Red Hat being phased out of existence?
A blog post and HN discussion debate whether IBM is gradually dissolving Red Hat's distinct corporate culture and brand following its acquisition.
summary is enough The source blog post is light on substance, but the comment thread provides valuable insider perspectives on IBM's impact on Red Hat.
summary
A TechRights blog post argues that Red Hat is being phased out by IBM, citing corporate changes, low-quality content, and employee departures. The Hacker News discussion evaluates these claims, with former employees noting a distinct brain drain and declining support quality since the 2019 acquisition. Meanwhile, others emphasize that Red Hat products like OpenShift and RHEL continue to capture enterprise market share despite the cultural friction.
key points
- The TechRights blog post claims IBM is slowly dissolving Red Hat's brand, culture, and independent operations.
- Commenters with enterprise experience note a significant drop in support quality and a brain drain of veteran engineers since the 2019 acquisition.
- Some organizations are standardizing on alternatives like Rocky Linux as a result of Red Hat's shifting corporate trajectory.
- Despite cultural friction, Red Hat products like OpenShift and RHEL continue to capture market share, partly driven by VMware price hikes.
who should read it
Enterprise IT professionals and Linux system administrators tracking the stability and culture of the enterprise Linux ecosystem.
discussion skeptical
consensus
Most commenters agree that while Red Hat is not disappearing overnight, IBM's corporate culture and restructuring have severely degraded Red Hat's former engineering-first identity and support quality.
pushback
Some push back on the blog's extreme framing and unreliability, pointing out that Red Hat still employs thousands of engineers and continues to anchor major Linux ecosystems.
As a Senior Engineering Manager, I can tell you that, per my directive, we've actively standardized on Rocky Linux. We're moving away from everything else, including RHEL.
I was a long-time RHCX (Red Hat Certified Examiner). From around 2005 to 2015. When IBM bought Red Hat, I saw the writing on the wall, but I was optimistic it might be a Good Thing™. It wasn't a good thing. Red Hat has been pretty stagnant, as the article says. RH is 90% AI slop today. They'll live on as a brand for a long time, but from a technical perspective, they don't have much to offer.
In the early 2000s, I …
A senior engineering manager shares first-hand perspective on the decline of Red Hat support quality and their organization's migration to Rocky Linux.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.