6 ms·

> Red Hat was 26 years old in 2019, and then they were acquired by IBM. As a former Red Hat employee this was painful to read. IBM is doing a Sun Microsystems

> Red Hat was 26 years old in 2019, and then they were acquired by IBM. As a former Red Hat employee this was painful to read. IBM is doing a Sun Microsystems to it, Red Hat used to be such a great company.

jterrys 3y ago
That's disappointing to hear. What are some noticeable changes since the acquisition?
- arjvik 3y ago
  For one, the deprecation of CentOS
  - chr15p 3y ago
    To be honest if the worst thing you can say about a company is they changed the distribution model of the thing they were giving you for free from point releases to rolling updates then they could be a lot worse.
    - stonogo 3y ago
      If that is how Red Hat saw CentOS, why the hell did they buy it?
      - dralley 3y ago
        Because CentOS had been languishing, with releases and security fixes taking longer and longer, and the thought at the time was that since CentOS was seen as the entry point to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it might be leaving a bad impression with potential future customers. The thinking behind CentOS Stream is different. The idea was not to kill off a free competitor (those were always going to exist, and projects like Rocky and Alma forming was inevitable, and this was obvious). The idea was to create a real community where previously there was not much of one. CentOS was the Android-style "throw it over the wall" model of open source. About the most you could do as an outsider to contribute was file tickets on Bugzilla and package for EPEL. Whereas CentOS Stream provides a place for people to contribute to future versions of RHEL, and therefore, RHEL clones like Rocky and Alma. So Rocky Linux devs and users, Alma Linux devs and users, CentOS devs and users, Facebook employees (they use CentOS Stream internally), Oracle Linux devs, and whoever else can make and review contributions, which is a more symbiotic relationship than existed before.
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      That effectively makes it useless. The whole reason to use CentOS is because it's binary-compatible with RHEL; it's merely RHEL without the expensive licensing fees and support. So it's really useful for developing software where your customer is the US government or someone else standardized on RHEL. Luckily, according to Wikipedia there are two new distros that have popped up to fill this need: RockyLinux and AlmaLinux.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    That one was a mistake, but also nothing at all to do with IBM. We (Red Hat) did that to ourselves.
    - arjvik 3y ago
      Curious for what the rationale behind the decision was?
      - bonzini 3y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988259 It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds. I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Absolutely nothing.
  - pxc 3y ago
    Do you work at Red Hat?
    - brozaman 3y ago
      He does, he's been many years and he's one of the best engineers I worked with :)
      - pxc 3y ago
        Wow. You two had very different experiences of the acquisition. I guess a lot of the anxiety surrounding an acquisition is anticipatory, and on some level that can cause culture changes in its own right, if it inspires a fair number of people to look for work elsewhere.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- brozaman 3y ago
  I'm not there anymore but there has been significant change in the company culture (which was great) and IBM is making conditions gradually worse. One thing that is a clear change is that IBM is pushing for having a cheaper workforce, more employees but cheaper and therefore less qualified. Many short term goals of getting quick sales rather than get stuff that is sustainable over time not just technically but also burning people out. Depecration of CentOS is something that really pissed me off, specially when we had acquired CentOS a few years back. Some projects have been transfered to IBM. Others without being transferred directly were influenced by IBM in a negative way (I was a software engineer in one that was). Significant changes in teams that deal with end customers, support has been affected, consulting has been affected. I know sales had some kind of merge as well (I don't any friend in sales but I've heard some stuff), etc... Also there are loads of ridiculous changes in policy to save costs and they don't even save any money. Something that really pissed me off were problems in HR. For instance I've seen problems in payslips (once I was paid THREE times with different amounts and the following month I got a discount on my payslip because I was paid too much, I know a guy who got paid 4 times that month and the month after he still got an extra amount because after 4 different payments money was still missing). I've heard of problems and delays doing the paperwork for paternity leave.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    Hi! I don't recognize your nick but thanks for the kind words in your other message, first of all. I'm curious who you are, it would be great if you dropped me a private email or social media DM to tell me! Sorry about not responding to every point, I tried to focus on those where I can reply without being too vague. I hope you understand. First of all let's be clear, the deprecation of CentOS was already in the air when CentOS Stream was started internally. That was IIRC in 2017, anyway before the acquisition. Even before that there had been a serious effort on increasing CI and CD of RHEL. It was a prerequisite to a feasible "rolling release" distro and it naturally led to CentOS Stream. I totally agree that communication sucked there, it was not the first time Red Hat screwed up communication with the community and probably won't be the last. That's sad. On the other hand I like the way Rocky Linux and Alma developed out of CentOS Stream. In exchange for a shorter lifecycle, their developers now have a path towards contributing to RHEL, which they didn't have before. And just like IBM is incorrectly accused of killing CentOS, the same is probably true of most internal policy changes. Internal communication was always very clear in the rare cases when policy changes were driven by IBM (no details sorry), and there have even been cases in which policy changes have been reverted (unlike CentOS ;)). Both of those things also points towards IBM _not_ being the mastermind here. I was hired when there were 3000 employes and now there's over 20000, it's normal that some policies change. At the same time we had no forced "return to office" after COVID, memo-list still exists and management recognizes their mistakes when they're pointed out. Likewise, I am not sure what you refer to as "wanting a cheaper workforce", is it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697? Again, not sure why you think IBM was behind it but I'd very much rather have that, than thousands of layoffs Google or Meta style. One comment in there says it all---people are not born as senior engineers and you must start somewhere. Growing junior developers to be open source project maintainers has always been Red Hat's superpower. And while some projects have been transferred to IBM, notably storage, some projects have been transferred _from_ IBM (the main being OpenShift ACM, and part of the Java team). I have met some of the people who moved from IBM, they are amazing and they quickly embraced being part of Red Hat. And in fact, while I'm not aware of (or did not understand) what you are referring to with respect to customers, support or consulting, I know IBM did a serious effort to educate _their_ customer-facing teams about Red Hat. I mean, it's not like Red Hat pulled a NeXT-style reverse acquisition, but the executive behind the acquisition is now IBM CEO and for some time a former Red Hat CEO was IBM #2. That must mean something. Over four years have passed since the acquisition was announced, and there has been no massive exodus out of Red Hat. The promise was that "Red Hat would still be Red Hat" and I think they kept it.
- op00to 3y ago
  one thing I don't hear mentioned is a huge change in company culture. we started hiring management from cisco, and they are NOT a good personal fit. like super sexist nasty backstabbing management types. that was NOT the type of people Red Hat hired pre IBM.
pxc 3y ago
Oracle basically murdered a ton of Sun open-source projects overnight. Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions?
- brozaman 3y ago
  > Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions? OK, my previous comment was an overstatement. This is what's happening.
  - pxc 3y ago
    That makes more sense. It's still sad to hear. As an outsider, Red Hat always stood out to me as a truly special company. Too few 'open-source' enterprises have figured out how to profitably develop F/OSS in a principled way, without the 'open core' bait-and-switch. It's just the tech company circle of life, I guess. I wonder what younger tech company might play a similar role as Red Hat has another 30 years from now, and if they even exist yet.
- ilyt 3y ago
  They will just make it PITA to use if you're not on Red Hat.
- op00to 3y ago
  They murdered RHV, that's a good start.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    Red Hat murdered RHV without IBM's help (sad to say).
    - op00to 3y ago
      Was that pre IBM? If so, I stand corrected!
veidr 3y ago
I clicked through to this thread because I want to know more about this. I'm a user (of both RHEL and Fedora, although I use RHEL via the free developer license so I am not actually a customer). I used to be a Sun user in the same way, but when Oracle bought Sun it was really, really obvious that using Sun's stuff was something we should immediately prepare to stop doing. It's a little less obvious with IBM buying Red Hat, though -- especially to a random user like me. For one, IBM isn't nestled between Halliburton, Enron, and Juul on the despicability spectrum. For two, it looks a lot like Apple buying NeXT, at least from the outside. As in old company with a lot of not-looking-so-hot-anymore tech buys the younger upstart with better tech, and the better tech seems to win. So what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad? E.g. firing the team responsible for developing X, and just milking the dead husk for short-term enterprise deals, or... ??
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- op00to 3y ago
  > what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad This is just the customer facing stuff. The internal politics are more painful. - Got rid of RHV, gave customers no realistic migration path - Moved an entire BU of employees from Red Hat to IBM with no choice except to GTFO if you didn't wanna become an IBM employee (storage BU) - Each area of the business is under increased oversight due to IBM beancounters thinking they know better - IBM interference in product development (IBM has a deal, so they want feature X, even though bugfix Y and Z are more important) At first it was all "yeah, you red hatters are gonna save IBM", but Red Hat is at the point where OpenShift is being milked by IBM 100%.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    Yeah it was genuinely really sad that the deal couldn’t have been “here have OpenShift for a mountain of cash, leave us alone.”
stbenjam 3y ago
Still is. I’ve been at RH a long time. IBM hasn’t touched us and they are not doing what Oracle did to Sun. Not yet anyway, but Jim made a bunch of promises to us when we were acquired and they’ve kept them all.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Why would IBM acquire and not touch it? They must have had a reason to acquire?
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    Big list of companies to upsell to.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    Red Hat is now worth 10% of IBM's revenue, and growing. They had 3.4 billion reasons to acquire when they acquired it in 2018, and they had roughly 6 billion reasons not to touch it last year.
    - op00to 3y ago
      IBM "touches" Red Hat on a constant basis, needling and throwing its weight around to make way for blue ribbon 7 figure deals that never materialize.
- op00to 3y ago
  This has not been my experience AT ALL. Also, no one has mentioned Jim in years. Where is he anyway? Chewed up an spat out by the IBM machine.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Oracle rescued what they cared from Sun, everyone else including IBM, couldn't care less.
ilyt 3y ago
Yup, it already started. They bought Ceph and one of first things they did is discontinuing packaging for non-rhel distros
- stryan 3y ago
  How is that related to IBM? RedHat bought Ceph back in 2014.
_chu1 3y ago
It is not nearly as bad. Oracle assassinated OpenSolaris on first sight while IBM literally pays people to develop Fedora.

jterrys 3y ago

That's disappointing to hear. What are some noticeable changes since the acquisition?

arjvik 3y ago
For one, the deprecation of CentOS
- chr15p 3y ago
  To be honest if the worst thing you can say about a company is they changed the distribution model of the thing they were giving you for free from point releases to rolling updates then they could be a lot worse.
  - stonogo 3y ago
    If that is how Red Hat saw CentOS, why the hell did they buy it?
    - dralley 3y ago
      Because CentOS had been languishing, with releases and security fixes taking longer and longer, and the thought at the time was that since CentOS was seen as the entry point to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it might be leaving a bad impression with potential future customers. The thinking behind CentOS Stream is different. The idea was not to kill off a free competitor (those were always going to exist, and projects like Rocky and Alma forming was inevitable, and this was obvious). The idea was to create a real community where previously there was not much of one. CentOS was the Android-style "throw it over the wall" model of open source. About the most you could do as an outsider to contribute was file tickets on Bugzilla and package for EPEL. Whereas CentOS Stream provides a place for people to contribute to future versions of RHEL, and therefore, RHEL clones like Rocky and Alma. So Rocky Linux devs and users, Alma Linux devs and users, CentOS devs and users, Facebook employees (they use CentOS Stream internally), Oracle Linux devs, and whoever else can make and review contributions, which is a more symbiotic relationship than existed before.
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    That effectively makes it useless. The whole reason to use CentOS is because it's binary-compatible with RHEL; it's merely RHEL without the expensive licensing fees and support. So it's really useful for developing software where your customer is the US government or someone else standardized on RHEL. Luckily, according to Wikipedia there are two new distros that have popped up to fill this need: RockyLinux and AlmaLinux.
- rwmj 3y ago
  That one was a mistake, but also nothing at all to do with IBM. We (Red Hat) did that to ourselves.
  - arjvik 3y ago
    Curious for what the rationale behind the decision was?
    - bonzini 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988259 It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds. I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.
bonzini 3y ago
Absolutely nothing.
- pxc 3y ago
  Do you work at Red Hat?
  - brozaman 3y ago
    He does, he's been many years and he's one of the best engineers I worked with :)
    - pxc 3y ago
      Wow. You two had very different experiences of the acquisition. I guess a lot of the anxiety surrounding an acquisition is anticipatory, and on some level that can cause culture changes in its own right, if it inspires a fair number of people to look for work elsewhere.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
brozaman 3y ago
I'm not there anymore but there has been significant change in the company culture (which was great) and IBM is making conditions gradually worse. One thing that is a clear change is that IBM is pushing for having a cheaper workforce, more employees but cheaper and therefore less qualified. Many short term goals of getting quick sales rather than get stuff that is sustainable over time not just technically but also burning people out. Depecration of CentOS is something that really pissed me off, specially when we had acquired CentOS a few years back. Some projects have been transfered to IBM. Others without being transferred directly were influenced by IBM in a negative way (I was a software engineer in one that was). Significant changes in teams that deal with end customers, support has been affected, consulting has been affected. I know sales had some kind of merge as well (I don't any friend in sales but I've heard some stuff), etc... Also there are loads of ridiculous changes in policy to save costs and they don't even save any money. Something that really pissed me off were problems in HR. For instance I've seen problems in payslips (once I was paid THREE times with different amounts and the following month I got a discount on my payslip because I was paid too much, I know a guy who got paid 4 times that month and the month after he still got an extra amount because after 4 different payments money was still missing). I've heard of problems and delays doing the paperwork for paternity leave.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Hi! I don't recognize your nick but thanks for the kind words in your other message, first of all. I'm curious who you are, it would be great if you dropped me a private email or social media DM to tell me! Sorry about not responding to every point, I tried to focus on those where I can reply without being too vague. I hope you understand. First of all let's be clear, the deprecation of CentOS was already in the air when CentOS Stream was started internally. That was IIRC in 2017, anyway before the acquisition. Even before that there had been a serious effort on increasing CI and CD of RHEL. It was a prerequisite to a feasible "rolling release" distro and it naturally led to CentOS Stream. I totally agree that communication sucked there, it was not the first time Red Hat screwed up communication with the community and probably won't be the last. That's sad. On the other hand I like the way Rocky Linux and Alma developed out of CentOS Stream. In exchange for a shorter lifecycle, their developers now have a path towards contributing to RHEL, which they didn't have before. And just like IBM is incorrectly accused of killing CentOS, the same is probably true of most internal policy changes. Internal communication was always very clear in the rare cases when policy changes were driven by IBM (no details sorry), and there have even been cases in which policy changes have been reverted (unlike CentOS ;)). Both of those things also points towards IBM _not_ being the mastermind here. I was hired when there were 3000 employes and now there's over 20000, it's normal that some policies change. At the same time we had no forced "return to office" after COVID, memo-list still exists and management recognizes their mistakes when they're pointed out. Likewise, I am not sure what you refer to as "wanting a cheaper workforce", is it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697? Again, not sure why you think IBM was behind it but I'd very much rather have that, than thousands of layoffs Google or Meta style. One comment in there says it all---people are not born as senior engineers and you must start somewhere. Growing junior developers to be open source project maintainers has always been Red Hat's superpower. And while some projects have been transferred to IBM, notably storage, some projects have been transferred _from_ IBM (the main being OpenShift ACM, and part of the Java team). I have met some of the people who moved from IBM, they are amazing and they quickly embraced being part of Red Hat. And in fact, while I'm not aware of (or did not understand) what you are referring to with respect to customers, support or consulting, I know IBM did a serious effort to educate _their_ customer-facing teams about Red Hat. I mean, it's not like Red Hat pulled a NeXT-style reverse acquisition, but the executive behind the acquisition is now IBM CEO and for some time a former Red Hat CEO was IBM #2. That must mean something. Over four years have passed since the acquisition was announced, and there has been no massive exodus out of Red Hat. The promise was that "Red Hat would still be Red Hat" and I think they kept it.
op00to 3y ago
one thing I don't hear mentioned is a huge change in company culture. we started hiring management from cisco, and they are NOT a good personal fit. like super sexist nasty backstabbing management types. that was NOT the type of people Red Hat hired pre IBM.

pxc 3y ago

Oracle basically murdered a ton of Sun open-source projects overnight. Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions?

brozaman 3y ago
> Is IBM really doing that to Red Hat, or just suffocating it slowly the way that happens in many acquisitions? OK, my previous comment was an overstatement. This is what's happening.
- pxc 3y ago
  That makes more sense. It's still sad to hear. As an outsider, Red Hat always stood out to me as a truly special company. Too few 'open-source' enterprises have figured out how to profitably develop F/OSS in a principled way, without the 'open core' bait-and-switch. It's just the tech company circle of life, I guess. I wonder what younger tech company might play a similar role as Red Hat has another 30 years from now, and if they even exist yet.
ilyt 3y ago
They will just make it PITA to use if you're not on Red Hat.
op00to 3y ago
They murdered RHV, that's a good start.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Red Hat murdered RHV without IBM's help (sad to say).
  - op00to 3y ago
    Was that pre IBM? If so, I stand corrected!

veidr 3y ago

I clicked through to this thread because I want to know more about this. I'm a user (of both RHEL and Fedora, although I use RHEL via the free developer license so I am not actually a customer). I used to be a Sun user in the same way, but when Oracle bought Sun it was really, really obvious that using Sun's stuff was something we should immediately prepare to stop doing. It's a little less obvious with IBM buying Red Hat, though -- especially to a random user like me. For one, IBM isn't nestled between Halliburton, Enron, and Juul on the despicability spectrum. For two, it looks a lot like Apple buying NeXT, at least from the outside. As in old company with a lot of not-looking-so-hot-anymore tech buys the younger upstart with better tech, and the better tech seems to win. So what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad? E.g. firing the team responsible for developing X, and just milking the dead husk for short-term enterprise deals, or... ??

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
op00to 3y ago
> what, specifically, is IBM doing that is so bad This is just the customer facing stuff. The internal politics are more painful. - Got rid of RHV, gave customers no realistic migration path - Moved an entire BU of employees from Red Hat to IBM with no choice except to GTFO if you didn't wanna become an IBM employee (storage BU) - Each area of the business is under increased oversight due to IBM beancounters thinking they know better - IBM interference in product development (IBM has a deal, so they want feature X, even though bugfix Y and Z are more important) At first it was all "yeah, you red hatters are gonna save IBM", but Red Hat is at the point where OpenShift is being milked by IBM 100%.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Yeah it was genuinely really sad that the deal couldn’t have been “here have OpenShift for a mountain of cash, leave us alone.”

stbenjam 3y ago

Still is. I’ve been at RH a long time. IBM hasn’t touched us and they are not doing what Oracle did to Sun. Not yet anyway, but Jim made a bunch of promises to us when we were acquired and they’ve kept them all.

quickthrower2 3y ago
Why would IBM acquire and not touch it? They must have had a reason to acquire?
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  Big list of companies to upsell to.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Red Hat is now worth 10% of IBM's revenue, and growing. They had 3.4 billion reasons to acquire when they acquired it in 2018, and they had roughly 6 billion reasons not to touch it last year.
  - op00to 3y ago
    IBM "touches" Red Hat on a constant basis, needling and throwing its weight around to make way for blue ribbon 7 figure deals that never materialize.
op00to 3y ago
This has not been my experience AT ALL. Also, no one has mentioned Jim in years. Where is he anyway? Chewed up an spat out by the IBM machine.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 3y ago
Oracle rescued what they cared from Sun, everyone else including IBM, couldn't care less.

ilyt 3y ago

Yup, it already started. They bought Ceph and one of first things they did is discontinuing packaging for non-rhel distros

stryan 3y ago
How is that related to IBM? RedHat bought Ceph back in 2014.

_chu1 3y ago

It is not nearly as bad. Oracle assassinated OpenSolaris on first sight while IBM literally pays people to develop Fedora.