[GTALUG] Looks like IBM is planning to eliminate RHEL

[Russell Reiter]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2020 at 9:52 PM Sergio Durigan Junior via talk <
talk at gtalug.org> wrote:

> On Wednesday, August 05 2020, Russell Reiter via talk wrote:
>
> > This is sad. But the article is an interesting backgrounder on the
> internal
> > chaos thats leading up to this.
> >
> > "They said that OS development was knocked down to lowest priority,” Ryan
> > noted. It says it right there. That may explain quite a lot, not just
> about
> > RHEL’s direction but also Fedora’s. We see more vendor tie-in/lock-in,
> more
> > software patents (monopoly) and not much of real value."
> >
> > IBM is Already Gutting Red Hat and Firing Employees Without Warning, Jim
> > Whitehurst Isn’t Even Using GNU/Linux | Techrights
> >
> > http://techrights.org/2020/08/02/red-hat-layoffs/
>
> This website is absolutely not trustworthy.  The person behind it posts
> made-up articles and fake information often times.  I confronted him
> once or twice before, but he's got an agenda and conspiracy theories to
> make him feel good about what he's doing, so it's hard (a.k.a. useless)
> to argue.
>

Well in the article he said, "Flatpak used to depend strictly on systemd
(they apparently fixed that, at least temporarily)." Earlier versions did
depend on systemd for cgroups. I know that is true

I have this alias in .bashrc "alias psc='ps xawf -eo pid,user,cgroup,args'"
from earlier days. Frankly not all that long ago.

Calling what was done a temporary fix may be not kind, but it's not
necessarily not true, given the way stuff can be broken as systemd becomes
more mainstream and other mitigating factors.


>
> Unfortunately he's very vocal in the community, which IMHO is
> detrimental to those who are actively trying to promote the Free
> Software ideals.
>

Some people have humble opinions, others do not. That is just the nature of
writing opinion pieces for publications. It may not be kind to say that MS
is dumping a lot of cruft into Red Hat but you would have to be an insider
to know that for sure. Just as you would to find out if there really is a
slogan that says "Watson Everywhere" or "Cloud Everywhere."

My point is that critical thinking starts with criticism. Whether the
criticism is notable or whether it is not worthy, is usually an exercise
left to the reader. Personally I wouldn't wait for Red Hat to pull Fedora
support in order to find out if that statement was true. I would however
explore the possibility that it may be true and plan for it accordingly.

Just a note on writing opinions. All articles are "made up" writing is an
imaginative art from. In the McLuhan sense of media in a post
"electronically enabled" global village, internet publications are a
tricky medium. As the man said perhaps even; the message itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan

Now I'm not saying I felt the earth shudder when IBM bought Red Hat, but I
did feel the winds of change coming with WSL. Some people said secure boot
was a way to prevent FOSS from being installed on modern systems, some say
that was nonsense, others say good hackers can bypass that restriction.
It's all a matter of who's opinions you rely on and which lense you are
using to filter the content.

The theory of conspiracy is that some of them turn out to be true, some
others are believed to be true and some others are false. The truth and
reconciliation movement in Canada, by stating there is systematic racism in
this country, validates that there was a conspiracy to keep indiginous
peoples in their place, on reservations and predominantly segregated from
the rest of a rapidly industrializing white colonialist society. That
conspiracy is now considered to be a theory proven true by that very
Commission which is charged with making the future determinations of
reconciliation.

As for Dr. Roy, perhaps he is the Dr. Phil of internet linux media, that
there is no grand plan to eliminate FOSS, but I won't sweat the small stuff
on that. I'll just take it with a grain of salt and keep hacking
alternatives around just in case.


> --
> Sergio
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-- 
Russell
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