I don't believe IBM directly directed Red Hat to do this with RHEL. There's no evidence of that. However, when IBM bought Red Hat, there was some hope that IBM would culturally become more like Red Hat, but instead the opposite appears to be happening. Red Hat appears to rather be culturally embracing the slowly dying star of IBM, mostly of its own volition.

@vwbusguy when I was at Red Hat, I was often heard to complain "I wish people would stop blaming IBM. We're perfectly capable of making our own mistakes!"

@funnelfiasco Amen. @vwbusguy

@sesivany @funnelfiasco @jzb helping us not look through the past with purely rose tinted glasses is some helpful context.

https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-ii-a-history-of-the-early-2000s-linux-landscape/

@funnelfiasco @vwbusguy Though if you look back at IBM & Microsoft's track record, it's pretty damning. And whether or not IBM was the one who called these shots, it's pretty obvious why they're taking the blame.

@cameronbosch @vwbusguy oh yeah, I totally understand it. Had I been on the outside, I'd have probably defaulted to blaming IBM, too.

@funnelfiasco @cameronbosch Imagine if IBM had publicly open sourced DB2 around 2000-2005ish when it came up. We all might very likely still be using it. Those "free developer subscriptions" to DB2 they've offered since haven't done anything to make it competitive against postgres or mysql again. Sure they have residual customers, but who do you know that is switching to Informix or DB2 these days?

@funnelfiasco @cameronbosch When they acquired Red Hat, I was kind of looking to DB2 as a sort of litmus test of how things would go and if IBM was really going to change. Again, the opportunity to open up DB2 came and passed and a once great ubiquitous industry standard database remains encumbered and obscure. It was some obvious low hanging fruit. When Whitehurst finally left, it was definitively the end of an era for Red Hat.

@vwbusguy @cameronbosch "what if Jim was never named IBM's president?" is one of my favorite alternate universe scenarios. I'm not sure how much difference it would have made in the end.

@funnelfiasco @cameronbosch Very much depends on who the other person would have been. When people's paycheck depends on going along with corporate decisions, they often get their way in some form, for better or worse. Still, imagine if Jonathan Schwartz or Eric Schmidt had gotten it. Stuff like last week's news would have probably been more the norm than the exception.

@vwbusguy @cameronbosch I'm not sure it matters much to Red Hat who IBM's president is. But moving Jim from the Red Hat CEO role into that seat is important. The question is if Jim were still CEO instead of Matt (and Paul before him), would the last few months be any different? Maybe!

@funnelfiasco @cameronbosch Oh! Sorry - I misread. I thought you were pondering if Jim hadn't been Red Hat CEO. Completely my bad! Yeah, sometimes I imagine if Whitehurst had gotten the IBM CEO gig instead of Krishna.