I'm all for Linux distributions run and owned by the community. With those we don't have to be afreaid of weird business decisions. Debian is a good example, and very democratic. But I believe several other distros are maintained by a community as well, including Arch, NixOS...
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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It definitely makes me suspicious, considering they're a standard 'money above all else' company (though they're better at playing the long game than some other companies) operating in a fascist state. They don't seem to abuse their power much, yet, but that can change rather quickly.
I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority. Suspicion of Red Hat was a major reason why systemd was so controversial.
No...systemd was controversial because it complicated an entire ecosystem and caused lots of growing pains for very little payoff at the time. SysV was fine for many, but now so is systemd, and it's solved many growing pains for distro maintainers.
@just_another_person @rumschlumpel The idea of replacing system-V init with an init system capable of parallel start-ups in an era where multi-core CPUs became the norm makes sense. If it had stopped at this I would have been fine with it.
But it then goes and takes over DNS and in a way that breaks some mail sites that have spf records in a single record longer than 512 bytes which is officially against the DNS standard but which bind9 was fine with, then it had to take over system time keeping, and then user home directories, and then it wants to containerize everything.
The original Unix and by extension Linux philosophy was make one tool to do one thing and make it do it well.
Systemd by contrast is now one bloatware that wants to do everything and doesn't do everything well. It does perform it's function as a new init well.
I mean, systemd-networkd and systemd-timesyncd are both completely independent and are not required by systemd. I use connman and chronyd on my arch box and systemd gives not one fuck.
There's still some totally valid concern to be had over how bundled a lot of this stuff is, but it's not all one big blob.
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I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority.
Yeah, I’m with you all the way — no shade to OP, but the question has a flawed premise. I think the majority opinion is that they’re both an asset and a liability. They’re a huge contributor to the ecosystem and have done a lot of practical good, but I also think the community will turn on a dime if the suits overstep into FAFO territory.
(All that said, fuck Lennart Poettering. Dude couldn’t design a plan to get himself out of a paper bag.)
Honestly I don't really see the systemd hate
Unless they system has less than 64mb of storage I wouldn't use anything but systemd
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I don't disagree with OP at all, though. Just because it's a minority doesn't mean they're wrong.
Sorry, bad phrasing on my end. I agree the community should suspicious, but I think the flawed premise in
It seems like there isn’t much criticism of the company or their tactics, and I’m curious if any of you think that should change.
is that there is consistent, well-founded criticism and has been this whole time. And even though the vocal folks are a minority, a lot of people feel ambivalent about the relationship rather than viewing it favorably.
All companies (and people for that matter) are "money above all else." If you don't have income you are in trouble.
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There is not much criticism of Red Hat? What? In what universe? I never see the name Red Hat absent the army of detractors they attract.
Power of what sort?
IBM is evil (literally making NAZI death camps possible)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
If it wasn’t for IBM the Holocaust couldn’t have happened.
So morally move away from them as soon as you can justify.
The alternatives provide better support anyway
Interesting read. "made Nazi death camps possible" seems a bit much, though - I don't see how punch cards were absolutely necessary to carry out a census and send all the jews, romani etc. they could find to camps and eventually kill most of them.
IBMs tabulation machines were never required for the functions of the death camps, but they vastly increased the speed and efficiency with which the Nazis were able to find and murder people through the death camps.
There are clear differences in countries where the census database were poorly implemented and those that had a well established census database before the Nazis invaded, in how many people the Nazis were able to find and murder.
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Isn't IBM just doing embrace, extend, extinguish?
No. Look at IBMs stock value history. There is a pretty clear point at which Remini stepped down and they really started to see the benefits of Red Hat. Nearly all IBM profit comes from Red Hat. They were drowning and their pivot to cloud was failing. With Red Hat they've been able to actually get a presence in the cloud with OpenShift.
Their stock history can also be explained as stock holders seeing value in destroying Red Hat.
That would be such a bizarre way to interpret that. They weren't even direct competitors. VMware, Oracle, and SUSE would be better comparisons for that move. And it seems to bear repeating that Red Hat is something like 30% of IBM's revenue. Why would you kill off a third of your income?
Because if they EEE all Linux distribution, they'll be able to kill off the libre aspects of the software and (in their minds) make even more money.
Revenue is never enough. They always want more.
You're being overly paranoid.
If you think IBM can be trusted you're being overly credulous.
I'm not saying they're to be trusted. But I'm saying they're not killing their golden goose for at least the near future. Red Hat still operates independently with their own CEO.
@queermunist @propitiouspanda I don't think they'd put the funds into development that they do if that were the case.
Why not? Until they have cornered distribution of the software they can't Extinguish yet. EEE isn't an instant process, it takes time. Crush all other distribution first and then killing it comes next.
The goal is proprietary Linux. Why would they settle for anything less?
Isn't RedHat who pushed systemd? Most init enthusiasts hate systemd ! Dunno if related tho. I'm just recently into linux so I never had the chance to give the init system a try !
However, I'm an opensource and free from corporate shit software lover. Try to avoid everything related to corpo (Redhat, Ubuntu...). That's exaclty the reason why I'm reluctant to give Fedora a try, even though it seems kinda a good distro !
Debian as server distro EndeavourOS as daily drive
I think 10 or so Linux users don't like systemd
Everyone else is to young to care or moved on
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🙄
This dumb thread comes up every few years from paranoid people new to the community who don't understand how this ecosystem works.
There are countless threads and blog posts about this, so I'm not sure why you're bringing your paranoia here to kick up some fear mongering or whatever your intent is, but let me break it down for you:
- Fedora is its own entity
- Red Hat is a for-profit company
- Red Hat doesn't own Fedora
- Red Hat contributes assets to many FOSS initiatives, not just Fedora
- Yes, some RH employees also work on Fedora. It's free contribution. Same as Canonical, Valve, IBM, Universities, and other private companies.
- There is nothing to be "weary" of because if something were to change about the Fedora ecosystem that didn't benefit users, guess what? There will be instant forks, and a massive shift away from that community. Red Hat knows this because they aren't fools.
- People aren't "shilling" for Fedora. It's the new standard for well-built and easy to run distro since Canonical decided to ruin Ubuntu (see point #6)
Red Hat EMPLOYS many contributors straight out of open source projects, and also just directly funds projects they want to see improve. So do other corporate entities. You know Redis was basically single-handedly funded by Amazon for multiple years so the project would upstream features they requested? Also many Apache projects, memcached, ELK, Grafana...etc.
Get outta here with the shit-stirring for absolutely no good reason 🤦
Fedora is heavily controlled by Redhat. The people behind it are pretty much all Redhat employees and the trademark is owned by Redhat.
With that being said, I think Redhat does a decent job with Fedora. They allow the project to run on its own and provide plenty of funding and man hours. This is mostly due to it benefiting them in various ways but it also means that Fedora will never have funding issues.
One complaint I have is that Fedora doesn't seem to want to recognize that Almalinux and Rocky exist. In the forums they commonly promote Fedora server instead and for the bootc docs they only list Fedora, Centos and RHEL even though Almalinux has a bootc image.
There is nothing to be “weary” of
I checked, and OP actually spelt "wary" correctly.
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