What Jim did do successfully is destroy the actual FOSS spirit within the company. Everyone has Mac Books now. All the standard corporate welfare initiatives for liberal arts majors (Chief Diversity Officer and their ilk).
Underperform the rest of the tech sector? No... 70+ quarters of successive double digit growth until the acquisition.
Mismanaged the company with respect to virtualisation? You're conflating mismanaging the company with possible strategic errors in virtualisation.
Destroy FOSS spirit? Absolutely the opposite. He is held in the highest esteem by every red hatter I have ever spoken to. Not only that, but he made the effort to do red hat training to learn the tech in the early days. How has he destroyed any FOSS spirit through his actions? Give an example.
Everyone has macbooks now? No. Sellers generally do, I'll give you that, but technical staff are mostly using Fedora or RHEL. Flexibility has always been a huge part of the employee experience.
Standard corporate welfare initiatives for liberal arts majors? You sound like an angry white man who can't stand that people other than yourself may have their disadvantage recognised nowadays. Stop feeling so threatened.
Why are you so bitter?
A lot of people felt betrayed when they switched to gmail. Those voices were all shouted down.
Jim turned a $1T opportunity into a $30B one.
Some people were pissed about switching to Gmail. They were not anything close to a majority of users.
It's fine that you don't share a positive opinion of Jim's tenure as CEO, but the commentary that shows ignorance of how public companies work, petty gripes about switching to Gmail (as if that was Jim's personal project) and grudge-holding about diversity doesn't paint you as someone to take seriously.
[1] https://www.lightreading.com/virtualization/red-hat-sharehol...
> They were not anything close to a majority of users.
You're making my point for me. Jim destroyed the actual spirit of FOSS at Red Hat. It transformed into "Everything we distribute is open source, and that's all we care about." The GPL has been all but abandoned in favor of non copy-left licenses.
Are you? Because your comments don't reflect that. "We all" don't "know" that, actually. Maybe they were, but as I understand it IBM's bid was unsolicited.
Do you have a citation for the claim Jim "pocketed the most money" from the sale? I am sure he made plenty, but so did the other execs, so did the shareholders -- the sale price was quite a premium on the share price.
Red Hat was a public company. Too many people have magical thinking about how Red Hat's execs should've run the company according to their ideals when the reality is if Jim ran the company the way you'd have liked it would've probably triggered an investor lawsuit.
If you want ideological purity to the satisfaction of your FOSS standards, then working for a public company is a path to unhappiness every time.
I didn't agree with every choice made by Jim and the rest of Red Hat's leadership at the time -- but he was a decent CEO within the parameters allowed for public company CEOs.
That's the prevailing opinion. It's safe to have. IMO, he's just an empty suit that peddles kool-aid. Red Hat was in a unique position as the top kernel contributor for a long time, meanwhile VMware, Google (android), and AWS ate up all the value.
“Bitter”
“White man”
“Facts are a mostly ignorable obstacle”
Please review the guidelines and save the clap trap for reddit.
Since "red hatters" believe they "are open source" and have turned their backs on the community (see the CentOS changes and the active attacks on Rocky Linux) dont know "red hatters" opinion carry much weight in FOSS these days.
Red hatters certainly have an the ego to believe only their opinion matters but reality often does not match ego
To me, I hope I never have to use another software product from RedHat again... I dont know if IBM killed RedHat, or if RedHat just reviled their true colors... either way RedHat is no friend to FOSS, they are just another corporate software company attempting to control FOSS not contributing freely to it.
To me in this day, Oracle is better steward of Linux that RedHat is.
Red Hat and Oracle are more or less the same now
But when it comes to Oracle Linux, atleast they are not putting the sources behind the paywall and threatening customers with bans if they follow their GPL Rights
B) Oracle cannot be described as a "steward" if their entire goal is to produce a RHEL clone using the sources provided by Red Hat. Oracle maintains a kernel package themselves, but that's about it.
C) "The sources" are not behind a paywall. CentOS Stream is "the sources". The only difference between now and 6 months ago is that it used to be the case that the specfiles for every package in the distro were maintained in a single publicly facing git repository which made it trivial to rebuild the entire distro, whereas now you would have to create a mapping of which CentOS Stream packages were used first, which is not as straightforward as having it all in one place. It is nonetheless possible to do.
That's exactly what he meant to communicate by using the traditional angry white man shibboleth of shaking his furious fist at the "Chief Diversity Officer and their ilk" who are active out to get him and ruin his life by making it impossible for him to get a job. Life is just so difficult for him with his anti-diversity disability, you can understand why he feels so angry and threatened and acts out like a toddler in this way.
Your comment would be fine without the first and last bits.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: yikes - you broke the site guidelines quite badly in several other places in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827776
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827745
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827731
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37827386
We have to ban accounts that post that way. If you'd please stick to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. The idea is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do—regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are.
These are some wild takes, it's only Monday my dude.
Talk about code words.... that right this is big code word...
If you know, you know.
Which as we know puts you down an irreversible ideological path of... something?
This is in the site guidelines:
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It's true rainbow activist types use sexual orientations and minorities as shields when their politics get criticized, as already seen above.
If people say "listen to gay people" they hardly mean say, UK writer Douglas Murray or the activist group Gays Against Groomers.
If people say to listen to black people, I'm quite sure they don't mean economist Thomas Sowell.
If they say transpeople, they definitely don't mean Scott Newgent of "What is a Woman?" fame.
But they don't mean Newgent either. All these people have the correct identity groups, but they're no-nos because they have the wrong politics. The DEI people clamoring for better representation definitely don't want offices staffed with Sowells and Murrays. Because the identity is just a shield, and the politics is the point, as eg. Rep. Ayanna Pressley put when she said they need "more black faces willing to be a black voice" - again, Sowell certainly is black and has a voice, but Pressley meant having the correct politics to count as representative.
Wanting less DEI is wanting less of a certain kind of politics, not wanting less people of whatever sexual orientation or skin colour. Because the politics is the point.
I have found that reactionary positions are not good ones and contain people who don't know what they want, only what they are opposed to.
Do they? A lot of the benefits of DEI policies are simply more quotas for people who were already well off and capable of gainful employment, where it's more inter-elite competition than anything.
But what of the actually underprivileged? I can't fathom a way in which forbidding teachers from keeping order in class (because discipline problems are unevenly distributed, and thus racist - I wish I was kidding) helps actual minority kids from genuinely underprivileged situations. Instead, the teachers are mandated to aid and abet the very dysfunctions that keep them down.
Or what's shown in this tweet? https://twitter.com/FreeBlckThought/status/17085822241767754...
Active recommendation that "Schools should NOT 'encourage students to change their behavior or families to do more things that were like white families do, like reading to their children or adopting a growth mindset'"
These are upper class ideologues adopting nice-sounding, feelgood ideas, inflicting them on genuinely underprivileged people, and won't themselves have to pay for the consequences of these beliefs. The poor black kids will pick up the tab.
A friend of mine commented on the video that: "People who really, actually hate minorities and want to destroy their children's futures must feel so frustrated that teachers' unions, Ed schools, and school bureaucracies have left them with nothing more to do. Clearly, the point of education is to keep kids doing what they were already doing that was working so well."
These very same education people will, if asked, swear that poverty causes dysfunctions and bad outcomes, but we should never ever try to drag people out of those dysfunctions.
This is what I meant above: The politics are the point, and this shit is a disaster, as far as I can tell. I couldn't imagine better policies to tear people down if I tried. And the teaching establishment gets lauded for it.
And this is just the stuff disguised as kindness, or born of misplaced kindness. It's not getting into the actively hateful side of their culture, because they have carte blanche to spread hate, if the target is right.
The Smithsonian—*The Smithsonian*—did the same thing. Three years later I still can't believe it. <https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...>
I don't even work there and I know that this is, at the least, hyperbole.
Jim was active on memo-list and seemed to listen to people. That doesn’t mean he’s perfect, but I’d give him very high marks and I think that he had a lot of goodwill among Red Hatters as CEO.