RHEL, Reddit, firing employees in the IT sector: Corporate mentality flexes its muscles
RHEL, Reddit, firing employees in the IT sector: Corporate mentality flexes its muscles
Red Hat used to be one of the champions of FOSS. The last years, after being acquired by IBM, they bought and castrated CentOS and now restrict public access to "their" code.
Reddit used to be the healthiest commercial social network (and probably still remains in that place) but chose to severe the ability of third party developers to use their API, thus closing their ecosystem.
Many IT companies have fired staff the last year and appear to be more assertive in regard to the working conditions of their remaining employees.
I wouldn't say that the above is an indication that the IT sector, which relies on highly educated people, keeps moving in the right direction...
I'd say that both Red Hat and Reddit maintain their position on the "ethical pedestal" but surely, these actions indicate their tension to step down in order to improve their balances. I am not an economist but it seems that they are likely to achieve short term profit (and Reddit may not achieve this either) and develop long term weaknesses.
Perhaps it's time to stop relying on commercial entities for our activities and strengthen community projects, which will remain open for companies to contribute and thrive but will never control.
While these thoughts extend well beyond the GNU/Linux ecosystem, I cannot think of a better community to sympathise with these thoughts.
Agreed with your closing thoughts. It's never been more obvious that we can't rely on commercial entities.
The fruits of years of organic growth within subs squandered in the name of corporate profits should be the wake-up call the average person needs.
Often when things like this happen (see:dig, twitter) the question gets asked "what can be done?" Well, let me tell you about FOSS..
I am sure that most people here adopt the principles of FOSS. I wouldn't miss at all the various "mainstream" subs with poor content but some of the best subs could be encouraged to migrate to the fediverse. I have really high hopes for this project.
Is there a stallmanwasright community here yet? This would fit in there.
There is, and it's not completely dead
I'm still getting used to Lemmy. Does anybody know why I see no posts when viewing the lemmy.ml instance but I see posts when viewing it via lemmy.world?
There is: !stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml It's active albeit a bit slow.
I’m sure there has been no shortage of enshitification before 2023, but for some reason now I’m seeing a lot of it. Some historian should document all of this.
It's the interest rate hikes. Tech companies relied on limitless free money from VCs before, without the pressure to turn a profit. That tap's been turned off now, so here we are.
That's it. No more 0% interest loans. Social media companies focused on users over profit. They can't do that anymore. And it's likely something similar with RedHat.
What? It's maximizing profit. Businesses are always finding new ways to cut costs while increasing revenue.
Reddit isn't just trying to balance the budget - they are specifically scrambling to make things work (or at least, look like they will work) for an IPO, which is a beast in and of itself.
Guessing that the whole "data scraping AI" thing also kick-started a bit of a panic with them
Possibly. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret that part.
One plausible scenario is that they brought in a consultant, who said their data would be worth $XXXX on the open market. A common element of MBA thinking is that any potential profits are something you are entitled to, regardless of the consequences. It's also pretty clear they don't have a mature management team, or a viable path to realize those profits. But they had to stop someone else from getting it, so there was a rushed decision. I don't quite know how it coincided with killing 3rd party apps, though, unless it was just more really incompetent management.
In the long term, all these tech layoffs in a short time frame depress the wages of the entire industry. The industry has seen an explosion of value and until recently quite a bit of that value has been captured by workers and individual innovators, instead of capital investors.
It benefits capital to have high competition for these jobs, and a high cost of entry to independent market action ie disruptive products only being viable with access to large data sets and processing to deal with that volume of data. The workers underbid each other while the owner of the platforms dictate access to them.
It does feel like there's been a shift, especially in organisations that use the work of others for their own benefit (e.g. open source, community produced content, etc). It seems like there's been a real move to have their cake and eat it.
Oracle has just made an aggressive move with regards to Java licensing too, they're now charging as much as $15/month/employee to use their Java runtime on the desktop/server. Their FAQ even points you to OpenJDK if you don't want to pay, which is strange - it makes me think the relationship between Oracle and the OpenJDK will be ending sometime in the not-so-distant future. There are several Java projects I've done where that would just become non-viable as it was a project for a single department in a large company.
Software developers are one of the most altruistic groups of people - it's amazing just how much time and effort they put into things that they get no financial return on, only the love of actually doing it. And people that dedicate their time and effort to online communities, education, and so on are equally amazing.
But I think it's time to stop being so naive and realise that many large corporate entities are abusing this relationship for their own gain.
That's a good point. Perhaps FSF has got the message and GPL v.4 will give FOSS developers the option to ensure that all derivatives of our code will remain publicly available and not placed behind paywalls.
There was a Sunday Perspective episode of The Cloudcast a few weeks ago about interest rates and VC funding and their effects on companies that was really interesting. Essentially, there is less "free money" these days and execs have more and more pressure to increase profitability of projects.
This explains a lot. Execs are not engineers, they don't understand software, nor how the community contributes value to the project. They just need to find an income stream and are willing to break everything they don't understand to achieve it. Even the company they work for.