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.
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.
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.
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...