The difference on impact is interesting. Boeing is an important company because they are one of a tiny number of companies that makes the world's commercial airplanes. Arguably their transformation into a useless junk-heap of a company that can't build good products has been underway for a while, and that's a huge problem for aviation.

IBM is one of many, and their decline wouldn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Since IBM bought RedHat, the parallels between IBM and Boeing here are too close to comfort. RedHat is potentially as vital to the Linux ecosystem as Boeing is to the (pre-pandemic) civil aviation sector. If IBM falls apart and RedHat vanishes, the impact on the Linux sector could be almost as bad as Boeing collapsing. Since Linux runs everything that's not a desktop computer or an iOS device, IBM-RedHat failing would be a very major problem for everyone.

Linux will be fine, people who used RHEL can just moved to cloud and/or Amazon linux or Canonical, whatever that suits them.

The changes could even be by the same people, I'm sure many from RH will not like IBM culture.

Red Hat heavily supports OSS projects used on their distributions. No other Linux companies contributes so much. (SuSE would be second, Hey Amazon?)

Last I heard Amazon itself was struggling with migrating from RHEL to Amazon Linux.

RedHat makes much more then just a Linux Distribution, for my part i fear for Ceph.

This is one of the huge selling points for RH IMHO: Since they are open source if the vendor dies the product doesn't. Ceph is an amazing product with some really big customers, it wouldn't go down with the ship.

That said, Red Hat is doing well and I don't see them dying.

Disclaimer: I work for RH but opinions are my own

Explain how RH could vanish even if IBM fails/falls apart. I don’t see any scenario where that would happen, sorry. I’m not sure you understand just how entrenched RHEL is in ISP/telecom/Enterprise/finance/banking/insert-pretty-much-anything-here is..

RedHat revenues likely aren't enough to keep all of half-IBM afloat. It's vaguely possible that IBM could go into Chapter 7 if things go badly enough. That's the worst-case scenario I was speaking to.

Ok I get that part, but surely Red Hat/RHEL itself wouldn’t perish as a result?

If a company goes into chapter 7, the entire company is disbanded and its assets are sold off. In that scenario, Red Hat, as a division of IBM, would cease to exist.

Perhaps. My point is that Red Hat will still thrive under whatever parent company they wind up in. Red Hat would still be a thing. A very huge thing, and still a very huge moneymaker. Red Hat doesn’t disappear.

I think Suse and Canonical would pick up the slack.