The Blue-Washing of Red Hat:The IBM Story
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- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- The Merger Agreement between IBM and Red Hat, dated October 28, 2018, does not specify a contractual obligation for IBM to maintain Red Hat’s corporate structure intact for a particular duration post-acquisition. Upon the merger’s completion on July 9, 2019, Red Hat became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. While IBM initially emphasized its commitment to preserving Red Hat’s independence and neutrality, there was no legally binding stipulation enforcing this arrangement for a set period. Consequently, IBM retained the discretion to integrate or restructure Red Hat’s operations as it deemed appropriate following the acquisition.
If you think the loss of Red Hat doesnt matter, you might want to think again...As of 2025 RedHat is the 3rd largest contributor to open source including the Linux Kernel. Here is a partial list of what they have worked on or continue to work on:
Red Hat has been a significant contributor to the open-source community, sponsoring and actively participating in numerous projects across various domains. Here’s an overview of some key projects and initiatives associated with Red Hat:
1. Operating Systems:
• Fedora Project: Red Hat is the primary sponsor of the Fedora Project, providing hosting, engineering, and other resources. Fedora serves as a community-driven upstream source for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). 
2. Virtualization and Cloud:
• oVirt: A free, open-source virtualization management platform founded by Red Hat, serving as the basis for Red Hat Virtualization.
• OpenStack: Red Hat contributes to OpenStack, a cloud computing platform for public and private clouds.
3. Identity and Access Management:
• FreeIPA: An open-source identity management system developed by Red Hat, providing centralized management of identities, policies, and auditing.
• Keycloak: Initially stewarded by Red Hat, Keycloak is an open-source identity and access management solution. In April 2023, it was donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project.
4. Development Tools and Middleware:
• Ansible: A widely used open-source automation tool for IT tasks, developed by Red Hat.
• WildFly (formerly JBoss Application Server): An application server authored by Red Hat.
• ManageIQ: An open-source cloud management platform founded by Red Hat, forming the basis for its CloudForms product.
5. Storage:
• Ceph: Red Hat contributes to Ceph, a scalable distributed storage system designed for performance and reliability.
• GlusterFS: A scalable network filesystem to which Red Hat has contributed.
6. Desktop and Productivity:
• LibreOffice: Red Hat has contributed to LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite. However, in 2023, they announced that LibreOffice would not be included in RHEL 10, citing the availability of Flatpak for desktop installations.
7. System Utilities and Tools:
• SystemTap: A tracing tool for Linux kernels, developed in collaboration with IBM, Hitachi, Oracle, and Intel.
• NetworkManager: A program for providing detection and configuration for systems to automatically connect to networks.
djware #cybergizmo
IBM is just doing its best Microsoft impression.
Red Hat made themselves irrelevant decades ago. IBM is just nailing the lid on the coffin today. I'm OK with that too.
Its a strange world we ended up to be, suddenly MS is not the bad guy, well at least certainly not the worst one while IBM, Oracle, and Broadcome are around.
@@Eugensson I don't know about that. Red Hat is still the second highest kernel contributor. Intel is number one.
2024: RedHat will always be committed to FOSS values. 2026: RedHat is being rebranded and absorbed into IBM. Well? Yes, looks like RedHat kept their word. It's just RedHat no longer exists.
not yet, but yeah it seems to be moving in that direction
I've been a Red Hatter for a long, long time. I always find it crazy the amount of external content where people ascribe something to IBM, or claim "IBM is ruining Red Hat". I work in the Red Hat Products team, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and see very little change being pushed for by IBM.
I think the most drastic thing I've personally experienced is the finance team pushing us to project how our annual budget will be spent by quarter, then actually holding us accountable to spend the money on the schedule we projected. I mean, how ruinous! (Or just a normal business-y thing to do.)
But really, Red Hat still has their own HR, Finance, Sales, IT, & Marketing teams. Those of you who have been through acquisitions know that generally, these are the first departments to be merged with the parent company, and they're not, 6(?) years later.
I'm not saying this is going to be how things are forever, because no one can confidently say that. But things are staying generally status quo and I don't see signs of that significantly changing.
@@scottmcbrien6535 That's great. Are their any inklings of IBM even going the opposite direction from what I said, and speeding/enhancing Gnome/GTK more for ready development options? ie: Alternatives to Adwaita - and more advanced, stable modding - custom widgets - concise and ready multi-language support.
@@taylor-worthington Red Hat is it's own line of business, so we have our own budgets generally set in line with our revenues. Right now Red Hat is investing heavily in AI. In addition to the RHEL and OpenShift AI products, you'll see some content landing in RHEL proper as well.
I don't think we're putting more effort (than we do today) into places like GNOME. Wayland was started at Red Hat and we have developers dedicated to it. There are some GNOME developers as well, but I don't work with them. The best way to influence GNOME is going to be through the community.
I also worked at IBM and saw this time and time again. I think you are spot on. I am honestly amazed it took as long as it has for them to do a rebranding on RedHat
Nice to see another 8-bar alumni
IBM has not rebranded Red Hat. Red Hat moved from shadowman to the hat on their own, before the acquisition. This rebranding had actually been in the works for 2 or 3 years before it finally happened.
IBM Storage Systems was actually thown over the fence Ceph from RedHat. They did not want it anymore. IBM Storage Systems already had GPFS and really did not know what to do with it. Former IBMer in storage systems from 1999 to 2022
Having been blue-washed myself too thru acquisition of Merge (and later sell-off once Ginny left and new CEO didn't care / flushed Watson Health) .. it's funny how they have an ENTIRE team dedicated to acquisition and onboarding and bluewashing. They laid the whole plan down too. Some aspects were very fast, some were very slow. They blew so much hot air up client's rears at tradeshows. Oh yeah their terrible plex font we had to implement too.
DJ, nice video. I always appreciate the historical perspective you provide.
This was a delightful watch! Thank you very much for creating it! 😊
You're welcome, glad you enjoyed it!
Feels like IBM still feels burnt by that whole Microsoft/OS2 debacle of the 90s. Their goal was always take over the business world with their own OS and systems. If gobbling up Linux to make Windows look like crap all the better as far as they are concerned.
When I started out, on MVS, the most common quote from the OGs was "This wouldn't happen on Burroughs".
lol
Having seen how IBM applied their blue-washing to Lotus Notes/Domino and ran that technlogy stack into the ground, followed by the brand itself, I agree that RedHat's days are numbered.
i remember one time I found a class 1 bug in Lotus Notes, a memory leak that was causing the RS/6000 to crash, they refused to fix it. Two months later Lotus Notes was gone.
@@CyberGizmo I used to work for an IBM Premium Business Partner company which based the majority of their services around Notes/Domino. IBM screwing this whole thing up caused major financial damage, and we cursed Big Blue many times for how they mishandled things.
As for "syphoning", IBM did that to Lotus Notes.
Sure, you hate Notes in 2025, but you couldn't hate it in 1994 - because it was the best system our there back then. Seriously, it was "the" networking client in 1994.
But IBM milked it for 30+ years…
One of my College Dormies was one of the early people who worked on Lotus Notes and yes it was dominant..until...
Many thanks for all your videos. Really enjoy them
It frustrates me that companies like Redhat sell out to these massive corporations that destroy them. I wish more would fight off acquisition. I hope Redhat's competitors beat them and make IBM ultimately have wasted their investment. Just disappointing.
Corporations are ridiculous, 'don't be publicly tradable' seems the only way to avoid buyouts. The system is so messed up, especially for people who weren't born millionaires.
@@Leahi84 Money talks--wife, husband, children, mortgage, all the current stuff.
@@johnrieley1404 Yeah, well. Capitalism is the main problem, IMO.
@@Leahi84 Then, I suppose, socialism, or communism, or mercantilism is the solution?
What you don't know is that they get the initial money from the venture capital divisions of those corporations, which later cash in on the investment. That is what we see here.
Thanks for yet another interesting story as it relates to Open Source, DJ. Ah yes, I remember well those days of dealing with IBM dirtbags (I mean reps) back in my limited time at LLNL in the mid 80s. Fortunately I had a manager that never took their bait! 😉
Interesting chain of thought, love the term blue-washing
IBM wants Unix back . ALL of Unix !
Back? They have not invented Unix. They have forked it and called AIX.
@@Eugensson yeah they invented Unix , they just neglected to copyright or patent it
@@edwardmacnab354 AT&T Bell Labs guys did (which is now Nokia Bell Labs).
So Fedora too eventually?
What the outcome will be is anyones guess, and how many of us step up to donate money to those folks who write the code, test it and get it to us.
@@CyberGizmo Donating money to the Fedora Project isn't the way to drive this outcome, buying RHEL is.
I'm not advocating for everyone to buy a RHEL Workstation, but when you're looking at Linux for your work, specifically production [as Red Hat now has several programs to provide RHEL for free for developers], buy RHEL for it.
Red Hat employs over 1000 people in Linux Engineering (and thousands more working on kubernetes, openstack, virtualization, AI, etc.). Many of them work daily on Fedora, as Red Hat has an 'upstream first' engineering design. Meaning that if a feature is going to be put into RHEL, it has to be in Fedora first. As a consequence, many of the Linux developers Red Hat employs work on Fedora, first. But Fedora is a free distribution (both in cost and open source-iness), so how does Red Hat afford to employ these people? They're employed because people buy RHEL (while not free as in cost, it is equally free in open source-iness).
Fedora just wants your AI training data for now
The whole chain: RedHat, Centos, Fedora
No. Fedora is a community project.
I know of a number of companies that have migrated from CentOS and RHEL to Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, not happy with the direction that IBM/Red Hat has been going.
Ceph have moved to IBM years ago. Why buzzing this today?
Watch what happens with OKD, the “free” version of Openshift
The forking is well under way. CIQ (the Rock Linux people) has already forked Ansible and Centos. (And made them better, in my opinion.) Their founder is a Richard-Stallman-level committed open-source adherent. Maybe they'll start supporting a fork of Ceph in the future.
glad to hear that, James thanks for letting us know.
This is all kinds of wrong CIQ's business model is using Red Hat's engineered products and then selling them for a drastic undercut while poaching Red Hat customers and not contributing upstream. They are a leech on open source. The guy that leads CIQ is the guy that originally created CentOS. You know before it was in such dire conditions that Red Hat bought it to save the project. Now CentOS is correctly upstream from RHEL and maintains ABI compatibility with RHEL.
If anything, Alma did it correctly. They fork CentOS Steam and contribute upstream. That's how you keep open source healthy.
The blue washing stats with the soy based pixie dust.
haha, and plugged into the universal adapter
anything cloud is control and surveillance
half right, “Ceph isn’t a cloud storage choice for Google because they have their own internal storage systems like GFS/Colossus. Hadoop is an analytics-focused file system, while Ceph is a multi-purpose software-defined storage platform. If you’re running your own infrastructure, Ceph can be a great alternative to cloud storage.”
You are wise.
So that's where Microsoft learned it from. Personally, I'd avoid anything "sponsored" by a company like IBM, Microsoft or any other such evil corporation, including but not limited to Amazon, especially if they offer it for free while just about everything else they have is enterprise. I know it's hard to pass this stuff up for some people, but I really wish more would try because it just corrupts everything. And lest anyone be confused, I'm not saying everything should be free, I'm saying that when it comes to corporations handing out freebies, that none of it should be free. It's how they monopolize areas of the market by luring people in with free things, then locking them in by making it difficult if not impossible to switch.
Sadly, nobody spends 34 billion on something and doesn’t try to profit from it.
They already do... Look at IBM earning reports. Red Hat is basically the only thing making them money and is showing good growth. Especially now with Broadcom driving up VMware pricing. Right now, IBM is incentivized to let Red Hat keep being Red Hat and keep making them money.
Is that a G-Shock Casioak (GA-2100)? Nice!
Yep it sure is
Listening to Lunduke, it sounds like Linux is dying, IBM can't hurt it more than they are hurting themselves.
An active campaign to Bud Light Linux is clearly underway.
There is still a number of BSD OS's around tho
IBM has been BAD for decades. Progressively worse each year. I had to deal with them because a client’s parent firm had a contract with them. Worthless.
I avoid RH because of them. Rocky and Alma are caught in their web as well. And poor Fedora.
RIP.
Maybe IBM will spin off Red Hat like Novell did with SUSE?
👍!
Seems to me fedora with all its spins and techology is LOTS of work with zero money earned.
None of the big techs innovate, they just gobble gobble gobble 🦃
They are trying to use watson for ansibleAI. It's expensive.
I saw that too, but that's how they do it
It really couldn't have happened to a distro that deserves it more than Red Hat does. For a moment everyone was running Red Hat. I even ran Red Hat. Red Hat was the answer to one of Linux's biggest problems. Fragmentation. But then Red Hat made up2date subscription. And we all left like rats leave a sinking ship. That single move set Linux back an incalculable amount. Now here we all are decades later.
Everyone ran redhat? I must have missed something in between 1995 and now, Slackware (with kernel builds to upgrade and tarball installs) to debian derived stuff (ubuntu and others). Debian was a substandard install for a long time while the derivatives all seemed to have nice installs. Now that almost every one has abandoned 32bit HW, I use Debian directly on those machines. Gnome has come and gone as no longer useful. However redhat was a try and drop for me more than once. So deserves it? The owners probably just wanted to retire and don't care. The users don't deserve it though. I hope they find an alternative that is easy to switch to.
@@lenwhatever4187 yes you must have missed something. Because when Red Hat 7 came out with up2date it was transformational. That was in 2000. But by 7.3 they made up2date subscription and all of the amateurs abandoned the distro. I went to SuSE back when they were formatting it like that still. Others went their separate ways. 7.1 and 7.2 had a massive share of the user base though. We could have standardized then and quit wasting so much effort. Alas it was not meant to be. Now we just have to duplicate everything ad nauseum.
@@lenwhatever4187my childhood was like: Slackware (too difficult for a child) - Redhat - Mandrake - Fedora - Ubuntu
Pretty sure ibm took ceph over a year ago.
It was an agreement between Red Hat and IBM, and happened a couple years back. Red Hat struggled for years in software defined storage. It's just not our thing. So could IBM be a better steward for that technology as they have much more experience and products in the storage industry? Conversely, Red Hat received a team of IBM engineers working on something that was more suited for OpenShift (IIRC).
Wow
Fork it and call it Blue Wash Storage Systems.
LOL, best comment of 2025 so far
My man, this is FUD. IBM is not absorbing Red Hat. They reconciled some of their offerings. IBM had more storage offerings and far more storage engineers. Simply put, IBM was better suited to maintain Ceph so they took it on the Red Hat storage BU. Storage is not something Red Hat is or was focused on selling. These days you'll find that the closest Red Hat gets to selling storage is Open Data Foundation, and it's usually included with OpenShift Platform Plus. Red Hat will even recommend that you use your own storage or IBM Ceph if you need the increased performance for something like OpenShift Virtualization.
This same thing happened to CloudForms/ManageIQ. IBM rolled it into their management suite because they had a more complete offering, and CloudForms wasn't exactly a big seller anyway...
I think you're totally wrong on this one. Yes IBM has been doing that for many decades, but on the acquisition they made sure to retain Redhats autonomy. The Ceph thing has also been happening for years now. IBM engineers now work on ceph. But ceph won't and kind of can't go out of the people's hands. That's just not a thing. All the private clouds use Ceph, so many business rely on it and the project's been developed under the Linux foundation. This to me just sounds like old man yells at cloud. I really like manx of your takes, but this one seems to be coming out of the gut feeling from your past experiences. Please do your research again next time. All the shit RH has been doing the last couple of years, is RH being RH, they haven't changed.
It's forking terrible.
1rd!