• SnailMagnitude
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    1 year ago

    TBF someone did say stream ‘wasn’t a great name’ which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.

    If: “The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side” as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat’s payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don’t want employees debating this stuff.

    If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn’t seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating “freeloaders”.

    I’ve been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I’m happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past…but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn’t want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.

    Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn’t often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8

    In light of the community response to the Red Hat situation that podcast really did feel like a marketing piece from Red Hat.

    Things are getting entertaining though as Oracle have indeed, as hoped, stepped up to question Red Hat’s moral ethics 😂 https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/

    • DigitalPortkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hm, then respectfully, if it’s not possible for a RedHat employee to be anything more than an advertisement and we’re judging the number of people on either side to be the indicator of truth, then I guess there’s nothing productive for you and I to discuss. I didn’t hear anything that sounded like rationalization or excuses from the RedHat guy.

      Something people were getting for free is no longer free. Those people will always outnumber anyone who has a different perspective on the situation. Which is why I said that FOSS enthusiasts have a tendency not to understand or appreciate what they’re getting for “free” and everyone wants to treat open source like it’s entirely powered by community and spirit and “money” or “compensation” or “economics” don’t really mean anything because we shrug it aside.

      Everyone wants to demonize the big bad corporate IBM but somehow we’re totally happy looking the other way while Rocky Linux happily clones the product and sells support contracts to NASA that should rightfully go to RedHat, no matter how much money RedHat makes.

      I think RedHat has provided tons of alternatives and compromises that don’t involve buying RHEL. Again, I don’t think this decision is going to convert anyone to a paid customer.

      • SnailMagnitude
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        1 year ago

        It’s entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn’t agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what ‘the entire linux community’ thinks about this.

        For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don’t know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the ‘entire linux community’ are not happy it’s not great journalism.

        “Now we’ve heard Red Hat’s version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on”

        I’ve not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing…but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I’m confortable dismissing them.

        If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I’d want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.

        I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.

        If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.