5 ms·

Bad trend for user freedom when the industry keeps acquiring and consolidating and further fattening the already fat giants.

rwmj 7y ago
Not really. The barrier to entry in Linux distributions is pretty low. Everything that Red Hat does is open source so can be forked.
- tw04 7y ago
  Forking Red Hat doesn't get you ANYWHERE close to having a replacment. What Red Hat got right was all the enterprise support contracts they were able to negotiate. You want to buy adapter X? Well if you have an issue with it, you need to reproduce it on Red Hat because the guys at Company X can work with the guys at Red Hat on a bugfix. Company X isn't really interested in having their highly paid developers sitting on mailing lists trying to negotiate a patch for the issue. The source code is the easy part.
  - rwmj 7y ago
    I know, I work for Red Hat ... I was addressing the original point that the poster made by pointing out that IBM buying Red Hat or SAP maybe buying SUSE in no way is a "bad trend for user freedom" because you can simply download and use CentOS or OpenSUSE at any time without paying the "fat giants" a penny and even fork them to make your own distro. Of course it won't be certified but that's not a free software problem.
    - ferzul 7y ago
      the major linux distributions could all get acquired by microsoft, google and ibm, but they have to give out they're kernel changes for free. thing is, increasing portions of our stack are bsd/mit/etc. those licences could go anywhere. “amazon postgres” could be funded well enough to hollow out the market. “we're already using 10 aws only api's, we're paying for support, and it's got these great features, and i can run it in virtual box/docker/whatever for porsonal and development use.” next thing you know, you wonder why independent cloud providers are dead. consumer computing will struggle, even worse than it does in these days of android-vs-ios that made the old (windows vs will this be the year of linux on the desktop) days look like a free software hayday. the cloudification of computing has destroyed any dreams of free software stacks - nowadays people call us thieves for not running other people's code on our own computer. but those problems aren't caused by microsoft buying canonical. but embrace, extend, extinguish. it's a known game, and we're the losers, even when we feel like the winners. who cares what licence the kernel and ls are distributed under, that's not what anyon's buying.
a3n 7y ago
It's the same for the internet in general, which has been turned into TV, and whose main purpose is to serve ads.
- coleifer 7y ago
  It's worse: it's reality TV.

rwmj 7y ago

Not really. The barrier to entry in Linux distributions is pretty low. Everything that Red Hat does is open source so can be forked.

tw04 7y ago
Forking Red Hat doesn't get you ANYWHERE close to having a replacment. What Red Hat got right was all the enterprise support contracts they were able to negotiate. You want to buy adapter X? Well if you have an issue with it, you need to reproduce it on Red Hat because the guys at Company X can work with the guys at Red Hat on a bugfix. Company X isn't really interested in having their highly paid developers sitting on mailing lists trying to negotiate a patch for the issue. The source code is the easy part.
- rwmj 7y ago
  I know, I work for Red Hat ... I was addressing the original point that the poster made by pointing out that IBM buying Red Hat or SAP maybe buying SUSE in no way is a "bad trend for user freedom" because you can simply download and use CentOS or OpenSUSE at any time without paying the "fat giants" a penny and even fork them to make your own distro. Of course it won't be certified but that's not a free software problem.
  - ferzul 7y ago
    the major linux distributions could all get acquired by microsoft, google and ibm, but they have to give out they're kernel changes for free. thing is, increasing portions of our stack are bsd/mit/etc. those licences could go anywhere. “amazon postgres” could be funded well enough to hollow out the market. “we're already using 10 aws only api's, we're paying for support, and it's got these great features, and i can run it in virtual box/docker/whatever for porsonal and development use.” next thing you know, you wonder why independent cloud providers are dead. consumer computing will struggle, even worse than it does in these days of android-vs-ios that made the old (windows vs will this be the year of linux on the desktop) days look like a free software hayday. the cloudification of computing has destroyed any dreams of free software stacks - nowadays people call us thieves for not running other people's code on our own computer. but those problems aren't caused by microsoft buying canonical. but embrace, extend, extinguish. it's a known game, and we're the losers, even when we feel like the winners. who cares what licence the kernel and ls are distributed under, that's not what anyon's buying.

a3n 7y ago

It's the same for the internet in general, which has been turned into TV, and whose main purpose is to serve ads.

coleifer 7y ago
It's worse: it's reality TV.