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.
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.
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.
Yes, I don't argue that IBM's ways are advisable. The revenue of the top ten big tech companies are all 2-10x greater than IBM, which is ~21 on that list.
You should update yourself on how those mainframes power z/OS UNIX, Aix and Linux workloads, alongside their older OS personalities just like VMS/Windows have done, including cloud workloads with containers even, at the usual traditional customers.
Those customers aren't going to place containers on Amazon for their systems.
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.
Broadcom has pretty famously gone back and offered vSphere standard. I don't think the strategy works long term, and I still think it was shortsighted play to juice #s in the 2-3 year timeframe.
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.
...and have it fail spectacularly when deployed in an environment that requires reliability performance and high availability. Yes, I honestly can't wait to see those horror comedies unfold, but hopefully far away from me. :)
GP is saying (paraphrased) "I'm not worried about Linux because even if IBM (or Qualcomm, or ...) decides to close down their Linux efforts, the Linux devs will go someplace else and still contribute", which is true as far as it goes. My contention is it might not matter, because the big player can just as easily pay far fewer people to vibecode their own Linux workalike and take back control by displacing OG Linux in their tech ecosystem. When I can leverage all the previous work done to create Linux (aka The Hard Part), leave the licensing behind (not tested in court yet) and have my very own OS that I can vibecode/iterate any way I want independent of the Linux dev community, why would $BIGCOMPANY not consider doing that? How would it be it 'valueless' to one of these players (most of whom chafe at being in bed with the OSS community anyway)? On the contrary, what value would the Linux devs still have? Why would I even consider taking any contributions not from my own little AI playpen, since I'd be able to trivially say "hey AI...those crusty old Linux devs look like they got themselves a good idea...why don't you add that to our own private OS in the next spin. Think of a nifty marketing spin to advertise it and come up with some commercials to promote it. In the style of Micheal Bay this time".
Hasz · · focus · HN ↗
Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:
<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...
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.
topspin · · focus · HN ↗
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.
cogman10 · · focus · HN ↗
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] <a href="https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf
topspin · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Those customers aren't going to place containers on Amazon for their systems.
Hasz · · focus · HN ↗
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.
xorcist · · focus · HN ↗
Broadcom likely disagrees, lightly snickering all the way to the bank.
Hasz · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://itdaily.com/blogs/datacenter/broadcom-makes-a-u-turn-on-vsphere-standard-in-an-effort-to-win-back-small-vmware-customers/" rel="nofollow">https://itdaily.com/blogs/datacenter/broadcom-makes-a-u-turn...
kjs3 · · focus · HN ↗
Should be an interesting decade coming up.
pferde · · focus · HN ↗
smackeyacky · · focus · HN ↗
kjs3 · · focus · HN ↗
Yes...that is exactly the point I'm making.
GP is saying (paraphrased) "I'm not worried about Linux because even if IBM (or Qualcomm, or ...) decides to close down their Linux efforts, the Linux devs will go someplace else and still contribute", which is true as far as it goes. My contention is it might not matter, because the big player can just as easily pay far fewer people to vibecode their own Linux workalike and take back control by displacing OG Linux in their tech ecosystem. When I can leverage all the previous work done to create Linux (aka The Hard Part), leave the licensing behind (not tested in court yet) and have my very own OS that I can vibecode/iterate any way I want independent of the Linux dev community, why would $BIGCOMPANY not consider doing that? How would it be it 'valueless' to one of these players (most of whom chafe at being in bed with the OSS community anyway)? On the contrary, what value would the Linux devs still have? Why would I even consider taking any contributions not from my own little AI playpen, since I'd be able to trivially say "hey AI...those crusty old Linux devs look like they got themselves a good idea...why don't you add that to our own private OS in the next spin. Think of a nifty marketing spin to advertise it and come up with some commercials to promote it. In the style of Micheal Bay this time".
jasomill · · focus · HN ↗
What’s the point?
kjs3 · · focus · HN ↗