What is IBM playing at?

In recent times, CentOS, Red Hat, and Fedora have made headlines for actions they have taken or plan to take. Both we and the rest of the blogs have commented on them. However, I think we are concentrating too much on the puppets and forgetting about the puppeteer. Good time to ask yourself, what is IBM playing at?

I'll play fair with you warning that This post has more questions than answers. If it were the other way around I wouldn't be writing in Linux Adictos but by making fortunes on the Nasdaq.

Let's talk about the elephant in the repositories

There is an old parable that some trace back to ancient Persia or India that tells the following:

Six blind sages wanted to live for themselves the experience of dealing with an elephant using their sense of touch. The first, since he did not know how far away he was and collided with the animal, concluding that it was like a wall. The second reached out, touched the hard, sharp and sharp fang and concluded that it was like a spear. The third felt the trunk and from that moment he assumed that the pachyderms were like a snake. Noticing the strength and thickness of his leg, the fourth decided that it was like the trunk of the tree. To the fifth, his ear suggested the resemblance to a fan while the sixth, feeling the tail, understood that the elephant was shaped like a rope.

The moral of this is that, if we forget that Red Hat is owned by IBM, and that CentOS and Fedora are projects financed and controlled directly or indirectly by Red Hat staff (Like the GNOME Foundation, the Wayland graphical server, and the Flatpak package format) we are proceeding like the blind.

The parts of the elephant

Some of the possible or future decisions we are talking about are:

• Include telemetry in Fedora: There a proposal so that starting with the desktop version of Fedora 40, data will be collected anonymously to “Achieve specific improvement goals”. The proposal talks a lot about guaranteeing user privacy by avoiding building usage profiles or leaking to companies that profit from them. The data collected will only be processed on the Fedora infrastructure (Note from me: can't you guess who provides the infrastructure? It is not yet known what information will be collected, but it is speculated that it could be the desktop environment, type of hardware, geographic location and impact of Software Center recommendations By default, the data submission option would be enabled.
• CentOS: The first and most controversial move after the Red Hat purchase was to transform CentOS from a commercially unsupported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (making it the preferred choice of many web hosting and cloud service providers) into a test bench of what will later become the payment distribution. When many forks appeared, the company with the red hat opted to liberalize the conditions under which its distribution can be used for free. To make things more difficult for your competitors, you just to restrict access to the RHEL source code to its customers and partners.
• Goodbye to LibreOffice: Red Hat Enterprise Linux will not include in the future to the open source office suite. This is because they no longer have someone to create the necessary packages. (That's because they fired him, which they forgot to mention in the release.)

What is IBM playing at?

All these measures are not necessarily bad. Ubuntu includes telemetry and I have it activated, of course Canonical does not have the political connections nor does it depend as much on its relationship with governments as IBM does, CentOS is just making things more difficult for competitors, particularly Oracle, but, as already my colleagues were covering, these are not insurmountable obstacles.

We could get conspiratorial and remember that when the project was split, IBM strongly supported the remaining group in OpenOffice. But I think the reason is more to focus efforts on those activities that create value for their customers.

The answer to the title question is that IBM bought Red Hat to make money, and every decision made by Red Hat, CentOS, and Fedora is in that direction.  It is not necessarily harmful to users. We have two quality distributions and we don't have to pay the bills.