The Red Hat is now IBM. And IBM is the quintessential big evil corporation with a hundred years of dirty business practices, far beyond anything Microsoft or Apple has done.
Red Hat itself was mostly fine. I've competed against them and fought against their FUD. They're an enterprise software vendor no different from Oracle in this regard. But besides the sales and marketing knife fights necessitating unsavory tactics (everyone's does it), it was a mostly ethical decent business.
That said, as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. For this reason, I never want to do business with them or Red Hat unless I absolutely must.
> as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor
Amen. IBM doesn't believe their customers are "developers" or "sysadmins"; they believe their customers are C-levels who will always come back. They miss the point that C-levels rotate out as previous devs and sysops rise up. That's how they lost the mainframe market, and the desktop market, and now the minicomputer market that they clawed back with RHEL. The cloud they already lost.
> IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery.
Or straight up bribery. An IBM exec in Poland pleaded guilty to bribing an government official to get a contract in 2012.
Red Hat itself was mostly fine. I've competed against them and fought against their FUD. They're an enterprise software vendor no different from Oracle in this regard. But besides the sales and marketing knife fights necessitating unsavory tactics (everyone's does it), it was a mostly ethical decent business.
That said, as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. For this reason, I never want to do business with them or Red Hat unless I absolutely must.