|
Hi! I don't recognize your nick but thanks for the kind words in your other message, first of all. I'm curious who you are, it would be great if you dropped me a private email or social media DM to tell me! Sorry about not responding to every point, I tried to focus on those where I can reply without being too vague. I hope you understand. First of all let's be clear, the deprecation of CentOS was already in the air when CentOS Stream was started internally. That was IIRC in 2017, anyway before the acquisition. Even before that there had been a serious effort on increasing CI and CD of RHEL. It was a prerequisite to a feasible "rolling release" distro and it naturally led to CentOS Stream. I totally agree that communication sucked there, it was not the first time Red Hat screwed up communication with the community and probably won't be the last. That's sad. On the other hand I like the way Rocky Linux and Alma developed out of CentOS Stream. In exchange for a shorter lifecycle, their developers now have a path towards contributing to RHEL, which they didn't have before. And just like IBM is incorrectly accused of killing CentOS, the same is probably true of most internal policy changes. Internal communication was always very clear in the rare cases when policy changes were driven by IBM (no details sorry), and there have even been cases in which policy changes have been reverted (unlike CentOS ;)). Both of those things also points towards IBM _not_ being the mastermind here. I was hired when there were 3000 employes and now there's over 20000, it's normal that some policies change. At the same time we had no forced "return to office" after COVID, memo-list still exists and management recognizes their mistakes when they're pointed out. Likewise, I am not sure what you refer to as "wanting a cheaper workforce", is it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29114697? Again, not sure why you think IBM was behind it but I'd very much rather have that, than thousands of layoffs Google or Meta style. One comment in there says it all---people are not born as senior engineers and you must start somewhere. Growing junior developers to be open source project maintainers has always been Red Hat's superpower. And while some projects have been transferred to IBM, notably storage, some projects have been transferred _from_ IBM (the main being OpenShift ACM, and part of the Java team). I have met some of the people who moved from IBM, they are amazing and they quickly embraced being part of Red Hat. And in fact, while I'm not aware of (or did not understand) what you are referring to with respect to customers, support or consulting, I know IBM did a serious effort to educate _their_ customer-facing teams about Red Hat. I mean, it's not like Red Hat pulled a NeXT-style reverse acquisition, but the executive behind the acquisition is now IBM CEO and for some time a former Red Hat CEO was IBM #2. That must mean something. Over four years have passed since the acquisition was announced, and there has been no massive exodus out of Red Hat. The promise was that "Red Hat would still be Red Hat" and I think they kept it. |