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How Red Hat’s Open-Source Negligence Is Doing Actual Harm to the Linux Community

37 points by twapi 3y ago

izacus 3y ago
Interesting posts after said community actively took Red Hats work and resold it for their own pure profit with no investment. Making Red Hats business model untenable. It seems like OSS Community loves to attack and eat their own - RH is one of the top Linux contributors across the board, while the profiteers did practically nothing for the community. The rabid the attacks of freeloaders are quite intersting to see here on this site.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  Redhat is profitable in such environment. This environment is not new, see CentOS. > Making Red Hats business model untenable. Uber business is untenable. Redhat is very profitable. > The rabid the attacks of freeloaders The rabid attacks of people and customers that got their promises broken. Even Dante claimed that the last circle of hell is for the ones that break trust. So, nothing really unexpected is happening here.
cyberax 3y ago
What a bunch of... Look, don't act like RHEL is the only distro in existence. There's also Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, and tons of other distros. Even for boring old enterprise stuff there's Ubuntu LTS. Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.
- izacus 3y ago
  > Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea. It's an amazing idea - copying RH meant no work had to be put into actually supporting the Linux community and keeping all the profits. Massive margins were made. It's just that the angry HNers think that RH should continue to just give things away to repackagers for free and let them profiteer off their work.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    The implication here is that people were getting rich off RH's hard work, but who else is rich in the Linux community? The only people making serious money that I can see are RH themselves, maybe Google if you want to count Android. They're earning $3.4B a year in revenue, compared to $140M for Canonical. Everyone else is scrounging around between the couch cushions for spare change by comparison. RH deserves kudos for being the biggest corporate OSS contributor (by far), but I'm just not buying this argument at poor RH can't sustain themselves against freeloading competitors when they seem to be the only ones making serious money.
    - tm-guimaraes 3y ago
      They were very profitable before IBM (now i dunno if IBMs splits the accounting) so poor Redhat doesn’t make sense.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea. Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors just the same - the "classic" and accepted FOSS monetization way was to provide paid support with SLAs for customers. This work cannot be copied by anyone else, just the business model - but that's ordinary business competition.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors Which FOSS contributors? The repackagers? Who are free to repackage Ubuntu, Debian, etc.?
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      Upstream as well. The spirit of the GPL and other FOSS licenses of its kind is that any modifications to a package have to be published as open-source as well if someone publishes a binary package. The reason is pretty simple: when a company makes a profit from using an open-source package, it should be forced to contribute its improvements back to the community in turn. The best example of why that's needed is Apple.
      - happymellon 3y ago
        The upstream that is mostly Red Hat funded development? My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. I'd much rather an ecosystem of enterprise Linux, such as Ubuntu and SUSE rather than a pile of free Red Hat clones.
        mschuster91 3y ago
        > The upstream that is mostly Red Hat funded development? Yes, RH (and others) are doing pretty significant work in the open-source space. I'm not denying that. But without the previous work that all the other non-Big Money-funded people did, RH, SuSE, Oracle MySQL and others wouldn't even be in business. > My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. Agreed on that one. Open Source in general lacks decent funding mechanisms.
- happymellon 3y ago
  It's not even the only RPM Enterprise distro.
- brightlancer 3y ago
  > But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea. RedHat's current business model is selling (via copying) the work of millions of other people, then refusing to adhere to the license terms they used to copy all of that work.
moomin 3y ago
There are companies out there so done with Red Hat now they’re wholesale moving to a radically different distribution.
- ttarr 3y ago
  Care to name few?
thedriver 3y ago
I'm actually with Red Hat on this one. There are many other great distributions that you can use, such as Debian. People are just angry that they can't get an exact copy of a paid product and 10 years of support for free. If there are non-profits and hobbyists who have been using one of the free derivatives, and this change causes problems for them, I feel sorry for them. But actual for profit companies could very well pay or use something else. If you want a similar system for free, you can use Fedora or CentOS Stream. And RHEL even gives you 16 free installations for non-commercial use. If you can't pay for RHEL and that 16 installations isn't enough, you most likely don't actually need it. So many companies rely on free labor of others in the form of FOSS, and they seem to be angry about the idea that they would actually have to make a contribution. RHEL also isn't just stealing software others wrote, they are a big contributor to many of the projects that RHEL is built upon. Besides, FSF/GNU never said that you can't charge money for FOSS or that the source code must be published for anyone in some git repository. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- safety1st 3y ago
  I've been watching this "crisis" unfold since the original announcement from Red Hat and I think most people are. Not giving Red Hat carte blanche here but fundamentally they are one of the largest contributors to open source, they're not violating the GPL (yet), and they're unhappy with Oracle and VC funded rebuilders using Red Hat's brand value for a free ride. Anyone with a foot in the business world at least kind of understands their position. What seems to have happened is "influencers," including many who have no skin in the game and shallow takes, have seen an opportunity in this topic to make a few bucks by churning out populist clickbait. It's a discussion about business and licensing which has been perverted into a culture war. As usual all the nuance is lost and the loudest personalities have ended up dominating. /barf
  - cbzoiav 3y ago
    I'd view it more similarly to the whole Reddit fiasco. There is a valid problem. The business has tried to solve that immediate problem without worrying about the knock on. In this case blocking large funded competitors ripping off your work is valid. The way they've approached it has cut off a large number of valid use cases that have arguably driven adoption of RHEL in the first place. In Reddits case for profit firms were hammering APIs and costing Reddit significant amounts. 3rd party apps also cut off ad revenue. A flat high fee cuts off those 3rd party apps entirely when your own product has significant deficiencies it upsets your most valuable users (contributors and mods). In both cases there was potential for a more nuanced change that works for both sides.
nullcipher 3y ago
Want to hear alternate view points. Why is Red Hat obligated to release source code. They had done this in the past, for decades. They are trying something else now. Why hold them on the hook for this? Practically all companies use Linux and open source. Barely any contributes or keeps their source code open. For example, no hosting company I know has their code open. Practically no SaaS has code open (sure, you can give me 10 examples, but I can you 1 million examples in the contrary).
- izacus 3y ago
  Because angry HNers who downvote you demand free (as in beer) software and are pissed that someone actually wants to pay their employees for Linux development.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    Didn't Red Hat manage to pay their employees for Linux development and make a profit prior to IBM acquiring them?
    - izacus 3y ago
      Yes, but at time the community didn't just resell their work at lower prices. Now the profiteers appeared and they're addressing that problem. Blaming IBM is a conspiracy theory that's more copium than anything else.
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        > at time the community didn't just resell their work at lower prices. That's because at the time, CentOS was still alive.
      - tm-guimaraes 3y ago
        CentOS existed before it was bought and shutdown. (There is something called CentOS Stream today, but it’s a completely different product with completely different purpose) All the “rebuilders” redhat is complaining are just CentOS folks continuing to do their thing after their name was bought. So this is almost as old as redhat. Not “a new treat”
MichaelMoser123 3y ago
Just a reminder: Red Hat is owned by IBM, though they say that this is an independent subsidiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
tm-guimaraes 3y ago
Redhat was actually really profitable, one of the reasons it was bought out. Unlike most startups, and darlings like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, and the like, Redhat actually makes loads of money. So please try to count as many software companies are more profitable than Redhat. Redhat saw “freeloaders” and wanted a piece of that pie. Terrible mistake. Redhat says those distributions don’t really do much, they are not completely wrong, but they do one thing that helps redhat, they expand their market. Because of a lot more companies using “RHEL compatible” distros, lots of software, (specially in areas with more regulation, or very specialized domains, etc) simply target those, this makes Redhat a very good option even if you can get some build from elsewhere, or Amazon/Oracle copies of those. It also provides a safety net/insurance for anyone picking a Redhat contract. Can’t go much wrong. Anyway, the issue is simple, it’s lack of vision, not only from redhat leadership but from plenty of other companies in today’s world, they are more concerned with “capturing” their small pond, instead of having a very small part of the ocean. Ocean is scary, too big to be controlled, even if your small part is much bigger than the pond, it requires actual expertise, and to benefit from such a huge thing you have to actually look for opportunities. And worse, you have to allow others to also make profits from that huge ocean. Much easier to just close a pond and rent seek. Lazy
- izacus 3y ago
  What kind of "vision" includes "we'll let others take our work for free, undercut us on pricing" that doesn't end up in bankrupcy for the company?
  - jpgvm 3y ago
    The kind of vision where you deliver superior service and thus win business the old fashioned way?
  - stakhanov 3y ago
    You mean like how Metallica went bankrupt when Napster came along? Oh, wait. That never happened.
    - 3y ago
bimblesticks 3y ago
Wow, another blog post on the same two changes everyone else has been talking about for two weeks, rehashing the exact same arguments. I genuinely cannot think of a company that contributes more to open-source projects than Red Hat. They to do this through hiring hundreds of talented engineers and adhering to an incredibly generous upstream-first policy, where most of the work they do gets made available for everyone else. No matter what Linux distribution you use, you are running a huge amount of code written by Red Hat. Unfortunately, because we don’t live in a utopia, they need to be able to pay their engineers to do this work, and clones that simply redistribute their packages pose a serious threat to their ability to do this. Previously, Red Hat went out of their way to make the exact RHEL sources available to these clones. Now, Red Hat is still publishing all the code they write through Stream, but they do not have a specific repo for the exact RHEL patch set. I don’t see how this isn’t completely reasonable. If you led a company making a product, and were responsible for thousands of employees, and some other company simply took that product and repackaged it, released it for free, while (in the case of Rocky and Oracle) running ads to compete with you in the process, are you telling me you would go out of your way to publish the exact patchsets to a special repository to make it as easy as possible for them to do this?
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  Yes. It would be giving customers insurance. customers made redhat huge. Free software with many vendors is insurance. Redhat was known to go the distance for customers, which also got some critics from some mantainers, but as a customer, what more could I want than that? They deliver, and give me the guarantee that if I’m not happy i can go to Rocky or Oracle and see if they are any better. Do you think you could get better customer focus than a company like this? But now this changes things. People are seeing this as “gpl rights” or “free loaders”, but it’s more like a social network shitting on its users because its market is set. Or any other company trying to get bigger lock in rather than providing better products/service. This is the typical big mistake of seeing uses without revenue and having the hubris to believe those are dollars lost.
  - bimblesticks 3y ago
nmmanx 3y ago
[flagged]
tannhaeuser 3y ago
RH's interpretation of GPL licensing in today's mature Linux market more than ever demonstrates lack of alignment of their incentives with their customer's and can be summarized as: let's introduce a thousand exclusive crap features on top of a POSIX core, then milk customers for support and ongoing maintenance. Yes RH pays most Linux devs (with SuSE a distant second, or at least it used to be like that), but their contributions are only monopolizing know-how, driving Linux further into the ground away from POSIX, and increase your dependency, a net negative. What's the point of GPL without choice? Consider that original Unix was developed in a couple of months and its point was to be compact, minimal, and portable. Linux today is a product of rent seeking in an environment of increased profit expectations, tolerated by its original developers (approaching retirement) as a well-paid hobby, that much is clear looking at its 30 years of development time. What are the goals of Linux as a development project? The Linux desktop is not only stagnating but severely regressing. It has become unusable for me after 12 years, with its focus on RH "innovations" such as gnome 3.x/4.x, completely unnecessary containers, and wayland, while applications are lacking. A fscking joke compared to Mac OS. The server-side? A cloud OS benefitting only FAANG where RH also uses its muscle to drive Docker out of business who dared to provide alternatives (not that I'm a big fan of solutions to self-inflicted problems anyway). Android Linux? The largest known spyware vector in the world. It's time for Linux developers to take a deep look into the mirror. On the plus side, RH's and Linux' demise means opportunities for the BSDs, for other Linux vendors such as SuSE, or entire new operating systems.
bastard_op 3y ago
Everyone seems to have forgotten IBM acquired Red Hat. What did anyone think IBM was going to do, other than fsck it up in bad ways? You know damn well if you know anything of the industry that nothing good was going to come of IBM acquiring anything or anyone.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Red Hat continually denies IBM had anything to do with this decision.
hamilyon2 3y ago
So, two main questions that I still don't understand completely. OpenSUSE is rpm-based. Does that mean that it will diverge or lag behind more? Technically, access to source code isn't revoked, right? Someone could set up private git repository, extract and copy source files there, it is just pita, not impossible. So, the freeleecher business model is still very much possible, it is just you'll have updates later, or am I missing something?

37 points by twapi 3y ago

Interesting posts after said community actively took Red Hats work and resold it for their own pure profit with no investment. Making Red Hats business model untenable. It seems like OSS Community loves to attack and eat their own - RH is one of the top Linux contributors across the board, while the profiteers did practically nothing for the community. The rabid the attacks of freeloaders are quite intersting to see here on this site.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago
Redhat is profitable in such environment. This environment is not new, see CentOS. > Making Red Hats business model untenable. Uber business is untenable. Redhat is very profitable. > The rabid the attacks of freeloaders The rabid attacks of people and customers that got their promises broken. Even Dante claimed that the last circle of hell is for the ones that break trust. So, nothing really unexpected is happening here.

cyberax 3y ago

What a bunch of... Look, don't act like RHEL is the only distro in existence. There's also Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, and tons of other distros. Even for boring old enterprise stuff there's Ubuntu LTS. Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.

izacus 3y ago
> Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea. It's an amazing idea - copying RH meant no work had to be put into actually supporting the Linux community and keeping all the profits. Massive margins were made. It's just that the angry HNers think that RH should continue to just give things away to repackagers for free and let them profiteer off their work.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  The implication here is that people were getting rich off RH's hard work, but who else is rich in the Linux community? The only people making serious money that I can see are RH themselves, maybe Google if you want to count Android. They're earning $3.4B a year in revenue, compared to $140M for Canonical. Everyone else is scrounging around between the couch cushions for spare change by comparison. RH deserves kudos for being the biggest corporate OSS contributor (by far), but I'm just not buying this argument at poor RH can't sustain themselves against freeloading competitors when they seem to be the only ones making serious money.
  - tm-guimaraes 3y ago
    They were very profitable before IBM (now i dunno if IBMs splits the accounting) so poor Redhat doesn’t make sense.
mschuster91 3y ago
> Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea. Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors just the same - the "classic" and accepted FOSS monetization way was to provide paid support with SLAs for customers. This work cannot be copied by anyone else, just the business model - but that's ordinary business competition.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors Which FOSS contributors? The repackagers? Who are free to repackage Ubuntu, Debian, etc.?
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    Upstream as well. The spirit of the GPL and other FOSS licenses of its kind is that any modifications to a package have to be published as open-source as well if someone publishes a binary package. The reason is pretty simple: when a company makes a profit from using an open-source package, it should be forced to contribute its improvements back to the community in turn. The best example of why that's needed is Apple.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      The upstream that is mostly Red Hat funded development? My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. I'd much rather an ecosystem of enterprise Linux, such as Ubuntu and SUSE rather than a pile of free Red Hat clones.
      - mschuster91 3y ago
        > The upstream that is mostly Red Hat funded development? Yes, RH (and others) are doing pretty significant work in the open-source space. I'm not denying that. But without the previous work that all the other non-Big Money-funded people did, RH, SuSE, Oracle MySQL and others wouldn't even be in business. > My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. Agreed on that one. Open Source in general lacks decent funding mechanisms.
happymellon 3y ago
It's not even the only RPM Enterprise distro.
brightlancer 3y ago
> But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea. RedHat's current business model is selling (via copying) the work of millions of other people, then refusing to adhere to the license terms they used to copy all of that work.

moomin 3y ago

There are companies out there so done with Red Hat now they’re wholesale moving to a radically different distribution.

ttarr 3y ago
Care to name few?

thedriver 3y ago

I'm actually with Red Hat on this one. There are many other great distributions that you can use, such as Debian. People are just angry that they can't get an exact copy of a paid product and 10 years of support for free. If there are non-profits and hobbyists who have been using one of the free derivatives, and this change causes problems for them, I feel sorry for them. But actual for profit companies could very well pay or use something else. If you want a similar system for free, you can use Fedora or CentOS Stream. And RHEL even gives you 16 free installations for non-commercial use. If you can't pay for RHEL and that 16 installations isn't enough, you most likely don't actually need it. So many companies rely on free labor of others in the form of FOSS, and they seem to be angry about the idea that they would actually have to make a contribution. RHEL also isn't just stealing software others wrote, they are a big contributor to many of the projects that RHEL is built upon. Besides, FSF/GNU never said that you can't charge money for FOSS or that the source code must be published for anyone in some git repository. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

safety1st 3y ago
I've been watching this "crisis" unfold since the original announcement from Red Hat and I think most people are. Not giving Red Hat carte blanche here but fundamentally they are one of the largest contributors to open source, they're not violating the GPL (yet), and they're unhappy with Oracle and VC funded rebuilders using Red Hat's brand value for a free ride. Anyone with a foot in the business world at least kind of understands their position. What seems to have happened is "influencers," including many who have no skin in the game and shallow takes, have seen an opportunity in this topic to make a few bucks by churning out populist clickbait. It's a discussion about business and licensing which has been perverted into a culture war. As usual all the nuance is lost and the loudest personalities have ended up dominating. /barf
- cbzoiav 3y ago
  I'd view it more similarly to the whole Reddit fiasco. There is a valid problem. The business has tried to solve that immediate problem without worrying about the knock on. In this case blocking large funded competitors ripping off your work is valid. The way they've approached it has cut off a large number of valid use cases that have arguably driven adoption of RHEL in the first place. In Reddits case for profit firms were hammering APIs and costing Reddit significant amounts. 3rd party apps also cut off ad revenue. A flat high fee cuts off those 3rd party apps entirely when your own product has significant deficiencies it upsets your most valuable users (contributors and mods). In both cases there was potential for a more nuanced change that works for both sides.

nullcipher 3y ago

Want to hear alternate view points. Why is Red Hat obligated to release source code. They had done this in the past, for decades. They are trying something else now. Why hold them on the hook for this? Practically all companies use Linux and open source. Barely any contributes or keeps their source code open. For example, no hosting company I know has their code open. Practically no SaaS has code open (sure, you can give me 10 examples, but I can you 1 million examples in the contrary).

izacus 3y ago
Because angry HNers who downvote you demand free (as in beer) software and are pissed that someone actually wants to pay their employees for Linux development.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Didn't Red Hat manage to pay their employees for Linux development and make a profit prior to IBM acquiring them?
  - izacus 3y ago
    Yes, but at time the community didn't just resell their work at lower prices. Now the profiteers appeared and they're addressing that problem. Blaming IBM is a conspiracy theory that's more copium than anything else.
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      > at time the community didn't just resell their work at lower prices. That's because at the time, CentOS was still alive.
    - tm-guimaraes 3y ago
      CentOS existed before it was bought and shutdown. (There is something called CentOS Stream today, but it’s a completely different product with completely different purpose) All the “rebuilders” redhat is complaining are just CentOS folks continuing to do their thing after their name was bought. So this is almost as old as redhat. Not “a new treat”

MichaelMoser123 3y ago

Just a reminder: Red Hat is owned by IBM, though they say that this is an independent subsidiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat

tm-guimaraes 3y ago

Redhat was actually really profitable, one of the reasons it was bought out. Unlike most startups, and darlings like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, and the like, Redhat actually makes loads of money. So please try to count as many software companies are more profitable than Redhat. Redhat saw “freeloaders” and wanted a piece of that pie. Terrible mistake. Redhat says those distributions don’t really do much, they are not completely wrong, but they do one thing that helps redhat, they expand their market. Because of a lot more companies using “RHEL compatible” distros, lots of software, (specially in areas with more regulation, or very specialized domains, etc) simply target those, this makes Redhat a very good option even if you can get some build from elsewhere, or Amazon/Oracle copies of those. It also provides a safety net/insurance for anyone picking a Redhat contract. Can’t go much wrong. Anyway, the issue is simple, it’s lack of vision, not only from redhat leadership but from plenty of other companies in today’s world, they are more concerned with “capturing” their small pond, instead of having a very small part of the ocean. Ocean is scary, too big to be controlled, even if your small part is much bigger than the pond, it requires actual expertise, and to benefit from such a huge thing you have to actually look for opportunities. And worse, you have to allow others to also make profits from that huge ocean. Much easier to just close a pond and rent seek. Lazy

izacus 3y ago
What kind of "vision" includes "we'll let others take our work for free, undercut us on pricing" that doesn't end up in bankrupcy for the company?
- jpgvm 3y ago
  The kind of vision where you deliver superior service and thus win business the old fashioned way?
- stakhanov 3y ago
  You mean like how Metallica went bankrupt when Napster came along? Oh, wait. That never happened.
  - 3y ago

bimblesticks 3y ago

Wow, another blog post on the same two changes everyone else has been talking about for two weeks, rehashing the exact same arguments. I genuinely cannot think of a company that contributes more to open-source projects than Red Hat. They to do this through hiring hundreds of talented engineers and adhering to an incredibly generous upstream-first policy, where most of the work they do gets made available for everyone else. No matter what Linux distribution you use, you are running a huge amount of code written by Red Hat. Unfortunately, because we don’t live in a utopia, they need to be able to pay their engineers to do this work, and clones that simply redistribute their packages pose a serious threat to their ability to do this. Previously, Red Hat went out of their way to make the exact RHEL sources available to these clones. Now, Red Hat is still publishing all the code they write through Stream, but they do not have a specific repo for the exact RHEL patch set. I don’t see how this isn’t completely reasonable. If you led a company making a product, and were responsible for thousands of employees, and some other company simply took that product and repackaged it, released it for free, while (in the case of Rocky and Oracle) running ads to compete with you in the process, are you telling me you would go out of your way to publish the exact patchsets to a special repository to make it as easy as possible for them to do this?

tm-guimaraes 3y ago
Yes. It would be giving customers insurance. customers made redhat huge. Free software with many vendors is insurance. Redhat was known to go the distance for customers, which also got some critics from some mantainers, but as a customer, what more could I want than that? They deliver, and give me the guarantee that if I’m not happy i can go to Rocky or Oracle and see if they are any better. Do you think you could get better customer focus than a company like this? But now this changes things. People are seeing this as “gpl rights” or “free loaders”, but it’s more like a social network shitting on its users because its market is set. Or any other company trying to get bigger lock in rather than providing better products/service. This is the typical big mistake of seeing uses without revenue and having the hubris to believe those are dollars lost.
- bimblesticks 3y ago

nmmanx 3y ago

[flagged]

tannhaeuser 3y ago

RH's interpretation of GPL licensing in today's mature Linux market more than ever demonstrates lack of alignment of their incentives with their customer's and can be summarized as: let's introduce a thousand exclusive crap features on top of a POSIX core, then milk customers for support and ongoing maintenance. Yes RH pays most Linux devs (with SuSE a distant second, or at least it used to be like that), but their contributions are only monopolizing know-how, driving Linux further into the ground away from POSIX, and increase your dependency, a net negative. What's the point of GPL without choice? Consider that original Unix was developed in a couple of months and its point was to be compact, minimal, and portable. Linux today is a product of rent seeking in an environment of increased profit expectations, tolerated by its original developers (approaching retirement) as a well-paid hobby, that much is clear looking at its 30 years of development time. What are the goals of Linux as a development project? The Linux desktop is not only stagnating but severely regressing. It has become unusable for me after 12 years, with its focus on RH "innovations" such as gnome 3.x/4.x, completely unnecessary containers, and wayland, while applications are lacking. A fscking joke compared to Mac OS. The server-side? A cloud OS benefitting only FAANG where RH also uses its muscle to drive Docker out of business who dared to provide alternatives (not that I'm a big fan of solutions to self-inflicted problems anyway). Android Linux? The largest known spyware vector in the world. It's time for Linux developers to take a deep look into the mirror. On the plus side, RH's and Linux' demise means opportunities for the BSDs, for other Linux vendors such as SuSE, or entire new operating systems.

bastard_op 3y ago

Everyone seems to have forgotten IBM acquired Red Hat. What did anyone think IBM was going to do, other than fsck it up in bad ways? You know damn well if you know anything of the industry that nothing good was going to come of IBM acquiring anything or anyone.

geerlingguy 3y ago
Red Hat continually denies IBM had anything to do with this decision.

hamilyon2 3y ago

So, two main questions that I still don't understand completely. OpenSUSE is rpm-based. Does that mean that it will diverge or lag behind more? Technically, access to source code isn't revoked, right? Someone could set up private git repository, extract and copy source files there, it is just pita, not impossible. So, the freeleecher business model is still very much possible, it is just you'll have updates later, or am I missing something?