IBM is Leaving Money on the Table by Paying Massive Salaries to Its CEO While Culling Workers and Neglecting GNU/Linux
They just want RHEL and stuff like OpenShift+, but in reality they seek another 'UNIX monopoly' (or monoculture [1, 2, 3] with stuff like Ansible and Podman) instead of community-developed systems; to make matters worse, they try to help Microsoft with "clown computing", set aside decommodification, because the goal is not freedom. The goal is control and habitual 'upgrades'.
THE earlier effort to gather additional information about rumours of impending Red Hat layoffs (like in April 2023) resulted in some circumstantial evidence that isn't mere rumours.
Let's face it; GNU/Linux is growing, based on all the major surveys, like we pointed out on Tuesday. In fact, statCounter shows GNU/Linux + ChromeOS (combined) at close to 7% in Germany, close to 5% in France, close to 15% in Sweden, and close to 20% in Norway this month. These people are willing to pay for GNU/Linux and can afford it. There is a lot of money to be made by companies like IBM.
On the server side, GNU/Linux has long been dominant (UNIX and BSDs don't come near; Windows is becoming extinct), but IBM does not have suitable ideology. Unlike its previous leadership, the current one does not understand the platform and does not even use it.
A week ago Liam Proven wrote:
Some techies expressed concern to us because they interpret talk of improving productivity as potentially cutting jobs, as when Red Hat's parent company IBM hired world number three consultancy Bain in 2018, just under two years before it spun off its services division, a year later renamed to Kyndryl.We are not suggesting Red Hat is anything but loved by IBM, and OpenShift is the basis for Big Blue's hybrid cloud. Nevertheless, some are a little worried.
If Red Hat (IBM) does not pursue GNU/Linux as a desktop (client) platform, and there are suggestions that they may move from GNOME to KDE as the default desktop environment*, there are plenty of community-run (managed, driven etc.) distros ready to fill the gap.
People are tired of Windows, Vista 11 is evidently failing (appalling news for Intel), and at the moment GNU/Linux is the most viable alternative for most people, so Microsoft wants it morbidly associated with 'safety' problems. █
_____________
+ OpenShift and other Red Hat "products" are a bit like openwashing. They take commonly used packages like container stuff, "enhance" them", FUD the originals ("difficult", "unsupported"), then rebrand and sell their own "version". Canonical does this too.
* Several people brought this up in IRC today and yesterday. "Looks like some higher ups at Redhat and the Fedora Project are proposing that KDE be the default desktop," arkanian said a few hours ago. We examined the links. Remember that Fedora and Red Hat basically abandoned KDE (formally) when nobody noticed after IBM had taken over. Is there remorse now?