Red Hat will begin to integrate even further into IBM. About to get into enshittification?

IBM has announced that, starting in early 2026, RedHat back-office teams will become part of IBM, reducing RedHat's independence.

Among the teams that will move to IBM are: Legal, HR, Finance and Accounting

Following the recent waves of layoffs at RedHat, it appears that this decision is due to a cost-saving measure on the part of IBM, continuing with its plans from some time ago to save up to $3.5 billion through, among other things, job cuts.

For the time being, the engineering, product, sales, and marketing personnel departments will remain as they are.

We have already seen worrying measures from IBM at RedHat. From dismissing a Fedora project manager (Ben Cotton) to restricting free access to the RHEL source code (only for customers and partners; Alma, for example, has since had to rely on "the new" CentOS), and a few months ago, removing permission to use RHEL in production for small projects with a developer licence.

Do you think RedHat is heading for enshittification? Will it affect RHEL, CentOS or Fedora?

Leave a Reply