[gnulinux]

Red Hat was probably my top company that I ever wanted to work in, but this time around couldn't find good open positions so joined another company (only a few months ago). I feel blessed because I'd probably feel really bad if I joined RedHat and then it suddenly became IBM. Now, next time around (in a few years) I'll know more about this whole IBM acquisition deal, and if RedHat is still a good company to work in, I can make an informed decision.

[dcosson]

Can I ask why? I'm genuinely curious. My understanding is their core business is selling Enterprise support for linux, which, no offense to them, doesn't strike me as particularly interesting. I know they also contribute a lot of open source stuff back, but in terms of working in open source Linux a company like Canonical seems more appealing from my limited knowledge, just because their main product is distributed under a free license unlike RHEL. In terms of working on interesting new software/infrastructure platforms, working somewhere like Hashicorp, or even working at Google Cloud or AWS also seem more appealing.

Not trying hate on Redhat, I just never got the impression of them being particularly innovative. A lot of the most interesting stuff I have heard of from them seems to have come from acquisitions, like CoreOS or Ansible. In which case, I don't see why these acquisitions now living under the IBM umbrella is necessarily that much worse than being under Redhat.

[gnufied]

> but in terms of working in open source Linux a company like Canonical seems more appealing from my limited knowledge, just because their main product is distributed under a free license unlike RHEL.

RHEL isn't distributed under free software licence?

> In terms of working on interesting new software/infrastructure platforms, working somewhere like Hashicorp, or even working at Google Cloud or AWS also seem more appealing.

I work on Openshift and Kubernetes and for me and barring Google I can't think of a company where I will get to solve as many interesting problems as I have solved at Red Hat. AWS is very new to Kubernetes and I do not think they have lot of people who can mentor someone just starting with Kubernetes. From what I have seen, if you work for a particular cloudprovider, you pretty much become goto guy for that cloudprovider in Kubernetes. It can be blessing or curse but at Red hat - engineers are forced to think one layer above. How will this work on Ceph FS, NFS, iSCSI and EBS? And yeah - You don't feel like second class citizen if you are remote at Red Hat. At some companies even though - they allow remote, they can exclude you, if they want all hands on the deck (like physically).

It is true to some extent that - Red Hat strength isn't churning out new technologies (but they can surprise you). But to Kubernetes for example - it has brought a stability for enterprise(again I could be biased). If you scratch the surface, many features in Kubernetes that you take for granted was developed in Openshift.

[bonzini]

Canonical does much less upstream development than Red Hat. If you want to work on the upstream kernel, for example, Canonical is probably not the right place to work.

Also, RHEL is distributed under a free license; if you want it free as in beer there's always Fedora, and also CentOS which is also a Red Hat product.