Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

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Hi -

I work at Red Hat for the last eight years, long before IBM had anything to do with us, and I cannot stress enough how much IBM is *nowhere* to be seen in not just our day to day engineering jobs, but pretty much not even periodically. I know nobody at IBM, I have no email addresses of anyone at IBM, nothing we get in our inbox (and we get a lot) ever has anything to do with "IBM" in it, I have no links or access to any IBM-specific intranets or resources of any kind. They truly have stuck to their promise of not changing Red Hat; our support system is the same, we still respond to bugs, ask for SOS reports, and customer support people do collaborative screenshares, just as we were always doing, there's nothing different about any of that. There have been no top-down changes or decrees or anything I'm aware of that would change how we do any of that stuff.

as far as Podman it's all I use for all of my server environments and I like it a lot better than Docker. It's simpler without all the weird "Dockerish" things getting in the way. Not having a monolithic server hang the whole machine due to a misbehaving container is well worth it.

> as far as Podman it's all I use for all of my server environments and I like it a lot better than Docker. It's simpler without all the weird "Dockerish" things getting in the way. Not having a monolithic server hang the whole machine due to a misbehaving container is well worth it.

Podman-compose was feature-lacking and beta even when podman already had its 3rd major release, while the communitcation was that "Podman is a drop-in replacement for Docker". It just wasn't a drop-in at all for all compose users. People either stopped considering Podman or enablded the socket daemon, so that they are still able to use docker-compose. But this goes against the design ideas podman had.

Feels as half-baked as Ingnition, which also still feels very bare-bone, as if there's no financial interest to enhance it further.

"docker-compose" is one of those "weird, dockerish things" to me. I use ansible to organize rollouts.

Well, there's two very different views of reality.. And one of them appears to be from a very unhappy customer.

Is it possible that different IBM Depts - or IBM regions, are selling Redhat Software/Support without much actual involvement of the Redhat business? Like the might have done in their traditional reseller/consulting/support role?

TBH I actually think it's likely - sales and account execs can probably just tickbox add RH stuff to their package deals, copy&paste the slide deck - and post sale the customer support channel will be the general enterprise support one. IBM are probably very deliberately channelling all first level support through there anyway, same as for everything else - so core Redhat support staff might only get looped in for 2nd and 3rd level issues for those accounts, if at all.

It's quite easy to see that effectively creating two sales/support channels depending on whether you "bought from Redhat" or "packaged from IBM" - but equally it's unlikely to be presented or perceived that way, until it's too late.

I believe you when you say they've been hands off - it's surprising, but I can also see how it would make this kind of situation _worse_, because they're still effectively treating redhat as an "external" provider they resell.

Not that fully integrating the business would make it better of course, probably just different worse ( just based on my experience of corporate mergers, not IBM specific... ).

Red Hat getting access to IBMs vast customer base was why the merger was good for us and to the degree that pays my salary, that's great.

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