Red Hat and the Clone Wars

dissociatedpress.net Red Hat and the Clone Wars: Dissociated Press

It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s an…

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/91676

It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s an…

8 comments

I appreciate the additional perspective, it’s tough to say if there are any good or bad guys here. The statements on IBMs role is a little self contradictory by saying they aren’t really involved but are also pressuring them with sales goals.
No matter what loss of consumer choice is depressing news, but it’s hard to disagree with RedHats right to make this decision.
- I am with you on it being disappointing for consumer choice. It was really nice to have software that was verified through all the government and industry security standards like FIPS, CIS, STIG, ANSSI, HIPPA, etc, etc, and with automated profiles easily available. I hope that someone can take up that mantle to provide better security models for the public.

This should be non controversial. RH is complying with it's obligations to those that it distributes to. Alma, Rocky, Oracle and Amazon have all built RHEL competitors based on RHEL. Red Hat shouldn't be obligated to do the work for it's commercial competitors. And let's not delude ourselves that RH and IBM are not major contributors to the Linux eco-system upstream. The issue here is that competitors want to have patch for patch RHEL and the back ports from upstream for free.

You are not entitled to a developer's works. If they choose to have you pay for the binaries and include the source with full rights preserved for what you can do with that source, they are providing FLOSS. RHEL after this is still doing better work for the Linux / Libre software space than Ubuntu is by trying to push for vendor lock via snaps in my mind.
- While I agree that nobody is entitled to the works of others, I find it both disingenuous and against the spirit of FOSS for Red Hat to lock its code behind a paywall just because it can still use the GPL due to some somewhat sneaky legal maneuvering so it can still call it "open source" by a very narrow technicality. At this point, why even bother? It's all just so slimy.
  
  From a users' perspective, you still have full rights to review, modify, and even redistribute the code. Though, exercising the last one is where RH limits people to the future code and software to its customer. A positive right to the developer's future work is something that would require some kind of funding mechanism, but for the purpose of being Libre/Opensource it was something never guaranteed anyway.

8 comments