As someone who currently works for Red Hat, yes. Red Hat is more than just a "department within a larger structure", it retains a separate CEO (who reports to IBM, yes), a separate human resources department, separate marketing events, we (apart from maybe a few dozen people) do not have IBM email addresses nor do we use their internal systems or vendors (except for e.g. Employee Stock Purchase Plan). There is almost no interaction between Red Hat and IBM employees apart from the highest levels.
Most of the decisions/changes which people attribute to IBM fall into one of a few categories:
* What tends to happen to any company when it doubles / triples in size to >20,000 employees, as Red Hat did from 2017 to 2023.
* Leadership shuffles, such as when Jim was replaced by Paul when Jim became President of IBM. (This happened at the same time as the acquisition, but just because one CEO made choices differently than another might have doesn't make IBM directly responsible for those decisions).
* The rise of Amazon, Google, Microsoft / PaaS and SaaS / containers sucking a lot of air out of the traditional Red Hat market segment. RHEL is still an important cornerstone of the company, but remaining a successful company 10 years from now will require finding additional niches and creating value in ways that are not as vulnerable to entities 100x our size.
I'm struggling to think of any company, anywhere, that has that kind of arrangement after an acquisition. Can you point one out?
>Some services not merged (yet).
No services have been merged as far as I know, other than the ones that are literally impossible to not merge, such as the employee stock purchase plan. Please do not twist what I said.
Health insurance is separate, 401k is separate, IT systems are separate. As far as I know the expense system is separate (I haven't needed to use it in years, and I'm on vacation so I can't check).
>Redundancies in a landscape that is changing.
What is even the point of saying this? You asked if there was separation and then dismiss evidence of separation as "redundancies" [that won't last]. I can't predict the future, but the way HN talks about Red Hat you would think the entity known as Red Hat no longer exists (or only barely so). The separation has remained constant for 4 years so far. Not sure what else to say.
I'm at a point now where I think this has just reached "conspiracy" levels. No amount of reasonable evidence could dissuade the people who think that IBM is micromanaging Red Hat, to the point where they are forcing (over the objection of the people who work on Fedora) the addition of some sort of privacy preserving telemetry to the product. When you get to the point of "all the Red Hat people that say Red Hat is independent are lying! They don't know what really goes on, but I (completely unaffiliated and viewing from a distance) know the truth!" I don't think there's anything more you can do.
Sorry this probably did seem like it was implicitly referring to you, but it wasn't my intention at all. I find you very reasonable :-)
It's kind of the culmination of dozens of threads on Hacker News over the last few years and increasing frustration on my end. Mainly the frustration is because I have criticisms of Red Hat, but every conversation seems to jump straight to some variation of IBM and it drowns out the (IMHO) reasonable discussion, or it's (rarely but still happens) a Red Hat person who doesn't think a single decision they've made is bad.
It wasn't my intention to twist your words at all so I apologise for not communicating effectively. What you refer to as separation obviously exists on a practical level that you experience day to day.
My reference to redundancies arose from my own experience (at massively smaller scale) when organisations merge. Duplicated functions are removed over time.
I think I've said enough for this topic and I hope you enjoy the rest of your holiday.
Do you think it's some giant conspiracy that everyone who works (or worked, in my case) at Red Hat has to go around claiming autonomy while secretly having their puppet strings pulled from IBM?
No. That is why I asked the poster above about structures that provide relative autonomy.
For instance, in this particular case, the proposal by the Red Hat Display Systems Team may well be considered by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee and the Fedora Council which sounds like what I mean by 'relative autonomy'.
However it appears that Red Hat itself does not have any 'corporate body' that is distinct from IBM.
I suppose I disagree that a distinct corporate body is required for autonomy, but I would definitely agree that without such the risk of the autonomy disappearing in the future is ever-present. I think Red Hat has tons of autonomy now, but at some point IBM could start changing that. It's also possible they have, but having worked at Red Hat and knowing many of the people there, I would expect a lot of screaming, whistleblowing, and resigning should such a thing ever happen. Red Hat is a remarkably "speak your mind" culture, and people do even though it sometimes starts shit storms (such as when people call out the CEO for something publicly on the company-wide mailing list).
Most of the decisions/changes which people attribute to IBM fall into one of a few categories:
* What tends to happen to any company when it doubles / triples in size to >20,000 employees, as Red Hat did from 2017 to 2023.
* Leadership shuffles, such as when Jim was replaced by Paul when Jim became President of IBM. (This happened at the same time as the acquisition, but just because one CEO made choices differently than another might have doesn't make IBM directly responsible for those decisions).
* The rise of Amazon, Google, Microsoft / PaaS and SaaS / containers sucking a lot of air out of the traditional Red Hat market segment. RHEL is still an important cornerstone of the company, but remaining a successful company 10 years from now will require finding additional niches and creating value in ways that are not as vulnerable to entities 100x our size.