1. Younglings will gain by reading Maddog's article because it contains a lot of insight that was not previously available online. 2. Maddog didMiss a major po

1. Younglings will gain by reading Maddog's article because it contains a lot of insight that was not previously available online. 2. Maddog didMiss a major point (which I'm certain he is aware): THE ENTIRE COMPUTER INDUSTRY WAS PUSHED TO ADOPT UNIX/POSIX APIS BY THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AS PART OF ITS EFFORTS TO PROTECT ITS SOFTWARE INVESTMENTS FROM HARDWARE VENDOR LOCK-IN. Even tho POSIX could be added to any platform, it was really crummy on some highly structured systems like VMS, leading all major hardware manufacturers to begin supporting UNIX-variants. POSIX was so "successful" the industry came together (with CDE, X/Open, etc.) to attempt to then further expand the functionality of such applications to be more competitive with what WindowsNT-based apps could offer. Heck, WindowsNT, which also had to awkwardly adopt POSIX APIs (along side Microsoft's Xenix UNIX-variant), even adopted one or two of the optional X/Open APIs. 3. WHY IS IBM INVOLVED IN LINUX? IBM wasn't (really) in the dot-com boom that made Linux what it is, but IBM was deeply affected by the dot-com bust like all other tech companies. One of the first things IBM did to survive was reduce costs by firing more than one hundred thousand highly paid engineers and shipping their jobs to India, putting them to work replacing legacy mainframe systems and setting up cheap websites in LAMP. IBM poured resources into LAMP to support that staff. 4. WHY DID IBM BUY REDHAT? As enterprise systems began to rely heavily on free software, Ginny Rometty the former CEO of IBM and, unbelievably, a one time System Administrator, bought REDHAT to "corner the market" for providing services to support free software within enterprises. 5. WHY IS IBM REDHAT GOING SIDEWAYS? Because IBM isn't going to ever be able to corner the market for free software support by locking its customers into REDHAT. Those customers will continue on with their current REDHAT distributions for a while and a new generation of workers will migrate them to distro-agnostic job control systems like Kata Containers (on AWS, Azure or on-prem Debian, etc.) even as the customer application providers release updates pre-packaged as containers that specify alternate Linux distributions (not CentOS/Fedora/RHEL) in their image/pod spec files. Note that while IBM REHAT may go sideways, IBM will still be able to provide free software support for non-REDHAT initiatives and will kill (or maybe spin) off REDHAT as that becomes more apparent.