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IBM Pays IDG's IDC to Market Proprietary Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Under the Guise of "Research"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 11, 2025,
updated Apr 11, 2025

Under the clouds

Proprietary RHEL promoted by FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt or just plain fear-mongering)

LAST month we wrote about Canonical's FUD-based marketing campaign, delivered repeatedly in "study" clothing [1, 2, 3]. Canonical is trying to upsell Ubuntu (for a fee) by insinuating those those who don't pay will likely suffer a security or data breach. We don't need to repeat what we said last month as what we said back then was likely clear enough. Canonical later disclosed that Google too had bankrolled this FUD. They hoped to sell some Google Clown with Ubuntu on it.

Google and Canonical paid IDC to do this.

A few days ago IBM Red Hat promoted Google Clown in Red Hat's official site ("Powering innovation with Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Google Cloud") and then spoke of: "A recent IDC paper, sponsored by Red Hat". (They also pay Gartner and Forrester to do similar things)

The short story is, they're pushing towards sales of "Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)" powered by FUD or the idea that if you don't use RHEL, then things won't work. The title is "Red Hat Enterprise Linux: A catalyst for business growth and innovation" and the mouthpiece is IDC. To quote: "The paper, based on interviews with organizations using RHEL, uncovers the real-world advantages of a unified Linux environment."

So IDC science means something "based on interviews". Same as "Linux Foundation Research" ("The 'Studies' of 'Linux' Foundation 'Research' Based on Data From Microsoft and Experts in Adobe, Not 'Open Source'").

For this day and age apparently, at leastt judging by the above, "Research" means asking some questions, hence science (or "Science") is just marketing slogans.

We'll write about the Linux Foundation in our next post, as promised yesterday. The attack on science is a lot bigger; the Linux Foundation also has a history of paying IDG for propaganda, e.g. by Al Gillen [1, 2]

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