Bonum Certa Men Certa

IBM Layoffs/Redundancies Rumours (2021)

Video download link



Summary: The above video took a lot of research time to prepare (about 200 visits to the forums over the past month); companies are rarely upfront about layoffs/cost-saving plans and growing corporate/staff unrest, so in order to gain insight regarding the situation at IBM we spent dozen of hours studying discussions and today we finally summarise some of the findings

OVER the past month or so we've watched very closely (about a dozen times per day) the IBM anonymous forum (or IBM layoffs board) not just because of rumours about staff cuts but all sorts of inside stories, including some about patents, low morale, and Red Hat's future. Threads such as this one (hundreds of them) offer some insight. One can see, based on a fast assessment, that many posters there are current or former insiders (not all; in fact, there's suspicion that IBM HR people troll or AstroTurf those pages as well, maybe to discredit and ruin them).



"We need to understand the context of such misguided policies."In the video above I take stock of some of the latest (today's) posts and assemble a bunch of insights gathered over the past month. It certainly looks like there's little or no future to IBM. In recent months they liaised with Microsoft while attacking the FSF as if another struggling company can somehow save them. Some of the most tactless moves (e.g. abandoning CentOS) seem like short-sighted money-grabbing moves. We need to understand the context of such misguided policies. As far as software freedom is concerned, IBM gradually turns from ally (of convenience) into foe.

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