Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.

There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.

These guys are pursuing the wrong strategy, they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions leveraging existing consulting teams they already have (IBM revenue to hugely reliant on PS, 33%). Basically the largest "forward deployed eng" transition ever, backed by existing very strong open-source software and tailored (with Watson, dear god) as the "AI powered" engine to appease the shareholder gods. You would run over so many startups with poor penetration at the F2000 level.

Dramatizing the inevitable does what?

Then they laugh at you,

Then they fight you,

Then you win

Then local datacenters move to the cloud

Then you don’t keep up with Amazon

Then you exit to IBM

Then you get used to shovel IBM garbage onto customers

Then you become an irrelevant footnote like vmware and Sun.

Early 2000s red hat was wild and I was glad to be there. I’m still the ‘mikem’ in /etc/sudoers in RHEL and Amazon Linu.

>Red Hat's "way" or "culture" or "open source org" is going away, step by step

I went through this and it started 5 years after purchase by IBM and it took another 3 or 4 years before everything was completely gone. FWIW, I have sense left IBM.