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.<p>Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:<p><a href="https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributors?timeRange=past365days&start=2025-10-01&end=2026-10-01" rel="nofollow">https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...</a><p>weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.<p>There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.<p>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".<p>Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.
Full video:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqrSXiRja4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqrSXiRja4</a>, 6:37 starts discussion about integration, so you can judge exactly what he says.<p>"The only one we have not fully fully integrated yet, and I will emphasize the "yet" is RedHat".<p>"on the go to market side, I really believe in full integration".<p>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.
> tailored with Watson<p>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.<p>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 lifeblood of the cloud, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in that 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.<p>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.<p>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.
> they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions<p>Could you expand a bit more on what you’re describing here? Interested to hear more.
Untrustworthy blog reposts Twitter message from some person?
First they ignore you,<p>Then they laugh at you,<p>Then they fight you,<p>Then you win<p>Then local datacenters move to the cloud<p>Then you don’t keep up with Amazon<p>Then you exit to IBM<p>Then you get used to shovel IBM garbage onto customers<p>Then you become an irrelevant footnote like vmware and Sun.<p>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.
Just wait for Watson to be the next AI Leapfrog
According to the tweet screenshot, IBM fires AI people! Hmm ...
We all knew red hat was going to be consumed right?<p>Dramatizing the inevitable does what?
For what it's worth:<p>* Engineering, marketing, and most of sales are still Red Hat (different employer, different benefits etc.)<p>* IT and some smaller sales teams are moving to IBM<p>* 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.<p>You may say this is simply boiling the frog, but Red Hat is still employing thousands of people.
No surprise with this, people who has been following IBM over the years knew this day would come.<p>>Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step<p>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.
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.
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: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841563">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49841563</a>
I'll stick with Fedora and RHEL.<p>From what I can tell NixOS still has no support for AppArmor or SELinux.
Last time I evaluated NixOS (Mar 2021) the project didn't care a whit about <i>desktop</i> security. Has that changed?<p>Fedora at least <i>tries</i> relatively consistently—and has been for decades.
I'll wait until AI has translated all the nix scripts to a more user friendly language, thank you.
So no more adults wearing red hats on conferences and meetups? Finally.