I'm not there anymore but there has been significant change in the company culture (which was great) and IBM is making conditions gradually worse.
One thing that is a clear change is that IBM is pushing for having a cheaper workforce, more employees but cheaper and therefore less qualified. Many short term goals of getting quick sales rather than get stuff that is sustainable over time not just technically but also burning people out.
Depecration of CentOS is something that really pissed me off, specially when we had acquired CentOS a few years back.
Some projects have been transfered to IBM. Others without being transferred directly were influenced by IBM in a negative way (I was a software engineer in one that was).
Significant changes in teams that deal with end customers, support has been affected, consulting has been affected. I know sales had some kind of merge as well (I don't any friend in sales but I've heard some stuff), etc...
Also there are loads of ridiculous changes in policy to save costs and they don't even save any money.
Something that really pissed me off were problems in HR. For instance I've seen problems in payslips (once I was paid THREE times with different amounts and the following month I got a discount on my payslip because I was paid too much, I know a guy who got paid 4 times that month and the month after he still got an extra amount because after 4 different payments money was still missing). I've heard of problems and delays doing the paperwork for paternity leave.
Hi! I don't recognize your nick but thanks for the kind words in your other message, first of all. I'm curious who you are, it would be great if you dropped me a private email or social media DM to tell me! Sorry about not responding to every point, I tried to focus on those where I can reply without being too vague. I hope you understand.
First of all let's be clear, the deprecation of CentOS was already in the air when CentOS Stream was started internally. That was IIRC in 2017, anyway before the acquisition. Even before that there had been a serious effort on increasing CI and CD of RHEL. It was a prerequisite to a feasible "rolling release" distro and it naturally led to CentOS Stream. I totally agree that communication sucked there, it was not the first time Red Hat screwed up communication with the community and probably won't be the last. That's sad. On the other hand I like the way Rocky Linux and Alma developed out of CentOS Stream. In exchange for a shorter lifecycle, their developers now have a path towards contributing to RHEL, which they didn't have before.
And just like IBM is incorrectly accused of killing CentOS, the same is probably true of most internal policy changes. Internal communication was always very clear in the rare cases when policy changes were driven by IBM (no details sorry), and there have even been cases in which policy changes have been reverted (unlike CentOS ;)). Both of those things also points towards IBM _not_ being the mastermind here. I was hired when there were 3000 employes and now there's over 20000, it's normal that some policies change. At the same time we had no forced "return to office" after COVID, memo-list still exists and management recognizes their mistakes when they're pointed out.
Likewise, I am not sure what you refer to as "wanting a cheaper workforce", is it https://qht.co/item?id=29114697? Again, not sure why you think IBM was behind it but I'd very much rather have that, than thousands of layoffs Google or Meta style. One comment in there says it all---people are not born as senior engineers and you must start somewhere. Growing junior developers to be open source project maintainers has always been Red Hat's superpower.
And while some projects have been transferred to IBM, notably storage, some projects have been transferred _from_ IBM (the main being OpenShift ACM, and part of the Java team). I have met some of the people who moved from IBM, they are amazing and they quickly embraced being part of Red Hat. And in fact, while I'm not aware of (or did not understand) what you are referring to with respect to customers, support or consulting, I know IBM did a serious effort to educate _their_ customer-facing teams about Red Hat. I mean, it's not like Red Hat pulled a NeXT-style reverse acquisition, but the executive behind the acquisition is now IBM CEO and for some time a former Red Hat CEO was IBM #2. That must mean something.
Over four years have passed since the acquisition was announced, and there has been no massive exodus out of Red Hat. The promise was that "Red Hat would still be Red Hat" and I think they kept it.
From the sidelines, thanks for this detailed reply. I went to bed last night before I saw it, but I was hoping I would get to see a more detailed account of this perspective.
one thing I don't hear mentioned is a huge change in company culture. we started hiring management from cisco, and they are NOT a good personal fit. like super sexist nasty backstabbing management types. that was NOT the type of people Red Hat hired pre IBM.
To be honest if the worst thing you can say about a company is they changed the distribution model of the thing they were giving you for free from point releases to rolling updates then they could be a lot worse.
That effectively makes it useless. The whole reason to use CentOS is because it's binary-compatible with RHEL; it's merely RHEL without the expensive licensing fees and support. So it's really useful for developing software where your customer is the US government or someone else standardized on RHEL.
Luckily, according to Wikipedia there are two new distros that have popped up to fill this need: RockyLinux and AlmaLinux.
Because CentOS had been languishing, with releases and security fixes taking longer and longer, and the thought at the time was that since CentOS was seen as the entry point to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it might be leaving a bad impression with potential future customers.
The thinking behind CentOS Stream is different. The idea was not to kill off a free competitor (those were always going to exist, and projects like Rocky and Alma forming was inevitable, and this was obvious). The idea was to create a real community where previously there was not much of one. CentOS was the Android-style "throw it over the wall" model of open source. About the most you could do as an outsider to contribute was file tickets on Bugzilla and package for EPEL. Whereas CentOS Stream provides a place for people to contribute to future versions of RHEL, and therefore, RHEL clones like Rocky and Alma.
So Rocky Linux devs and users, Alma Linux devs and users, CentOS devs and users, Facebook employees (they use CentOS Stream internally), Oracle Linux devs, and whoever else can make and review contributions, which is a more symbiotic relationship than existed before.
It was purely a communication issue and a tempest in a teapot. There are great replacements for CentOS Linux, and Red Hat employees are now all working on CentOS Stream (development is done in Stream) instead of having just a handful of people doing the rebuilds.
I for one don't miss having to ask permission months in advance to backport a bugfix to a weird RHEL package! A lot more decisions can be taken in autonomy by developers.
Wow. You two had very different experiences of the acquisition.
I guess a lot of the anxiety surrounding an acquisition is anticipatory, and on some level that can cause culture changes in its own right, if it inspires a fair number of people to look for work elsewhere.
