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.
> weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo
What does "weighting commits by market cap" mean? Counting commits from people who work for companies with larger market cap more? Why would that be a useful metric?
I think the interpretation is that red hat devs are over-represented in terms of ratios compared to market cap weighting of all companies contributing to linux or similiar
basically. Comparing a company with google resources (and needs) is not really the same as RH resources (and needs). Basically, what percentage of rev/resources/profit/engineering headcount are you spending on linux?
I don't feel like this answers the last part of my question: why would that be a useful metric? If the claim is that I should be concerned with the future of kernel development because of the future of Redhat, why should dollar amounts matter rather than directly inferring from proportion of the development they do independent of dollars?
Because percentage of investment indicates how central Linux is to their business. If Linux disappeared overnight, Google would find another way to sell ads, but RedHat would disappear.
It's a reasonable proxy for things like long-term commitment and commits across the stack (e.g. audio and video, not just network and disk).
The premise of the discussion is that someone is claiming RedHat will disappear on its own, not because Linux disappears. There's no long-term commitment from an entity if it "phases out of existence". Linux disappearing because RedHat disappears is the concern.
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.
saghm · · focus · HN ↗
> weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo
What does "weighting commits by market cap" mean? Counting commits from people who work for companies with larger market cap more? Why would that be a useful metric?
elikoga · · focus · HN ↗
Hasz · · focus · HN ↗
saghm · · focus · HN ↗
xylophile · · focus · HN ↗
It's a reasonable proxy for things like long-term commitment and commits across the stack (e.g. audio and video, not just network and disk).
saghm · · focus · HN ↗