Not surprised. A for-profit corporation wanting more money. Especially as we enroach further into late stage capitalism where corporations struggle to find more territory to profiteer from and squeeze more profit out of us.
The era of free services being profitable is ending rapidly, and we see this across many areas in the world.
I wouldn’t say they aren’t profitable, I would say the greed outweighs profitability.
You’re right. I should say “profit growth” which is what corporations look for. You can have solid growth, but unless it’s growing, they don’t care.
Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” There’s a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.
And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.
I was wondering when Red Hat enshittification would began the moment IBM announced the acquisition. Turns out it begins today.
They announced the discontinuation of CentOS in 2020. That’s when it started for me. This is just more of the same crusade against people “using RHEL for free” (which I’m sure none of the suits at IBM even begin to understand the value of, the real wonder is that RH managed to resist this move for so long).
Certainly in retrospect. Back then they defended the decision by saying they wanted to shift their resources to centos stream, and that would be fair enough. But now it’s clear that wasn’t their motivation at all. They wanted to kill the free RHEL fork in the hope to attract more customers, as a lot of people already suspected.
Jeff Geerling consistently has the most compatible, tested, updated, and well documented Ansible rolls out there. If I need to get some niche software installed and there is a geerlingguy role for it - I breathe a sigh of relief.
If he is considering stopping support for RedHat and it’s various distros - that is massive.
It’s most probably IBM forcing it, but yeah it’s dumb.
I don’t know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don’t think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it’s easy to blame IBM, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
I’m absolutely not surprised that NASA took CentOS-in-more-than-name over the people who are trying to kill Enterprise Linux.
they wanted Red Hat for a reason.
They were dying and they needed a cash cow to milk. The only way that was gonna work is if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it. And they can’t stop, so they’re just kicking away.
. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.
It’s a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.
But this new one is QUITE the departure. It’s not ‘red hat’ stupid but a little further on the spectrum.
Maybe IBM can hire the Reddit CEO when he is fired to head up Red Hat. Seems like a perfect fit
