Absolutely, we should talk about this more. Red Hat and IBM can swing their dick around and make literally any change they want to Linux. They control a lot of things, like FreeDesktopOrg (how free is that free?)

Well, I guess Freedesktop.org is free because it is free both monetarily and in terms of the “4 freedoms” of the FSF. You are correct though that Red Hat yields an enormous amount of influence. Freedesktop is a great example. Not only is it the basis for Flatpak but with Wayland relying on all the “portals”, it is becoming essential and unavoidable for the Linux desktop in general. I think the IBM boogeyman is overplayed. Red Hat is extremely successful financially and I believe IBM knows that messing with Red Hat could kill the golden goose that is laying the golden eggs. To my eyes, IBM seems quite hands off. Red Hat is the way it is as a result of its own corporate agenda. Of course, that all could change at any time.

I am wary of their bullshit. We need to make sure to keep alternatives to big corporate software in case they decide to fuck us over.

In my view, Open Source is perfect defense against the “in case they decide” timeline. For me, the bigger concern is the level of influence and the fact that, like in most areas of humanity, money talks. The vision that Red Hat has for Linux is the journey that we are all on. I think they are generally decent stewards but I do not agree entirely with their vision. I think Systemd, not just the init supervisor but the “manage everything else too” aspect, is a great example. The “our extensions are the platform” nature of glibc and friends is another. My concern about Red Hat is totally different from many of the other complaints about them in that I am worried that they will continue to “collaborate” really well and, in doing so, totally dominate the evolution of the Linux ecosystem.

Use GPL software, above all else, and remember, if GPL wasn’t effective in cutting the corpo hand they wouldn’t spread propaganda against it.

Are you saying that Red Hat “spread propaganda” against the GPL? We live in different worlds. Red Hat is not only one of the biggest GPL supporters but also one of the biggest authors of GPL software. All the software they write is released GPL including tools they originated like systemd, flatpak, libvirt, and cockpit. More importantly, they are not just one of the largest contributors to other important GPL projects (like Linux itself) but often by far the largest contributor. They often employ the project lead or have directors in the “foundation” behind a project. They have tremendous influence over the projects many GPL fans hold dear including GNOME, GCC, Glibc, and the GNU Utils.

Ironically “Use GPL software, above all else” often means being wholly within the core sphere of Red Hat control.

I use Chimera Linux which does not use GNU Utils, GCC, Glibc, or Systemd. I do not use GNOME. I am a bit less directly impacted by the army of people Red Hat has involved in Fedora and GNOME. But a lot of the alternatives to the software listed earlier in this paragraph are Apache, BSD, or MIT licensed. Ironically (or at least I think so) a lot of the people that rail against the evils of Red Hat would also caution against choosing the software I run with the view that their permissive licenses leave me open to “corporate rug pulls” and “commercial control”. This has always struck me as quite ironic given the massive corporate dominance of the core “GNU” projects.

People seem to imagine that GPL software is “written by tens of thousands of volunteers”. I saw this sentence so many times in Red Hat threads last year. But take glibc as an example. Almost all the glibc project leads have been Red Hat employees. Red Hat has been responsible for well over 50% of the commits (sometimes much higher). It is essentially a Red Hat project. Compare that to musl which is MIT licensed but where no single entity dominates development.

You could say the same for GCC. Red Hat may only have contributed 30% of the commits but the percentage on x86-64 is closer to 70% and the maintainers are Red Hat employees.

If you hate “corporate” software then Clang is your worst nightmare. It is permissively licensed (Apache) and the biggest contributors are Google, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Intel. I mean, other than Oracle or Meta, how much more evil could we get? But even the largest contributor, Google, is less than a third of the commits. And it is clear that Google is mostly contributing to create a compiler for their own in-house use. They are not trying to “control” the user base or monetize the compiler and it would take a massive shift in strategy by them for this to be a concern.

Anyway, this is not meant to be an argument really. Please think and choose as you wish. However, sometimes I wonder if people have looked at the facts or if we are just projecting things we imagine must be true due to idealogy.

I do think we should be wary of Red Hat. They have a massive amount of control over the Linux ecoysystem. However, I also recognize how much benefit I get from their contributions. And personally, I do not see how the GPL stops them from taking Linux in the wrong direction (my concern). Circling the wagons around glibc and GCC especially looks and feels to me like embracing “big corporate software”, not the opposite. Red Hat has made many tens of billions of dollars off GPL software which is why they have always released all their own software as GPL. I really doubt that Red Hat themselves would agree that the GPL is “effective in cutting the corpo hand”. But that is not the argument I want to have. It is a point of view that confuses me but that is ok.

Red Hat wants to create a Linux “platform” which does not always look like traditional UNIX and which is a mono-culture in terms of the core software it requires. This is a smart move product wise so I cannot fault them. And I do want the platform to evolve (modernize). However, I would also like the Linux ecosystem to remain more distributed, more modular, and more robust. More free. I do not like technology monocultures. I “try” to avoid chromium, I resist software like systemd (again not even so much the init system part but its expansion into everything else), and I think allowing GNU and Red Hat to “embrace and extend” the POSIX world with incompatible extensions such that gnome only works with systemd which only works with glibc and software only builds with GCC and such are bad things. My “wariness” of Red Hat makes musl and Clang more attractive to me. Of course, I understand, not everybody agrees.