Weekend Discussion About How IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Will Cause "Enshittification" for Users
"Enshittification" is a term used "as a designation for a particular phenomenon affecting online platforms", but it is no longer limited to any particular domain, definitely not online things. Consider these examples:
- Enshittification of Airports, Airlines, and Airplanes
- Enshittification is Everywhere: You Pay More, the Services Get Worse
- The Enshittification of Royal Mail (Post Office/Postal Services) Continues
- Non-Tech Enshittification: Post Office Perils and the Czech is in the Mail
Enshittification is almost a dictionary word by now, but with the substring "shit" it'll face perils, an uphill battle of sorts.
Enshittification is now discussed in a Microsoft-friendly forum (where moderators censor Free software advocacy). Less than a day ago somebody posted:
Red Hat will begin to integrate even further into IBM. About to get into enshittification?
IBM has announced that, starting in early 2026, RedHat back-office teams will become part of IBM, reducing RedHat's independence.
Among the teams that will move to IBM are: Legal, HR, Finance and Accounting
Following the recent waves of layoffs at RedHat, it appears that this decision is due to a cost-saving measure on the part of IBM, continuing with its plans from some time ago to save up to $3.5 billion through, among other things, job cuts.
For the time being, the engineering, product, sales, and marketing personnel departments will remain as they are.
We have already seen worrying measures from IBM at RedHat. From dismissing a Fedora project manager (Ben Cotton) to restricting free access to the RHEL source code (only for customers and partners; Alma, for example, has since had to rely on "the new" CentOS), and a few months ago, removing permission to use RHEL in production for small projects with a developer licence.
Do you think RedHat is heading for enshittification? Will it affect RHEL, CentOS or Fedora?
There are many comments in there, but the top comment said what bluewashing is (or was) like, based on direct experience.
Nearly 30 years ago, I was working at Tivoli which had been acquired by IBM about a year earlier.I seem to recall HR's move to IBM finishing while I was there, and I would assume that the other departments did too (but I didn't deal with them), and it was fine -- IBM started handling the HR functions and it while it maybe looked a bit different, it didn't affect my job much at all.
As for Tivoli itself, as long as Tivoli kept making its numbers and doing well, IBM left us mostly alone and let us do our own thing. But when the numbers started slipping, IBM moved in and finished the assimilation and soon after the old Tivoli was pretty much no more, just another brand name.
And I saw this general trajectory happen with other companies too -- IBM acquires them, IBM takes over HR (and I assume legal, finance, accounting, etc.) quickly and that part pretty much fine and then things stay the same until the company starts faltering in some way, and then the company gets fully assimilated into IBM fairly quickly after that.
And the assimilation wasn't horrible -- IBM wasn't a bad place to work, but it was a change in how things felt, from going to a smaller company to a bigger company.
So I guess I'm surprised that it took this long for IBM to take over RedHat's administrative functions, but my past experience tells me that it's probably not horrible (unless you work in these departments, maybe -- which I do not) -- it's the next step that one has to worry about and that happens when the sub-company stops doing whatever it is that IBM wants it to do.
(Of course, on the flip side ... 30 years was a long time ago, and my experience with IBM may be totally irrelevant now.)
"I worked at a software company that was acquired by IBM so I knew it was game over for RedHat the day they were acquired," said another comment. "IBM’s CEO is all about cutting out the things IBM used to be good at in favor pumping up the stock price. It’s a matter of time until he does the same to Red Hat," a comment further below says.
As recently as 2 days ago we mentioned a "Noteworthy Claim That IBM is Firing a Lot of Lawyers This Week (RAs in the Legal Department)". Some of them might be Red Hat's. But their "hat" is blue now.
We may never hear of "Red Hat layoffs" again; because they'll be called "IBM". The same goes for GitHub. █