06.03.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Red Hat is Becoming Somewhat Like SUSE, Stranded Inside a Company That Doesn’t Get Free Software (Pushing Proprietary Software for Money)
They just don’t understand our culture and they don’t want to, either
SUSE and Red Hat employees inside GCC are bossed by people who dislike the FSF and don't understand Free software communities; instead they harvest and look to 'monetise' software patents
Summary: With IBM officials calling all the shots at Red Hat (like Novell’s CEO did, after his long IBM career, inside SUSE) we need to think carefully of the full ramifications of old proprietary software giants taking over GNU/Linux distributors
Yesterday Red Hat published this blog post about Microsoft SQL Server. It’s far from the only such post and we’ve become accustomed to Red Hat’s promotion of proprietary software. As recently as today, for example, Red Hat was promoting SAP Store… same thing SUSE does… and it’s all becoming reminiscent of what Novell did to SUSE!
“Generally speaking, Red Hat is leaning on proprietary software companies nowadays, promoting their stuff instead of competing with them, hoping that this will bring income to IBM.”But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here; the analogy isn’t great because in Novell’s case there was a patent collusion with Microsoft, whereas with IBM and Microsoft there’s a longstanding cross-licensing affair. And saying “boycott Novell” is like saying “boycott IBM” (unlike boycotting SUSE, which would be like calling for a Red Hat boycott quite needlessly, knowing that many parts of the company actually do some useful things, still).
Generally speaking, Red Hat is leaning on proprietary software companies nowadays, promoting their stuff instead of competing with them, hoping that this will bring income to IBM. In the process, to use examples from earlier today [1, 2], Red Hat is rebranding servers as “clown” and paying fake ‘experts’ to produce propaganda in “study” clothing. “A new IDC white paper sponsored by Red Hat…”
I really don’t want to bash Red Hat. I never really did, but I’m growingly concerned that some of the strategic moves at Red Hat “came from above” and they harm the community as a whole, not just Red Hat. As somebody put it 3 hours ago: “What does IBM have? Z, DB2, cloud paks??? They are also screwing Redhat dude. IBM is finished 10 years back. Nothing can change it. If you are at IBM, it means you are low skilled and can’t find any jobs elsewhere.”
Novell had the same issue when it signed the deal with Microsoft. █
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