Comment by pstch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstch | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The engineering culture is not solely determined by the innovations the company has come up with, so I don't really see the point of the question you ask, with regards to the statement you quoted.

When you say that "most of the innovations [...] have been widely seen in the sysadmin community as negative", well, that can only be true in your own sysadmin community. If you replace "innovation" by "contribution", and make the list include everything RH works on (SELinux, NM and systemd are really a tiny part of it), the sentence becomes factually incorrect, even in your own sysadmin community (I hope).

Also, systemd was not created by RH (LP was not employed by RH at the time), and SELinux is from the NSA's TRUSIX. Labeling SELinux as a "negative innovation" is very weird (not that whole sentence isn't).

When you say that RH's only "positive tech" is Ansible, but that it was an acquisition, that's true for mostly everything RH participates in (Ansible, but also systemd, OpenStack, Ceph, CoreOS, GlusterFS, KVM, LVM/DM, gcc, gdb, systemd etc... were acquisitions or acqui-hires), so I really don't see your point. Does the fact that all of this software originated from somewhere else than RH negates the existence their engineering culture ?

EDIT: made quotes inline

If the bulk of RH's tech was acquired and did not originate with them then why is their engineering culture even relevant? What engineers work by acquisition? That doesn't sound like engineering to me but business.

Now, if you're talking about the engineering cultures of the companies RH acquired, if RH was able to preserve the engineering cultures of the acquisitions they made, why can't IBM?

Also, if by "engineering culture" you're not actually talking about any innovative products that RH itself came up with, but rather the contributions that RH engineers made to open source projects like gcc or the Linux kernel, IBM has done a lot of that too. I'm not sure why that wouldn't continue under IBM's stewardship of RH.

I feel bad for having inserted myself into this discussion. I think I'm actually agreeing with you here, in that there's nothing that shows that IBM couldn't preserve the culture of its acquisition. I just wanted to comment on what I thought was a statement on their engineering culture.

Personally, I just hope that RH can preserve its engineering culture. I can't say anything on whether it will happen or not, because I don't know.

systemd was created when Lennart was a Red Hat employee, for the record.

I stand corrected. There is something wrong in Wikipedia, as he's cited as working for Red Hat since 2011, while systemd was created in 2010.

I suppose that nobody could find another source than him saying that he works for Red Hat in a FOSDEM 2011 interview.

If you have such a source, I suggest correcting Wikipedia, as it may induce others in error.

https://lwn.net/Articles/299211/ is from 2008. This is the first pre-systemd source I could find, but PulseAudio became the default in Fedora about a year before so he might have been employed at that time, too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com