No.2141
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
Today I'm apply this to what's currently going on with the GNU/Linux project. With the push by Microsoft, putting their own software on the platform and having Microsoft Azure run on it, I'll advise everyone to remember who we;re dealing with here. Microsoft has no intention to give the power and freedom to their users. As it might sound fantastic that Microsoft is letting their projects be open source (to a select group), we cannot let our guard down. Now Red Hat, one of the most popular companies in Linux, influencing the rest of the distributions, creating standards by being closest to the enterprise (ex: systemd), whether you like them or not.
Red Hat has just been bought by IBM and I'm not going to repeat myself, so I'll make it quick. This may, or may not go well for us. IBM is first and foremost a company that probably don't have the same intentions and visions as their founders, or as Current CEO of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst.
No.2146
Can they "extend" projects that are under the GPL? How would that work?
No.2153
>>2141IBM has OpenPOWER. IBM sells mainframes that run Linux. Going back further, IBM has a much better history with OSS and Linux than Microsoft does. There's also the fact that it would be bad for business for IBM to spin Red Hat away from promoting open source standards, because IBM is not at the forefront of technology anymore and they don't have the power to push their proprietary solutions. I trust IBM to take care of Red Hat much better than I would trust Microsoft.
No.2164
RedHat is responsible for systemd and pulseaudio, two of the worst kept software projects that people won't stop supporting because it has the backing of an enterprise. RedHat has always been a problem for the community.
No.2165
>>2153I feel like I am more afraid, what ibm will do within freesoftware, than what they will take away. honestly if they made systemd closed, that would likely kill it, which would be a good thing.
the damage they may do, will almost assuredly be more insidious, and of the flavour redhat has pursued.
No.2166
RedHat? more like TinFoilHat amirite?!?
No.2191
How would IBM treat systemd? Would it improve with the backing of a great industry? Would it be left to the sorry developers?
