IBM Has Moved Away From Standards and Freedom, Red Hat's Leadership Has Changed, So Users Should Probably Move Away From Red Hat

Dr. Roy Schestowitz

2023-08-25 08:39:18 UTC
Modified: 2023-08-25 08:39:18 UTC

Video download link | md5sum f198c77a4a777cc21cde8d97519bd9d3 IBM Betrays Standards Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Red Hat's behaviour under IBM's leadership is getting worse and less defensible over time; maybe it's time to reconsider the status of Red Hat within the community

THE VIDEO above focuses on IBM's shift from "Linux" to vendor lock-in, including Clown Computing and secret source code. Red Hat promoted vendor lock-in in all sorts of other ways, including Ansible and systemd (lock-in by complexity), but now it's actively suppressing the adoption of Free software that has built in OpenDocument Format (ODF) support.

It's becoming increasingly hard to defend what Red Hat is doing, going as far as defending Microsoft Office and pushing systemd everywhere, despite it being run by a Microsoft employee.

Thankfully alternatives do exist. Debian recently turned 30 and it's still not moving away from systemd or enabling alternatives, in spite of a years-old General Resolution. Well, just over a week ago Devuan GNU+Linux 5 was released. As noted in this forum, citing this Slashdot comment (Perens left Twitter last year):

Yesterday this was posted as an image.

As we noted in 2019, Bruce Perens had long criticised systemd:

Bruce Perens systemd 3

Bruce Perens systemd 2

Bruce Perens systemd 1

He cautioned about it half a decade earlier as well.

"Now that IBM behaves so badly and systemd is managed by a Microsoft employee it's time to consider moving away to truly community-run distros."As he put it in 2014: "As you can see, I found out this morning that anyone who criticizes systemd has a character flaw. It's not a technical or policy argument at all. You can't really even start talking about it without being criticized for the tone of your discussion. This is mad, folks. [...] I think you are expecting me to argue against systemd on a technical basis and you are disappointed that I do not. But this isn't really a technical argument. It's process, policy, and marketing. It is not how any of the individual pieces work, but it is the fact that they are in a project as big (maybe larger) than the KDE or GNOME GUI which the rest of the world has been expected to accept en masse rather than ala carte."

Now that IBM behaves so badly and systemd is managed by a Microsoft employee it's time to consider moving away to truly community-run distros. The video above mostly focuses on the office suites aspect. ⬆

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IBM Has Moved Away From Standards and Freedom, Red Hat's Leadership Has Changed, So Users Should Probably Move Away From Red Hat

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