Krishna was on Norges podcast a while ago and mentioned that Red Hat would be (not his words) brought to heel with the rest of IBM. IMO, it is a version of the Broadcom/VMware playbook, boil-the-frog style.

Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it. For example, look at kernel committers:

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo.

There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization and little impetus for IBM to GAF.

These guys are pursuing the wrong strategy, they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions leveraging existing consulting teams they already have (IBM revenue to hugely reliant on PS, 33%). Basically the largest "forward deployed eng" transition ever, backed by existing very strong open-source software and tailored (with Watson, dear god) as the "AI powered" engine to appease the shareholder gods. You would run over so many startups with poor penetration at the F2000 level.

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bonzini 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Krishna's words on the podcast you cite were: "Red Hat has not been integrated... yet. [...] Engineering in Red Hat, I actually believe given the open-source nature of Red Hat, is going to have to be its own function. So, engineering I will likely not integrate because working at their scale of open source, maybe that is one where IBM learns from them, and things that are open source should belong much more in the Red Hat methodology than ours".

Operations (HR, finance, legal, IT) has already been integrated into IBM and that's what the post is talking about. Not engineering.

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kjs3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

When we were purchased by IBM (admittedly it's been a while), our separate HR, finance, IT and legal groups were gone before we knew it. Engineering got integrated over the first year (when I left), but with a pretty light touch, and AFAIK took into the second year to complete. Apparently things got increasingly more "IBM-ified" over the years, but a suprising number of the core folks have stayed, so it can't be all misery. Maybe RH won't be completely crushed.

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Hasz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Full video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqrSXiRja4, 6:37 starts discussion about integration, so you can judge exactly what he says.

"The only one we have not fully fully integrated yet, and I will emphasize the "yet" is RedHat".

"on the go to market side, I really believe in full integration".

you already mentioned the engineering teams, and I do think your framing is mostly right. However, I think it unrealistic to say I am going to fully integrate back-office, fully integrate GTM, and somehow engineering is totally untouched.

	▲	bonzini 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They are not fully integrating go-to-market. In the podcast Krishna says that the size and organization of Red Hat's GTM was larger than every other acquisition, and they were looking at partial integration only. Since then they actually have moved the sales teams for smaller markets to IBM. Red Hat kept the 20 or so largest markets and the verticals. Right now operations is employed by IBM but still mostly working as they did at Red Hat. We'll see how that changes over the next couple years, as that would be the first look at Red Hat integrating into IBM.

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sippingabonedry 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For example, look at kernel committers

Microsoft 12 places higher than Canonical.

Going back in time 25 years and telling someone that would have been met with Doc Brown's "who's Vice President, Jerry Lewis?"

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saghm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For example, look at kernel committers:

> weighted by market cap, the disparity is even more severe imo

What does "weighting commits by market cap" mean? Counting commits from people who work for companies with larger market cap more? Why would that be a useful metric?

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elikoga 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think the interpretation is that red hat devs are over-represented in terms of ratios compared to market cap weighting of all companies contributing to linux or similiar

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Hasz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

basically. Comparing a company with google resources (and needs) is not really the same as RH resources (and needs). Basically, what percentage of rev/resources/profit/engineering headcount are you spending on linux?

	▲	saghm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't feel like this answers the last part of my question: why would that be a useful metric? If the claim is that I should be concerned with the future of kernel development because of the future of Redhat, why should dollar amounts matter rather than directly inferring from proportion of the development they do independent of dollars?

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zozbot234 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Redhat underpins many low-visibility, very important Linux projects, and most have no idea they are doing it

Not sure why that would have to be an issue, IBM have their own history of significant contributions to the Linux and FLOSS communities. They're not pre-acquisition RedHat but they're not far behind either.

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htrp 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> tailored with Watson

I think you mean built with Bob

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topspin 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

IBM won't entertain your recommended strategy. IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money: the sort of broad-based popularity you hope for has no value at IBM. Governments, banks and monster health care operations are the only customers IBM really cares about for their computing products.

I know IBM has been employing a large number of people to work on Linux. I'm not as concerned about the eventual wind-down of that as I might otherwise be: Linux is the global lifeblood of enterprise computing, and there are a lot of other existing and potential sources of wealth in this world to employ Linux developers. A dispersion of this talent, with the inevitable shift in focus to things that are not strictly IBM's prerogatives, might have a real benefit for Linux.

Past that, software development has suddenly become cheaper in any case: Linux is in the optimal position to benefit greatly from the good parts of that, largely due a legacy of good leadership, so perhaps employed developer headcount doesn't have the importance it has always had.

In any case, I have every faith that Linux's future is not tightly coupled to the fate of whatever Red Hat withers into: there is too much at stake for too many well-resourced entities to permit Linux to suffer at the hands of IBM. If you need evidence for this, consider the outcome of the IBM's attempt to tighten their grip on the RHEL distribution, and the stampede to rapidly established alternatives this induced. If more of that is in Linux's future, so be it.

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Hasz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The interview I linked higher in this thread specifically calls out targeting non F2000 type customers with point solutions and not taking their traditional sales motion everywhere. I think this will be quite difficult for them to do, but will see.

I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).

I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.

If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.

Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.

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cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money

Well that's the funny thing, the deep pocketed institutional money is by and large using common and popular open source projects (increasingly so).

IBM is hoping for the old mainframe days to come back, but those are long gone. The tech IBM has which companies want to use by and large comes out of redhat today.

I'm reminded of IBM's opposition of C++'s removal of trigrams [1] all because it makes their character encoding system, EBCDIC, incompatible with C++. That's the sort of lock in that IBM is hoping for and it's lock in that no (sane) business tech leader would subscribe to.

[1] https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf

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kjs3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We'll see how that works in a world where someone/something with enough cash/tokens can say "hey there little AI buddy...why don't you code me up something that works exactly like Linux without all those pesky licensing things while I grab a beer". Personally, I think that's going to be kinda inevitable in the corporate world since I could say thing like "...oh, and add these 5 things Linux doesn't do, and don't reimpliment anything that isn't in this widget we want to sell. And write it in rust, because I heard that's cool." and instantly get a slimmed down, bespoke chunk of software that I/the corp/evil people can (so far?) claim ownership of.

Should be an interesting decade coming up.

	▲	pferde 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		...and have it fail spectacularly when deployed in an environment that requires reliability performance and high availability. Yes, I honestly can't wait to see those horror comedies unfold, but hopefully far away from me. :)

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stackghost 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> they should be using super popular, high-mindshare projects to drive new wave of tailored business solutions

Could you expand a bit more on what you’re describing here? Interested to hear more.

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toast0 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Offer paid support for $(whatever redhat project), do all the support stuff, but also cross-sell IBM business solutions.

	▲	stackghost 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes indeed, that's pretty much what parent poster wrote. This part: >$(whatever redhat project) is what I would like parent poster to expand upon, though.