Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

This afternoon, I noticed that Fedora’s mailing lists, “Hyperkitty”, were down and all the server said was “varnish cache error”.

Now they are back up, but all of the messages are deleted and nobody has posted anything.

I suppose time will tell if this was actually an error, if they plan to recover things, and continue using it.

If it was IBM nuking the thing on purpose, it was another thing that it has done with no warning to anyone.

People were actively posting to it, including IBM’s Red Hat employees, right up to the end.

There has been a surge in “I am orphaning my packages. Good luck everybody else.” posts from developers and package maintainers that are finished with this IBM nonsense that’s been going on.

It’s quite possible that IBM made the decision to bring the hammer down to plug a source of “dirt” that bloggers, including myself, had been sourcing from those lists.

Mozilla used to operate in full view of the public, on newsgroups (NNTP) and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) (their own server), but under Mitchell Baker, Mozilla killed the IRC server and moved to a network of child molesters (matrix.org), but sent the development stuff to “Google Groups” (not an open standard) and marked many of them private so you can’t even see what’s going on in there.

As I reported previously, Matrix.org’s IRC bridge to Libera Chat was lopped off by Libera recently, citing a lack of moderation following major layoffs in the “trust and safety” division of the company that runs Matrix.org and Element (the Web client for the protocol).

They did not cite the child molesters on Matrix.org, but they did say this.

“abuse load from the bridge that made use of easy anonymous registration and the protocol’s persistent and distributed archiving of files, including images, videos, and long messages converted to pastebins”

-Libera

Hmm, what kind of images and videos, I wonder? 😛

Matrix.org is basically dead at this point. The 10,000 people (1/4 of all Libera Chat users) who got booted from the Matrix.org side now need IRC accounts, and with the IRC bridges gone, and the child molesters roaming the place, Matrix.org is rapidly turning into a ghost town.

Back to IBM Red Hat, I would say that this is the biggest bungled merger since AOL TimeWarner.

Neither company was a good fit for each other, and IBM is scrapping Red Hat for itty bitty bits and pieces and burning Fedora down as it goes.

I suppose if Hyperkitty doesn’t re-appear soon, we will have our answer that Fedora will now be developed in the dark, like Firefox.

Almost as soon as IBM took over, some Red Hat employees, many of which were subsequently laid off, started complaining about the lack of “dogfooding”.

As IBM took over Red Hat, they started dismantling server infrastructure that had been built and paid for and throwing away software Red Hat had already written, which were sunk costs, and doling out expensive rents on contracts with “cloud vendors” like Microsoft and Google. Arguing that the never ending rent payments were more efficient.

Now they lay off and squeeze and squeeze. You know, it’s interesting that my username here is a contraction for “Baron Vladimir Harkonnen”, the infamous machiavellian “floating fat man” of Frank Herbert’s Dune. Not even death would kill the baron, as he resurrected in a sense in the minds of his descendants.

The people IBM has placed into upper management at Red Hat are sort of like “Beast Rabban”, the Baron’s “idiot nephew”, sent to lay waste to the company.

In the 1984 movie (not the best version, but still…),

“Rabban. I place you in charge of Arrakis. It’s yours to squeeze, as I promised. I want you to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. Give me spice. Drive them. Drive them into utter submission. Do not show the slightest pity or mercy. Never stop. Go. Go. Show no mercy.”

-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

This whole sort of mindset has crept into Fedora, too, where many of the “community” running the spins where IBM doesn’t care if they work or not (like KDE), are running “Edge on Windows” and “Safari on Mac”.

What does it do on my laptop? They don’t even know. They don’t run it on THEIR laptop.

openSUSE Leap 15.5 KDE at least appears as though the people making it use it. ⬆