THIS morning we caught up with some comments made anonymously by (we assume) IBM/Red Hat insiders. The situation has been rather bad for a while -- layoffs included -- and with that squeeze on CentOS users to pay IBM (this has largely backfired in several different ways) "redhatters [are] leaving in troves. Get out while you can." Says an insider, apparently...
"Free software that is difficult to set up and maintain can limit one's freedom."So says the latest comment, only weeks old. In this video I give some background information, I explain why Ansible/containers (OpenShift, Podman)/systemd are added complexity which helps sell support contracts, and I remind people that I'm no Red Hat basher. I've spent nearly 20 years boosting the company and its products, many of which I've used and still use.
Yesterday we wrote about added technical complexity as a barrier. It's like a form of vendor lock-in, no matter if it's proprietary or Free software. Free software that is difficult to set up and maintain can limit one's freedom.
Take AWS for example (Fedora is being outsourced to Microsoft and to AWS). AWS is not Free software but an exploiter of Free software (ask projects which are 'monetised' by Amazon at those projects' expense). AWS is about learning and memorising GUIs, not real skills, and those 'skills' become useless anyway as soon as you move to a customer/server that doesn't have AWS (then there's inclination to just outsource everything to such a surveillance monopoly). IBM wants something along the same lines. It nowadays has Amazon envy and it's doing harm to what remains of Red Hat. ⬆