Red Hat appears to have fired its entire engineering team in China, which it no longer thinks is a country it needs to prioritize. Most of the team will move to India.
Red Hat appears to have fired its entire engineering team in China, which it no longer thinks is a country it needs to prioritize. Most of the team will move to India.
I am not surprised. This is almost certainly pressure from the US government that caused this decision. Red Hat is what the US government uses almost exclusively for linux distributions. So, I am sure they didn’t like them having an engineering team in china. They forced Microsoft into doing something similar recently also.
bocsika on
Maybe also an important factor is the Xin-Chuang initiative, which is about non-Western, standalone Chinese IT infrastructure at most of the places, from the hardware (CPUs) up to OS and application software, whenever possible, starting from 2027.
There is a certification process in the critical infrastructure (even in finance), where certain “Western” software components are disallowed, together with x86 CPUs, and even some non-China hosted Linux OSes are forbidden.
In our area, even MariaDB or Oracle is forbidden, together with Ubuntu, RedHat etc.
Allowed alternatives are like openEuler Linux OS (China hosted), OceanBase RDBMS (China developed), Hygon CPUs (China developed) etc.
KiwiFisher1 on
Not surprising when your biggest customer is the US government. You can’t serve both sides of a tech cold war forever, eventually you have to pick.
grondfoehammer on
Given that ibm closed its offices in China in 2025, I’m surprised this hadn’t already happened.
perilousrob on
which is it? the team got fired, or they’re moving to India? the article itself says they don’t have any details as well as acknowledging the changes won’t be made public.
Riversntallbuildings on
Why are we saying “Red Hat” instead of IBM?
“Red Hat” is simply support on top of open source Linux software. It makes complete sense that China wouldn’t want to hire American tech support. LOL
9 Comments
.rpm has always been trash. Debian all the way.
I am not surprised. This is almost certainly pressure from the US government that caused this decision. Red Hat is what the US government uses almost exclusively for linux distributions. So, I am sure they didn’t like them having an engineering team in china. They forced Microsoft into doing something similar recently also.
Maybe also an important factor is the Xin-Chuang initiative, which is about non-Western, standalone Chinese IT infrastructure at most of the places, from the hardware (CPUs) up to OS and application software, whenever possible, starting from 2027.
There is a certification process in the critical infrastructure (even in finance), where certain “Western” software components are disallowed, together with x86 CPUs, and even some non-China hosted Linux OSes are forbidden.
In our area, even MariaDB or Oracle is forbidden, together with Ubuntu, RedHat etc.
Allowed alternatives are like openEuler Linux OS (China hosted), OceanBase RDBMS (China developed), Hygon CPUs (China developed) etc.
Not surprising when your biggest customer is the US government. You can’t serve both sides of a tech cold war forever, eventually you have to pick.
Given that ibm closed its offices in China in 2025, I’m surprised this hadn’t already happened.
which is it? the team got fired, or they’re moving to India? the article itself says they don’t have any details as well as acknowledging the changes won’t be made public.
Why are we saying “Red Hat” instead of IBM?
“Red Hat” is simply support on top of open source Linux software. It makes complete sense that China wouldn’t want to hire American tech support. LOL
more and more dystopian
Good luck with that.