Do not attribute to stupidity actions that can be adequately explained by greed.
As some of the article’s comments say, the answer is probably the simplest: IBM.
IBM said they’d let Red Hat operate independently, but it was a matter of time before some of that corporate “culture” (aka stock-driven decisions) started showing through.
Hopefully the employees themselves aren’t slowly sinking into the IBM workload. I think a lot of them intentionally left IBM for Red Hat specifically because of the ideological difference.
IBM wants to userp Canonical as the Windows of Linux.
IBM are useless. They had a decade head start on LLM with Watson but still couldn’t make it profitable.