Should we be wary of Red Hat? (lemmy.cafe)

submitted 22 hours ago by propitiouspanda@lemmy.cafe to c/linux@programming.dev

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They were bought by IBM a few years back, but even aside from that they’re a corporation and they care about making money above all else.

It looks like Red Hat is doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem.

I don’t think the incessant Fedora shilling is unrelated.

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.

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[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

🙄

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 🤦

[-] drspod@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago

There is nothing to be “weary” of

I checked, and OP actually spelt "wary" correctly.

[-] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 5 points 19 hours ago

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.

[+] just_another_person@lemmy.world -8 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Let me pick this apart piece by piece because you don't understand how any of this works, and for your uninformed answer from AI or Reddit:

A Trademark is nothing more than branding. Meaningless. The substance of the project is MIT Licensed which means...open.
As you can read in their Charter docs: "Many basic decisions are made through a process known as “lazy approval”, in which general consent is assumed unless valid objections are raised within a period of time..." So, no, Red Hat as an entity isn't making decisions in the direction of the project.
Fedora ecosystem is one group of devs working on a specific line of tooling centered around rolling releases. Alma and Rocky have their own, which is mostly a free version of RHEL focused on LTS releases (not desktop). Two factions of the same coin with different goals.
In Fedora forums you're wondering why Fedora people would suggest Fedora Server??? See #3. They have completely different use-cases and userbase.

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 4 points 18 hours ago

@just_another_person @possiblylinux127 On point #4, how so?

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world -1 points 18 hours ago

How so what?

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 4 points 18 hours ago

@just_another_person What is the difference in userbase and use cases between fedora and alma or rocky? I have all three and don't see any notable differences between them except fedora is a bit more current.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world -2 points 17 hours ago

You're an amateur user. Engineering teams need long term and stable distributions with frequent security updates to be stable for long periods of time. That is why LTS releases exist.

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 5 points 17 hours ago

@just_another_person I've been using Linux in a commercial setting since 1991 when you had to compile you're own kernel and userland, and I am using it commercially today, so no I am not an amateur user. Ad hominem attacks don't benefit anyone.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Nah, you weren't. Nobody was using it in a "commercial setting" in 1991. In fact, it didn't even do anything in 1991 boot sort of boot, and it had a somewhat functional input and TCP/IP stack if you were lucky enough to even keep it stable enough. People weren't even using it in research settings in 1991 for this reason, because the very basic running kernel released in September of that year with ZERO functionality but the above.

I don't even want to continue to railing on you, but your post history has all the facts of your first uses of Linux in between a bunch of far-right conspiracy junk, anti-vax ranting, and Doomsday Prepper thoughts, and then a bunch of overstating your expertise in seemingly everything that contradicts previous statements you change at will to make a point.

You're just a sub-par Internet troll, guy. The fact you even asked this question is hilarious because you don't understand the need for LTS focused releases of a distro 😂

[-] nanook@friendica.eskimo.com 2 points 16 hours ago

@just_another_person In what ways do the use cases and userbases vary between these distros?

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world -1 points 9 hours ago

See my other comment to you, guy. Ya blocked.

this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025

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