The interview I linked higher in this thread specifically calls out targeting non F2000 type customers with point solutions and not taking their traditional sales motion everywhere. I think this will be quite difficult for them to do, but will see.

I am not too worried about Linux specifically. RH is a large committer, but a lot of those commits are down to a handful to very talented individuals. One of the other BigCos will sweep them up if RH culture falls apart, imo likely Qualcomm (see their large open source push recently), maybe Linaro (although I dont know much about them).

I think this approach of integration is the mistake in IBM's strategy -- they are squeezing some very slippery customer hard, and IMO this was Broadcom's mistake. The integration must go very deep, be multi-threaded, beyond a single app, OS, whatever, and it has to be a slow noose, not a hard jerk.

If I am IBM, I continue to invest in core, open source, deploy my army of PS people to build custom business solutions around that core open-source (but tailored to their specific issue), use "AI" and very strong core product engineering to reduce risk/time-to-effect, and keep pushing their entire ecosystem (rhel, hashicorp, confluence, whatever else) to customers.

Integrate deeply, then put those annual increases at 9% and build a very healthy, strong moat on a premium brand, experience and level of trust. Better to not give anyone a critical event to justify walking away from you.

> IBM wants deep-pocketed institutional money

Well that's the funny thing, the deep pocketed institutional money is by and large using common and popular open source projects (increasingly so).

IBM is hoping for the old mainframe days to come back, but those are long gone. The tech IBM has which companies want to use by and large comes out of redhat today.

I'm reminded of IBM's opposition of C++'s removal of trigrams [1] all because it makes their character encoding system, EBCDIC, incompatible with C++. That's the sort of lock in that IBM is hoping for and it's lock in that no (sane) business tech leader would subscribe to.

[1] https://isocpp.org/files/papers/N4210.pdf

We'll see how that works in a world where someone/something with enough cash/tokens can say "hey there little AI buddy...why don't you code me up something that works exactly like Linux without all those pesky licensing things while I grab a beer". Personally, I think that's going to be kinda inevitable in the corporate world since I could say thing like "...oh, and add these 5 things Linux doesn't do, and don't reimpliment anything that isn't in this widget we want to sell. And write it in rust, because I heard that's cool." and instantly get a slimmed down, bespoke chunk of software that I/the corp/evil people can (so far?) claim ownership of.

Should be an interesting decade coming up.