4 ms·

There's no Red Hat. They got by IBM for $34 billion, I keep seeing a lot of reference to Red Hat in this post. Please call it, what it is. IBM. It's all abo

There's no Red Hat. They got by IBM for $34 billion, I keep seeing a lot of reference to Red Hat in this post. Please call it, what it is. IBM. It's all about money. Much can be said about this, but money has really corrupted and polluted OSS.

neilv 7y ago
Of course the possibility of Red Hat being ruined has been on everyone's minds since the acquisition. But things akin to the Wayland push happened before that, so I wouldn't attribute that to post-acquisition. I won't call it IBM, so long as Red Hat retains some autonomy to exercise their know-how, and distinct identity (not kill some of the golden goose for which they paid serious gold), and so long as most of the the most skilled Red Hat people are happy and stay. (If they tried to commoditize everyone as worker drones, that would be unfortunate.) Also, FWIW, recall that IBM have for many years been a strong supporter of various open source. (Maybe too bad they didn't buy Java/Sun in the end.) For money reasons, of course, but there seemed to be a lot of goal alignment among open source people, and overlapping with libre people.
- ggreer 7y ago
  In the short time I worked at Red Hat (as part of the CoreOS acquisition), several of the redhatters in Raleigh mentioned how much they enjoyed working at Red Hat and how much they hated previous jobs at IBM. This was before the IBM purchase was announced. I predict a mass exodus as golden handcuffs come off and employees start to chafe under new management.
  - darkpuma 7y ago
    Where do you think they'll go? Canonical? Or will their man-hours be lost to the FOSS community?
    - ggreer 7y ago
      Wherever they go, I doubt most of them will continue to work on open source software. I'm not sure if it's a bad thing that these man-hours will be lost to the open source community. I think Red Hat’s involvement in open source has been double edged. Yes, they have funded projects that are crucial to the open source ecosystem, but their main source of revenue is support contracts. That means they have different incentives from most of the users of their software. If a big customer wants some feature, Red Hat tries to add it as fast as they can. If a big customer doesn't want to change their software to use new versions of some dependencies, Red Hat keeps a fork around and applies security patches. These behaviors serve to increase complexity and technical debt while also causing more headaches for maintainers of upstream software. It's very frustrating to have someone say, "I have a bug with your tool." and it turns out they're on an ancient version of libxml that has a bunch of custom patches applied. Also, Red Hat wants to upsell people onto RHEL, which means shoving RHEL into places it doesn’t belong. I ended up quitting because I was tired of pushing back on boneheaded technical decisions made in the service of these incentives. I don't mean to single out Red Hat. It's just the company that showed me how the sausage is made. I think these criticisms can apply to any company that develops open source software with the goal of making money from support.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

neilv 7y ago

Of course the possibility of Red Hat being ruined has been on everyone's minds since the acquisition. But things akin to the Wayland push happened before that, so I wouldn't attribute that to post-acquisition. I won't call it IBM, so long as Red Hat retains some autonomy to exercise their know-how, and distinct identity (not kill some of the golden goose for which they paid serious gold), and so long as most of the the most skilled Red Hat people are happy and stay. (If they tried to commoditize everyone as worker drones, that would be unfortunate.) Also, FWIW, recall that IBM have for many years been a strong supporter of various open source. (Maybe too bad they didn't buy Java/Sun in the end.) For money reasons, of course, but there seemed to be a lot of goal alignment among open source people, and overlapping with libre people.

ggreer 7y ago
In the short time I worked at Red Hat (as part of the CoreOS acquisition), several of the redhatters in Raleigh mentioned how much they enjoyed working at Red Hat and how much they hated previous jobs at IBM. This was before the IBM purchase was announced. I predict a mass exodus as golden handcuffs come off and employees start to chafe under new management.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Where do you think they'll go? Canonical? Or will their man-hours be lost to the FOSS community?
  - ggreer 7y ago
    Wherever they go, I doubt most of them will continue to work on open source software. I'm not sure if it's a bad thing that these man-hours will be lost to the open source community. I think Red Hat’s involvement in open source has been double edged. Yes, they have funded projects that are crucial to the open source ecosystem, but their main source of revenue is support contracts. That means they have different incentives from most of the users of their software. If a big customer wants some feature, Red Hat tries to add it as fast as they can. If a big customer doesn't want to change their software to use new versions of some dependencies, Red Hat keeps a fork around and applies security patches. These behaviors serve to increase complexity and technical debt while also causing more headaches for maintainers of upstream software. It's very frustrating to have someone say, "I have a bug with your tool." and it turns out they're on an ancient version of libxml that has a bunch of custom patches applied. Also, Red Hat wants to upsell people onto RHEL, which means shoving RHEL into places it doesn’t belong. I ended up quitting because I was tired of pushing back on boneheaded technical decisions made in the service of these incentives. I don't mean to single out Red Hat. It's just the company that showed me how the sausage is made. I think these criticisms can apply to any company that develops open source software with the goal of making money from support.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]