"About 15 years later I ran into that manager again, and he was close to dying from a kidney ailment. I spent a day with him, driving him around so he could take some photographs, and having lunch. We didn't talk much about work, mostly he wanted to get out of being in bed and see the world a bit."
Just deLurking to say that was an excellent thing to do. This small paragraph tucked away at the end of the anecdote shifted the whole experience for me.
Does 'Red Hat' actually exist as a separate entity?
Is there any 'relative autonomy' entity for Red Hat, like a board of directors or a council of any kind. Or is Red Hat simply a department in a larger structure?
This question is not meant to be rhetorical or challenging.
As someone who currently works for Red Hat, yes. Red Hat is more than just a "department within a larger structure", it retains a separate CEO (who reports to IBM, yes), a separate human resources department, separate marketing events, we (apart from maybe a few dozen people) do not have IBM email addresses nor do we use their internal systems or vendors (except for e.g. Employee Stock Purchase Plan). There is almost no interaction between Red Hat and IBM employees apart from the highest levels.
Most of the decisions/changes which people attribute to IBM fall into one of a few categories:
* What tends to happen to any company when it doubles / triples in size to >20,000 employees, as Red Hat did from 2017 to 2023.
* Leadership shuffles, such as when Jim was replaced by Paul when Jim became President of IBM. (This happened at the same time as the acquisition, but just because one CEO made choices differently than another might have doesn't make IBM directly responsible for those decisions).
* The rise of Amazon, Google, Microsoft / PaaS and SaaS / containers sucking a lot of air out of the traditional Red Hat market segment. RHEL is still an important cornerstone of the company, but remaining a successful company 10 years from now will require finding additional niches and creating value in ways that are not as vulnerable to entities 100x our size.
I'm struggling to think of any company, anywhere, that has that kind of arrangement after an acquisition. Can you point one out?
>Some services not merged (yet).
No services have been merged as far as I know, other than the ones that are literally impossible to not merge, such as the employee stock purchase plan. Please do not twist what I said.
Health insurance is separate, 401k is separate, IT systems are separate. As far as I know the expense system is separate (I haven't needed to use it in years, and I'm on vacation so I can't check).
>Redundancies in a landscape that is changing.
What is even the point of saying this? You asked if there was separation and then dismiss evidence of separation as "redundancies" [that won't last]. I can't predict the future, but the way HN talks about Red Hat you would think the entity known as Red Hat no longer exists (or only barely so). The separation has remained constant for 4 years so far. Not sure what else to say.
I'm at a point now where I think this has just reached "conspiracy" levels. No amount of reasonable evidence could dissuade the people who think that IBM is micromanaging Red Hat, to the point where they are forcing (over the objection of the people who work on Fedora) the addition of some sort of privacy preserving telemetry to the product. When you get to the point of "all the Red Hat people that say Red Hat is independent are lying! They don't know what really goes on, but I (completely unaffiliated and viewing from a distance) know the truth!" I don't think there's anything more you can do.
Sorry this probably did seem like it was implicitly referring to you, but it wasn't my intention at all. I find you very reasonable :-)
It's kind of the culmination of dozens of threads on Hacker News over the last few years and increasing frustration on my end. Mainly the frustration is because I have criticisms of Red Hat, but every conversation seems to jump straight to some variation of IBM and it drowns out the (IMHO) reasonable discussion, or it's (rarely but still happens) a Red Hat person who doesn't think a single decision they've made is bad.
It wasn't my intention to twist your words at all so I apologise for not communicating effectively. What you refer to as separation obviously exists on a practical level that you experience day to day.
My reference to redundancies arose from my own experience (at massively smaller scale) when organisations merge. Duplicated functions are removed over time.
I think I've said enough for this topic and I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Do you think it's some giant conspiracy that everyone who works (or worked, in my case) at Red Hat has to go around claiming autonomy while secretly having their puppet strings pulled from IBM?
No. That is why I asked the poster above about structures that provide relative autonomy.
For instance, in this particular case, the proposal by the Red Hat Display Systems Team may well be considered by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee and the Fedora Council which sounds like what I mean by 'relative autonomy'.
However it appears that Red Hat itself does not have any 'corporate body' that is distinct from IBM.
I suppose I disagree that a distinct corporate body is required for autonomy, but I would definitely agree that without such the risk of the autonomy disappearing in the future is ever-present. I think Red Hat has tons of autonomy now, but at some point IBM could start changing that. It's also possible they have, but having worked at Red Hat and knowing many of the people there, I would expect a lot of screaming, whistleblowing, and resigning should such a thing ever happen. Red Hat is a remarkably "speak your mind" culture, and people do even though it sometimes starts shit storms (such as when people call out the CEO for something publicly on the company-wide mailing list).
Since you need two of everything, or more, two switches, two physical links, (hopefully) two physical racks or cabinets, and all that, it's minimum x2, but nowhere near x100. The cost for additional physical transit links is generally pretty reasonable, depending on provider, if you have more you can negotiate better rates, same with committed bandwidth. You can get better rates if you buy more.
There are a lot of aspects to that, but the cost of doing all of the above is a lot less than not having it and failing to have it at the wrong moment and losing money that way. Each business needs to weigh their risk against how much they want to invest and how much they think they can tolerate in terms of downtime.
Notes and presentations from various HEPiX conferences around 2003/2004 will reveal the reaction to academic licence fees for RHEL, and the birth of Scientific Linux as an EL rebuild.
Remember these were/are publicly funded projects with budget time-lines.
And the decision to withdraw CentOS 8 was taken quite suddenly, part way through the advertised 10 year lifetime of EL8. And the free RHEL development licence offer wasn't ready to go the day of the announcement - there was a delay of some months.
I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.
I understand your concern but at around the same period as this expedition it was routine to flush ships bunker tanks in maintenance docks now and again - probably a few tonnes each time. I grew up on a spit of land between two estuaries and I can remember the globs of bunker oil and the slight film on the water.
I suspect that the Trieste itself added little to the general mess.
Reminds me of a few rabid "activists" trying to stop any further development of SpaceX Starship because of a few chunks of concrete a single test launch scattered on a beach.
In their minds, all human scientific progress should just stop dead if it makes a mess.
SpaceX deliberately decided not to use a flame diverter for that launch site, which is a few hundred feet from an endangered bird nesting area. It's clear they could have done more to avoid damage to nearby wildlife and property and it's a travesty that they were given a permit to launch without using standard practices.
The ecosystem there has had 200 million years, give or take, to adapt the seasonal storms. Hurricanes bring rain, which revitalizes wetlands and flushes out lagoons, removing waste and weeds. "Hurricane winds and waves move sediment from bays into marsh areas, revitalizing nutrient supplies. Fragile coral reefs can also receive benefit from hurricanes during the warm summer months, as the storms’ upwelling of cooler waters help to alleviate thermal stress. In addition, waves and tidal water movements scour some areas, removing macroalgae and exposing the solid limestone structure of the reef, which provides a firm foundation on which corals can settle and grow." <http://www.hurricanescience.org/society/impacts/environmenta...>
Everyone here is acting like they had set off a nuclear bomb, permanently rendering the area incompatible with biological life.
What I saw was some chunks of concrete — rocks basically — making a mess.
Your reactions and incredible -4 downvote does not in any way meet the reality of the situation on the ground.
What it does marry up with very neatly is unjustified, seething hatred for a certain singular person who can apparently do no good. All that he touches is nuclear wasteland and death, it seems.
Link one picture of one dead bird please.
Or were you the victim? A little birdie with broken wings who used to work at Twitter?
Not sure there is a lot of subsidy for council/housing association housing. Building costs paid back over 60 years or so generally. Perhaps land may be allocated?
From my end user perspective Slackware 15.0 works fine - up to date(ish) packages with what might be described as 'conservative' (old school) administration. For server use it might be best to have a look at the Slackware forum...
Perhaps the reaction has something to do with a product for which the USP is reliability and stability changing the terms on which the product is available very suddenly and without warning twice in the last few years?
The clones did contribute mind share to RHEL. That will now be lost. We don't know what the consequences of that will be.
PS: I think people should support Debian. A non-profit project with clear charitable status in many jurisdictions and a fully public development process. No sudden shifts if you use stable in production (or even oldstable).
"About 15 years later I ran into that manager again, and he was close to dying from a kidney ailment. I spent a day with him, driving him around so he could take some photographs, and having lunch. We didn't talk much about work, mostly he wanted to get out of being in bed and see the world a bit."
Just deLurking to say that was an excellent thing to do. This small paragraph tucked away at the end of the anecdote shifted the whole experience for me.
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