Video download link | md5sum 75e8b5cba1a4f1fd173acf6816ed2391 IBM Attacking Its Own Community Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: IBM has lost control; whether it cares to realise it or not, many of its recent decisions and policies are self-harming reflexes that aren't well-received gestures but instead deeply offensive attacks on the community; the harm is irreversible at this point and it seems like Fedora users/contributors already flock to other distributions of GNU/Linux

THE "Big Blue" IBM decided to buy Red Hat, thinking it would buy itself a future this way. Less than half a decade later we mostly see IBM dismantling some of the biggest assets, including a community of willing volunteers (working without pay).

In 2020 we saw the CentOS kibosh (way to upset people during a pandemic and unprecedented lock-downs) and this past week we've seen some of the same things happening in Fedora. Now it seems like IBM may be trying to simply silence the community (like that's going to work! This typically results in more backlash or blowback!) and this corporate agenda of IBM seems to overlook the simple fact that complete corporate control of software means no volunteers. In other words, IBM would need to hire thousands of people to get the same work done (that it previously got for free).

“They are burning a serious bridge with the developer community.”
      --AnonymousAs one reader put it, the point should be that the agenda is about control; that's what RMS manifesto was about too: control. If IBM does not respect users' control, or even access to the source code, there will be trouble. To quote the reader: "IBM is in trouble because there were still a lot of people using/working on Fedora. They are burning a serious bridge with the developer community. Once they get settled in (e.g. in Devuan or Debian), there is no going back to IBM. That will in turn bite RHEL hard."

"Will we see a GNU/Linux revolution wherein people flock (back) to community-controlled (or user-centric) distros?"The video above discusses some of the latest posts and takes note that (while the video was being recorded) in IRC Ryan had announced his latest article. It seems like a lot of Fedora (or EPEL) packages are being orphaned this week. Fedora is basically collapsing and this will also impact RHEL along with its various clones. Will we see a GNU/Linux revolution wherein people flock (back) to community-controlled (or user-centric) distros? ⬆