this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Should we be wary of Red Hat? (lemmy.cafe)
submitted 22 hours ago by propitiouspanda@lemmy.cafe to c/linux@programming.dev
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They were bought by IBM a few years back, but even aside from that they’re a corporation and they care about making money above all else.

It looks like Red Hat is doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem.

I don’t think the incessant Fedora shilling is unrelated.

It seems like there isn’t much criticism of the company or their tactics, and I’m curious if any of you think that should change.

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[–] N0x0n@lemmy.ml 2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Isn't RedHat who pushed systemd? Most init enthusiasts hate systemd ! Dunno if related tho. I'm just recently into linux so I never had the chance to give the init system a try !

However, I'm an opensource and free from corporate shit software lover. Try to avoid everything related to corpo (Redhat, Ubuntu...). That's exaclty the reason why I'm reluctant to give Fedora a try, even though it seems kinda a good distro !

Debian as server distro EndeavourOS as daily drive

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[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 2 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Isn't IBM just doing embrace, extend, extinguish?

[–] FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

No. Look at IBMs stock value history. There is a pretty clear point at which Remini stepped down and they really started to see the benefits of Red Hat. Nearly all IBM profit comes from Red Hat. They were drowning and their pivot to cloud was failing. With Red Hat they've been able to actually get a presence in the cloud with OpenShift.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml -2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Their stock history can also be explained as stock holders seeing value in destroying Red Hat.

[–] FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

That would be such a bizarre way to interpret that. They weren't even direct competitors. VMware, Oracle, and SUSE would be better comparisons for that move. And it seems to bear repeating that Red Hat is something like 30% of IBM's revenue. Why would you kill off a third of your income?

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml -1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

Because if they EEE all Linux distribution, they'll be able to kill off the libre aspects of the software and (in their minds) make even more money.

Revenue is never enough. They always want more.

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[–] lung@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago

Power of what sort?

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (11 children)

🙄

This dumb thread comes up every few years from paranoid people new to the community who don't understand how this ecosystem works.

There are countless threads and blog posts about this, so I'm not sure why you're bringing your paranoia here to kick up some fear mongering or whatever your intent is, but let me break it down for you:

  1. Fedora is its own entity
  2. Red Hat is a for-profit company
  3. Red Hat doesn't own Fedora
  4. Red Hat contributes assets to many FOSS initiatives, not just Fedora
  5. Yes, some RH employees also work on Fedora. It's free contribution. Same as Canonical, Valve, IBM, Universities, and other private companies.
  6. There is nothing to be "weary" of because if something were to change about the Fedora ecosystem that didn't benefit users, guess what? There will be instant forks, and a massive shift away from that community. Red Hat knows this because they aren't fools.
  7. People aren't "shilling" for Fedora. It's the new standard for well-built and easy to run distro since Canonical decided to ruin Ubuntu (see point #6)

Red Hat EMPLOYS many contributors straight out of open source projects, and also just directly funds projects they want to see improve. So do other corporate entities. You know Redis was basically single-handedly funded by Amazon for multiple years so the project would upstream features they requested? Also many Apache projects, memcached, ELK, Grafana...etc.

Get outta here with the shit-stirring for absolutely no good reason 🤦

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[–] bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 0 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

IBM is evil (literally making NAZI death camps possible)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

If it wasn’t for IBM the Holocaust couldn’t have happened.

So morally move away from them as soon as you can justify.

The alternatives provide better support anyway

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