[_jal]

RedHat's goodwill will be spent down over the next decade or so, and eventually I fully expect to think of them the same way I do IBM. (Which is, roughly, the same way I think of Oracle.)

All of the people I deal with there are the same as before the acquisition, so things have not changed much for me personally, yet. But I am looking at building replacements for certain tools we depend on; the writing is on the wall.

[Accujack]

This is (at present) a standard progression in the life cycle of a corporation in the US. There are vanishingly few corporations left who practice a business model designed to span more than about 30 years.

Most businesses today are founded, then the founders are bought out/merged, getting cash in the process.

Then the new owners change things to effectively profit on the business at the expense of longevity, which causes discontent in users and starts the slow downhill slide to the product's death. Then as the product becomes less relevant and loses market share cuts are made to preserve profitability and lower ongoing costs.

Once the business has extracted all the value from the product, they then drop the product entirely but retain the IP for it, preventing anyone else from resurrecting it, thus suppressing competition.

[jdofaz]

>they then drop the product entirely

Or sell it to Micro Focus

[quercusa]

Odd, isn't it, that nobody feels the need to ask what your opinion of Oracle is - it's just (with good reason) assumed.

[violetgarden]

I haven’t worked with IBM, but soon as Oracle was mentioned, I understood.

[cubano]

It's easy to want to do, but much harder to justify banging on public companies for trying to increase revenue.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> but much harder to justify banging on public companies for trying to increase revenue

I assure you, it is very easy to be unhappy with a company for screwing over its users, even if they think it might net them more revenue (bonus points for this being a questionable assumption)

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Well, if you ignore the history of Red Hat. It used to be "the" Linux company, a paragon of what you can achieve by combining business acumen of the corporate world with complete transparency of the open source process.

When the first clones of RHEL appeared, they received C&D letters about the use of "Red Hat" in the name, so they complied and started to replace the branding before recompiling. Who would expect that the only free-as-in beer RHEL clone we'll be able to use will be Oracle Linux.

[laurent92]

I’m deeply interrogated by Atlassian forcefully moving users to the cloud.

It’s as if, in 5 years, we developers wouldn’t have a safe Linux to deploy on, and then we’d be required to use Amazon Linux or GCP Linux, the other ones being not officially supported and therefore not insured in case of leak, or not approved for PCI or PII or GDPR or...