Bonum Certa Men Certa

"They Aren't Really Red Hat Any Longer, They're IBM"

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 01, 2024

Or worse, they're Microsoft

Hat Red

As just noted, Bruce Perens recalls the frivolous libel lawsuit against him and cautions that IBM is now doing the same:

Perens recently returned from a trip to China, where he was the keynote speaker at the Bench 2023 conference. In anticipation of his conversation with El Reg, he wrote up some thoughts on his visit and on the state of the open source software community. One of the matters that came to mind was Red Hat. 'They aren't really Red Hat any longer, they're IBM,' Perens writes in the note he shared with The Register. 'And of course they stopped distributing CentOS, and for a long time they've done something that I feel violates the GPL, and my defamation case was about another company doing the exact same thing: They tell you that if you are a RHEL customer, you can't disclose the GPL source for security patches that RHEL makes, because they won't allow you to be a customer any longer. IBM employees assert that they are still feeding patches to the upstream open source project, but of course they aren't required to do so. 'This has gone on for a long time, and only the fact that Red Hat made a public distribution of CentOS (essentially an unbranded version of RHEL) made it tolerable. Now IBM isn't doing that any longer. So I feel that IBM has gotten everything it wants from the open source developer community now, and we've received something of a middle finger from them.'

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

In Europe, More People Turn to Russia for Answers, Not Microsoft
The future of computing doesn't look pretty
SLAPP Censorship - Part 48 Out of 200: Brett Wilson LLP and 5RB Copy-Pasting Bogus Claims for Violent Americans (Microsoft) Who Tell Women to Kill Themselves
Microsoft's Graveley telling his partner to kill herself is probably a crime
 
ActBlue former IT boss disappearance: Decklin Foster & Debian, Harvard suicide lab, Chris Gleason is wife, whistleblower or both?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 17/04/2026: Getting competent in NixOS and Alhena 5.5.6 Released
Links for the day
Links 17/04/2026: "We Cannot Lose Sight of Ukraine" and "When Leaders Should Resign"
Links for the day
GizChina Appears to Have Become a Slopfarm, I.e. Fake News Site With Fake Text
Don't waste a moment reading LLM slop, as at the very least it rewards plagiarism [...] Deemed to be slop also by two human beings, not just two scanners
Massive, Cross-Site Strike at the EPO Today
There's coordination across sites for maximal pressure
Dr. Andy Farnell Says "AI" is "Only a Marketing Term" for Things That Exist for "Entertainment Purposes Only"
distortion or misuse of the term (now buzzword/s) "AI"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 16, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, April 16, 2026
Strikes at the EPO Carry on, Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) Increases Pressure Ahead of Technical and Operational Support Committee (TOSC) Meeting Next Week
the local section The Hague (or SUEPO TH) wants to rally many staff members
Gemini Links 16/04/2026: LLM Nuisance, Identity Systems (Surveillance), and Why Windows is Failing
Links for the day
'Going Offline' is Not Primitivism
Computers are good at automation, but people are not robots
The Register MS Has Published Article With "AI" 18 Times in it, "Cloud" 9 Times. It Got Paid to Do This.
What happened to journalism?
The EFF Is Hardly Doing Anything Anymore
Our series about the EFF has been brewing for over 2 years already
Microsoft Uses Slop to Bribe (at No Cost) Nations That Otherwise Would Move to GNU/Linux and IBM is Forcing Red Hat Staff to Use Slop
Life it too short to waste "consuming" slop
Links 16/04/2026: Roblox Launching ‘Roblox Kids’ Accounts and "Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools"
Links for the day
Red Hat Staff: IBM Red Hat Laid Off About 400 Engineers, the Media Did Not Cover This
The media is not doing its job or doing a really shoddy job
Gemini Links 16/04/2026: Nocturnal Pulse, Unpersoned Outlaws, and Monaspace Lagrange Fontpacks
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Lecture in GDC Auditorium in Austin, Texas
corporate power could not 'cancel' the man
It's Not About the Head, It's About the Masters (and Funding)
Regardless of who the OSI claims to be its leader, its masters are Microsoft, just follow the money
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 15, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Links 15/04/2026: Geelong Corio Refinery Fire, Journalist Sentenced for "Insulting the President"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/04/2026: Organiding .bashrc with Imports, Oddμ as SSG
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 14, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 14, 2026