IBMers have a term for this: Bluewashed. They take over a company, figure out how it runs for 1-3yrs while keeping the founder/CEO (usually?), then fire that CEO and start full integration and doing things the IBM way. I am only surprised they haven't rebranded yet. My prediction would be that they will let this change take its course for 1-2 quarters (or maybe by september for budget season) and rebrand it to some b.s. name. BlueHat? IBM Linux? Who knows. This current move will make it harder for customers to jump ship but also easier for IBM to upsell support and consulting. Of course, us normal people know RedHat doesn't need rebranding even with their endgoal in mind but they might do it anyways because they follow playbooks so that if it doesn't work out, some exec somewhere doesn't get blamed. And RHEL in its new brand will do ok for a while and then people will get promoted and it becomes other people's problem where it will slowly wither and remain in a vegetative state for who knows how long.

I fear this is where companies like Google are headed, and soon.

You know, they say keeping shareholders happy is the problem but IMHO, it's that shareholders don't want money enough. They are disciplined and want specific targets met and risk calculations working out fine. They don't say to themselves "you know what, IBM made me $250k this quarter but I want a million per quarter so let them take on losses for 3+ years to get there and in 10yrs I'd be making much more money". And the way you do that is top-down restructuring so that IBM would compete against redhat instead of bluewashing it. Spend 1-2BN and 3 years with a new BU/subsidiary/culture, or at least takeover ubuntu and suse and monopolize enterprise server support and partner with cloud providers to upsell support instead of using redhat to support other dead business units.

Man, how stupid and short sighted are the decisions they have been making at RH. Makes you really cautious for rug-pulls on any of the software they maintain

I must be out of touch, but how does IBM bypass the GPL license? How are their customers not allowed to share the source code for it?

IBM strikes again, following the Microsoft playbook.

We knew this was coming, right? Come on.

Red Hat would love to be the next major OS company.