[cantrememberpw8]

I'm excited by this.

I recently left Red Hat for greener pastures. From where I sat, IBM was slowly turning toward wisdom again, having been run aground by its previous few CEOs. I was skeptical when IBM bought Red Hat, but after several years of not screwing it up, I'm pretty hopeful. Now, Krishna is working on streamlining the business and making the rest of IBM more like Red Hat. Splitting off the low performing Kyndryl, and selling Watson, are part of this by cutting obsolete sectors; focusing on getting Red Hat the resources it needs to rapidly accelerate, and on building the talent pool by hiring more junior engineers, are the positive changes working to turn IBM back into a powerhouse.

[kumarvvr]

Curious, what does RedHat actually do ?

[leokennis]

They make sure enterprises can run Linux that doesn’t “suddenly” (read: with less than 2-3 years notice) break their critical workflows because some component loses support or some dependency reaches EOL - they do this by extended maintenance, backporting (security) patches to old versions, providing tailored support etc.

This is very valuable to enterprises and so they pay a lot for it.

For example, you can still run Red Hat 6 safely and securely until 2024; by that point Red Hat 8 will have been out for 5 years already.

[staz]

To save you a web search : Red Hat 6 was relased 6 November 2010. Roughly 1 year after Window 7, which ended support 2 weeks ago.

[KindOne]

Windows 7 went EOL in on Jan 14, 2020.

Are you talking about the Extended Security Update? That ends Jan 10, 2023.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...

[cantrememberpw8]

Red Hat is the premier organization doing open source development. They optimize the experiences for enterprises: lots of support and a goal of helping it be easy to use so enterprises can focus on their business logic.

Lots of well-hated projects come from Red Hat: systemd, wayland, ... but they have also contributed well to some other projects which are much less controversial.

[dreamcompiler]

Aside: Why do people hate Wayland? Systemd loathing I can understand but I think of Wayland as X11 with most of the horrible parts scrubbed away.

[ako]

Services/products of a company usually bring one of the following to customers: 1) improve revenue, 2) lower costs or 3) manage risks. RedHat is probably mostly about the last one, manage the risks of running linux.