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I appreciate your candor, but what makes this "gross and unethical" exactly? RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of othe

I appreciate your candor, but what makes this "gross and unethical" exactly? RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of other coders outside the company (i.e. Linus et al). It's hypocritical if you ask me.

freedomben 4y ago
Good point, there's some hypocrisy at play here. I think overall though the "taking" done by RH is on the whole much less than most of the 3rd party support vendors. But my original language was a little harsher than I really feel. Red Hat funds an enormous amount of the development of projects (like the kernel), and makes Fedora one of the best (IMHO the best) distros for personal computing, so is one of the top contributors to the community at large. Their support also actively fixes bugs and sends them upstream. Contrast that with many of the cheaper 3rd party supports, who rarely if ever send contributions (beyond bug reports, which are sometimes a positive contribution, but frequently are net drain because the bug reports don't contain enough info to be reproducible or actionable). They also don't do much or any development. Of course this is a broad stereotype. I'm sure you can find 3rd party support providers that do contribute to the community.
- gjs278 4y ago
Galanwe 4y ago
> RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of other coders outside the company Linux is not developed by thousands of volunteers on their free time in their garage. At least 85% of commits to the Linux kernel are from corporates (AMD, Intel, Broadcom, RedHat, etc). Linux is free and open source code, but very largely written by people who are paid to do so, by companies that need to somehow make a profit. RedHat amounts to roughly 20% of these corporate commits, and that's counting in the share of other corporates that frankly mainly only contribute work for their own drivers. I see paying for RHEL as being 50% for support / 50% for sponsoring Linux development as a whole.

freedomben 4y ago

Good point, there's some hypocrisy at play here. I think overall though the "taking" done by RH is on the whole much less than most of the 3rd party support vendors. But my original language was a little harsher than I really feel. Red Hat funds an enormous amount of the development of projects (like the kernel), and makes Fedora one of the best (IMHO the best) distros for personal computing, so is one of the top contributors to the community at large. Their support also actively fixes bugs and sends them upstream. Contrast that with many of the cheaper 3rd party supports, who rarely if ever send contributions (beyond bug reports, which are sometimes a positive contribution, but frequently are net drain because the bug reports don't contain enough info to be reproducible or actionable). They also don't do much or any development. Of course this is a broad stereotype. I'm sure you can find 3rd party support providers that do contribute to the community.

gjs278 4y ago

Galanwe 4y ago

> RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of other coders outside the company Linux is not developed by thousands of volunteers on their free time in their garage. At least 85% of commits to the Linux kernel are from corporates (AMD, Intel, Broadcom, RedHat, etc). Linux is free and open source code, but very largely written by people who are paid to do so, by companies that need to somehow make a profit. RedHat amounts to roughly 20% of these corporate commits, and that's counting in the share of other corporates that frankly mainly only contribute work for their own drivers. I see paying for RHEL as being 50% for support / 50% for sponsoring Linux development as a whole.