[1] https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The weakest link at this point would be Oracle. They've bet their future on AI, and it's crushing them.
https://openela.org/
(I have no idea why they'd do that, but it's a terrifying prospect; worse than letting it go to pasture, imo)
The building was constructed in 2015 I believe, if that's some context.
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.
https://avi.alkalay.net/2007/06/you-win.html
>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.
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.
From what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
Fedora at least tries relatively consistently—and has been for decades.
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.
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.