Red Hat Begins Cutting 'Hundreds of Jobs' (phoronix.com) 49
According to Phoronix citing multiple local North Carolina news outlets, Red Hat is cutting "hundreds of jobs" in an initial round of layoffs announced today. From the report: According to WRAL, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks is said to have told employees in an email "we will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products," which is hopefully good news for their many upstream Linux developers they employ that ultimately build Red Hat Enterprise Linux and associated software products. Red Hat will begin notifying affected employees today in some countries while the process will continue through the end of the quarter. IBM, which acquired Red Hat in 2019, has already slashed some five thousand positions so far in 2023.
Re:RIP Red Hat... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder how long it will be before we see Fedora killed
We won't see that. Killing it would save no money. But we might see it stagnate for a while.
almost all F/OSS projects axed
Very unlikely. Users may have to rely more on community support, but there are no savings in "axing" them.
and prices hiked exponentially?
Many people who don't understand business assume that "higher prices" equal "more profit."
No. It doesn't work that way.
Businesses set prices to maximize profit. That means not too low but also not too high, or they will surrender market share to the competition.
If IBM thought they could make more money at a higher price point , they would already be doing it.
Re: (Score:3)
If IBM thought they could make more money at a higher price point , they would already be doing it.
More to the point, they already are doing it. IBM software is expensive AF.
Re: RIP Red Hat... (Score:1)
Red Hat made the decision some time ago to treat the open source community as an afterthought. To some extent that makes sense since they make money from customers with deep pockets who pay for support. But by shunning the community they lose mindshare that can be very damaging over the long term. I'm not privy to how many people download Fedora Vs Ubuntu / Debian but I wouldn't be surprised if it has dropped substantially over time because the community has gravitated to the latter.
Re: RIP Red Hat... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also Red Hat chose to openly participate in cancel culture over accusations of creepiness against Richard Stallman, which of course angered people who remember how important Stallman has been to the open source movement and are willing to forgive some clearly autistic behaviors.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, put out a poll asking their users what they should do, and their users overwhelmingly responded "do nothing, stay out of politics," and so that's exactly what Ubuntu did.
Re: (Score:2)
You think people in the broad community of open source users / developers really gave a fuck about that? Assuming they cared at all then I'd they'd be in broad agreement that Stallman had some creepy views and suffered the consequences for airing them.
Back in reality, the things that make people choose one dist or another are things like the availability of packages, how often packages are updated, what dists are prevalent in WSL, containers & virtualization, what dists are best to used with cloud platf
Re: (Score:3)
I wonder how long it will be before we see Fedora killed
Won't be. The killing happened with CentOS, when they moved to CentOS Stream. The original CentOS went against IBM's core value: Never give anything away that could be monetized. If it can't be monetized, get rid of it.
The narrative is simple (Score:1)
My theory is that all these stories about layoffs are happening before a presumed fed interest rate drop occurring some time in the near future.
My guess is that all this press about layoffs that otherwise would go completely unnoticed by the press is to support a recession narrative following a drop in interest rates.
Re:The narrative is simple (Score:4, Interesting)
My theory is that all these stories about layoffs are happening before a presumed fed interest rate drop occurring some time in the near future.
My guess is that all this press about layoffs that otherwise would go completely unnoticed by the press is to support a recession narrative following a drop in interest rates.
You obviously do not hear the words of Chairman POW and the rest of the Economic Apostles at The FED.
Rates will go up until the trend numbers show the economy is on target for a 2 percent inflation rate. "The beatings will continue until morale improves" approach.
Right now the predictions of the market pundits tend to agree (between 65 and 70 percent of them tend to agree) on 1 more 25 basis points (0.25 percent) hike in May 2023 and then The FED stops hiking the rate and HOLDS it's position while it studies the economic trend numbers.
Why HOLD the interest rate position you may ask? Go look at American economic history for the answer.
Hint: Back in the 1970s The FED backed off on interest rate hikes too soon and American economic inflation rates took off UP and STRONG. The FED did not wait for it's monetary policy to truly take hold, and FED monetary policy can take up to 9 months to show results in the economic numbers.
.
Chairman POW is a student of American economic history. He will not release the HOLD until the economic numbers say the American economy has cooled off from it's bender, meaning spending and money printing rates have slowed down for longer than a finger swipe on a smartphone.
Re:The narrative is simple (Score:4, Insightful)
Hint: Back in the 1970s The FED backed off on interest rate hikes too soon and American economic inflation rates took off UP and STRONG. The FED did not wait for it's monetary policy to truly take hold, and FED monetary policy can take up to 9 months to show results in the economic numbers.
Not 100% correct. In the 70s you had Oil Shock. I remember that clearly and prices at times rose daily due to the price of Oil and Gas. People would full up daily, even if that meant waiting in lines (thus wasting even more gas), because prices would go up on gas almost 10 to 20 cents, sometimes overnight. Note, 20 cents would but you a can coke back then.
The fed could not stop inflation by raising Interest, it had no impact. The Fed even tried price controls but all that did was cause shortages. The issue ended when Oil Prices stopped raising daily and the Boycott by OPEC ended. The inflation was all due to Oil, which the US economy was/is based on. No amount of interest raising could mitigate inflation when it all had to do with one commodity that people needed and there was no alternative.
IIRC, after that the Fed pulled energy prices out of their main inflation indicator. Why, it skewed everything, but Oil still cause inflation, you can see that today, but at least now we have some alternatives.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My theory is that downturns are often used as an excuse to cut people that weren't making the company money. If they did this when times were good, the story would be that they are doing badly financially, now they get to blame the overall economy instead.
Re: The narrative is simple (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
If you're big enough, dead weight is profitable. The overhiring by FAANG was all about keeping the best engineers away from their competitors and startups.
Re: (Score:2)
Did you notice they announced that they aren't cutting any engineering, sales or customer service jobs?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
It's the reverse, the interest rate increases mean that these companies no longer have access to "free" money.
Re: (Score:2)
These companies don't all need to trim costs. By getting press coverage for layoffs they are sending a message that raising interest rates kills jobs.
Same thing they did with the Trump tax cuts. Not a lot of long term raises, but a lot of companies responded by giving employees a lump sum "bonus." It was not about the employees but trying to sell the idea to the press that tax cuts are good for workers.
to much windows only (limited mac) out there for (Score:2)
to much windows only (limited mac) out there.
Chrome OS can work for some stuff but linux is better on the same hardware.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We're a microsoft shop.
Emails are a nightmare to find in Outlook because of busted 'windows search' indexing. Onedrive insists on filling up your drive with crap that some random employee decided to upload and their lazy load stuff only when you need it is broken. Anything complicated in Excel requires hunting through a stupid ribbon.
Give the choice of a *decent* mail program and LibreOffice and a proper network share, fuckin' oath I would use something else.
Making the experience suck is of their strategy t
Re:The "Year of the Linux Desktop" Never Came (Score:4, Funny)
It always amazes me when people here appear unaware that servers exist.
Re: (Score:3)
The ultimate truth is if you cannot run Microsoft's Office suite directly from the source and without wrappers, VMs, or some convoluted un-easy-for-a-layman means, your OS is not going to be one people want run in a corporate environment.
My previous job used google docs pretty much throughout as the office suite.
Re: (Score:3)
Servers, what are they?
Re: The "Year of the Linux Desktop" Never Came (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Jobs? (Score:2)
Red Hat Begins Cutting Hundreds of 'Jobs'
Fixed it for you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For a 'bad business model' they have done quite well over the last couple decades. You are thinking extremely small if you think that anyone hires Red Hat when they could, instead, pay for a single "resourceful tech guy."
Re: (Score:2)
Yet even large enterprises are still cost-conscious. With Red Hat's pricing per-install, the usual scheme enterprises did was hundreds of thousands of Centos installs with only a limited number on "genuine" Red Hat, for tech support purposes. Yet instead of making that sane (ie, pricing by the volume of support cases rather than # of installs), IBM/Red Hat tried to squeeze more revenue by killing Centos. And that gamble failed...
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you never have never worked with somewhere with software that requires a licensed RHEL install to get any support whatsoever. I worked for a place that was forking out for 3 RHEL licenses just because of that and we weren't the worse we heard about.
On top of that, many places know how many software devs RedHat has on staff and pay for support thinking the support from them will be better.
Re: (Score:3)
It all started when they pissed off the community with the ending of CentOS in December 2021.
CentOS used to be my home distro and I would run RHEL at work.
I tried using the replacement of CentOS and it was beyond bleeding edge, buggy, and generally incompatible.
So, I switched everything to Ubuntu LTS, it was a sad day when this happened, but at least everything works again.
They shot themselves in the foot.
Re: (Score:3)
But not just ending support - nope, they ensured that all Centos 8 servers all had umpteen Yum problems, affecting any package installation (from the Centos repos or otherwise) from that point on. They didn't just let those servers run and gradually rot into an un-updated mess (as every previous Centos release had done) - they actively broke them.
So yeah, fsck to Centos. Most new stuff I've done since has been Ubuntu, but Rocky Linux is looking very nice too.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Sorry to hear (Score:3)
Well, it sounds like IBM has truly integrated RedHat with their layoff schedules. IBM for the last 2 decades has announced layoffs the month before announcing merit increases so they can cut back on the number of people they would have to pay out.
Oh well, I'm sure RedHat will recover from this. I mean just look at how helpful IBM was to Lotus after they were acquired.
Re: (Score:1)