Summary: A lot of people are deeply disappointed to see the decisions IBM makes regarding GNU/Linux; we need to recognise IBM for what it really is (and has long been), not some fantasies about what we want it to be

AFTER one company of Bill Gates went bankrupt (yes, Microsoft wasn't the first) Microsoft got its breakthrough deal -- perhaps life-saver deal -- after Bill Gates' highly well-connected mother (born to a super-rich and privileged family) had pressured IBM to give her son an important software deal. Here we are decades later and IBM squashes key parts of Red Hat whilst at the same time helping Microsoft's monopoly.

"We should not assume that IBM is "good" because Microsoft is "bad"; Microsoft and IBM are not opposites!"IBM as a force of monopoly was never gone; it was merely hibernating. A lot of people out there (even politicians, e.g. head of the Libertarian Party, Robert Mercer, Linux Foundation) came from IBM. Many people from Novell had come from IBM. We should not assume that IBM is "good" because Microsoft is "bad"; Microsoft and IBM are not opposites!

Techrights was never anti-IBM (in its roots, the site is against Novell's collusion with Microsoft). In its early days it even cheered for IBM's response to SCO and advocacy of OpenDocument Format (ODF). IBM is certainly not a 'high-priority' threat; in relative terms, IBM is probably a lot more innocuous than any of GAFAM in isolation. What we hope is that IBM won't use its clout (through Red Hat) for censorship and lies (such as revisionism about IBM's history).

We certainly hope that IBM will at least try to understand the community and not just look at it like a piggybank to piggyback.

If IBM doesn't take CentOS seriously, how can it be expected to treat Fedora any better? As we said yesterday, we dread uttering the names of projects IBM might can next (the same way Oracle did Sun's). We think that the next few months will show us where IBM stands; IBM never stood on the "right side of history". Helping Donald Trump's regime showed everyone -- even current and past employees -- that IBM is refusing to change, even after buying Red Hat. ⬆