Keeping Open Source Open
The solution here is forking and accepting that IBM just doesn&#x27;t want to share. The whole value of the Red Hat eco system is lots of people using the down stream variants. Actual direct licensees of Red Hat are not where most of the action is.<p>The value creation is actually distributed across the ecosystem. People encounter issues, report them, and fixes are distributed. If you break that cycle and get IBM out of the loop, the process just continues elsewhere. The vast majority of that ecosystem does not pay IBM a single dollar and probably never will.<p>IBM is a company that is in slow decline, so the remaining Red Hat employees are facing an extended period of that company just squeezing harder and harder until nothing remains. It&#x27;s death by a thousand cuts. But the bottom line is that a lot of people doing the hard work of committing actual code on behalf of the ecosystem that are currently employed there will be facing endless rounds layoffs, reorganizations, restructurings, etc. If there isn&#x27;t an employee exodus happening there already, that might soon start to happen. The only question is where those people will end up.<p>A well funded foundation maintaining the fork of the distribution formerly known as Red Hat could be a nice destination for such people. Between Amazon, Oracle, and the countless users of Rocky, Alma, Centos, Fedora, etc. there should be plenty of brain power, motivation, and money to make that happen. They need a stable foundation. They don&#x27;t need IBM to be part of that.<p>Don&#x27;t play IBM&#x27;s game on their terms. Just cut them loose. They get to do whatever they want downstream, not upstream. And they get to contribute all their fixes under GPL. That&#x27;s not optional. This foundation would be free to use these fixes as they need to. Comparability with IBM&#x27;s downstream distribution should not be a goal for this foundation. And if IBM wants to pretend they can do it all by themselves, they are more than welcome to try.<p>My prediction is that if the big supporters of this ecosystem join forces and do this, IBM will grumble a bit and then ultimately join the foundation because their alternative will be just writing off the investment they made in Red Hat and watch from the sidelines how most of the ecosystem stops depending on IBM&#x27;s Red Hat.