After the Red Hat mess I see many people saying IBM destroys everything they touch, but I can’t think of many examples of it. Can you tell me what else IBM has destroyed after acquiring it, or something good that they themselves developed and then ruined it with stupid corporate choices?

  • TheWoozy@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
    106·
    1 year ago

    IBM/Redhat only HAS to provide their source code to paying customers. That is what they are doing. They will also refuse to do business with entities that use the source to release their own distro.

    This violates the spirit of open-source. IBM benefits from the work of thousands of programmers for free, but refuses to reciprocate. They are de facto close sourcing their code.

    You can also bet of the fact that IBM will decrease their development of Redhat (more layoffs) over time as they emphasis short term profits.

    • Captain_Patchy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      61·
      1 year ago

      https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

      From that link,

      Despite what’s currently being said about Red Hat, we make our hard work readily accessible to non-customers. Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model. When we find a bug or write a feature, we contribute our code upstream. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers.

      We don’t simply take upstream packages and rebuild them. At Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time - something that our customers and partners need.

      This is about the hours and late nights we spend backporting a patch to code that is now 5 to 10 years old or older; at any given time, we are supporting 3-4 major release streams, while applying patches and backports to all. Additionally, when we develop fixes for issues in RHEL, we don’t just apply them to RHEL - they are applied upstream first, to projects like Fedora, CentOS Stream or the kernel project itself, and we then backport them. Maintaining and supporting an operating system for 10 years is a Herculean task - there‘s enormous value in the work we do.

      We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL.