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Red Hat paywall?! How the Raleigh giant divided the open source community.
(www.newsobserver.com)
Idk, I’d say it brought us together (against RedHat) pretty quickly.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Yes, and made many of us realise just how important it is to use and support Community distros and projects, and ditch the Corps.
No more Ubuntu, no more Fedora (Red Hat in disguise). Use Debian and any other community distro.
I've settled on Linux Mint Debian Edition, personally.
Don't besmirch Red Hat this way. Red Hat is as dead as Sun Microsystems at this point. They're just being Weekend at Bernie's-ed by IBM. Despite IBMs promise of independent operation and business as usual.
A colorful image but what does that even mean? I get not liking their decisions but they’re hardly dead…
Red Hat is gone. The leadership, vision, people, and culture that made Red Hat Red Hat are gone. IBM has completely taken over internally. Red Hat's logo is being paraded around to keep people complacent due to their former reputation.
I think it’s a cop out to blame any of this on IBM as these kinds of changes started before the acquisition.
I also don’t know who you mean when you say the people are gone as most of the executive leadership have been with the company for a decade or two.
I guess I was sad when they killed shadowman but that was before IBM too!
they’re hardly dead…
It's a matter of perspective. Just like how microsoft is dead for a lot of us because we don't use their products, the same can be said about IBM and red hat.
As a former RedHat advocate it sucks honestly, I have to find companies like Rancher and Suse that off truly FOSS products now. Like I want opensource devs to get paid if they are being depended on, but the RedHat paywall makes avoiding the vendor lock or trying to be cost flexible a legal land mine. They also offer more and more proprietary rebrands of FOSS projects that I fear will get EEEd as well.
I flip the bird at the Red Hat building every time I pass it.
How can they use GPL'ed code and then close it? I thought this was specifically forbidden?
It's available to the end users - I.e. red hats customers. End users are who the GPL is there to help, not everyone on the planet.
Exactly. Amazing how many people seem to forget it is "free as in freedom, not free as in beer".
Thought the GPL theoretically forbade this. No? Licensing is not a strong suit of mine...
The code is available as git, you just don't have access to src.rpm.
Not what they did on the surface (limiting source to only customers). That’s allowed by the GPL. But they went beyond that which imo makes them non-compliant.
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RH will cancel your access/agreement if you share the GPL’d source with others. That’s directly forbidden by section 6 of the GPLv2. RH is free to cancel your agreement when they want, but not because you exercised your rights under the GPL.
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Once your agreement is canceled, you also lose access to the matching source for other GPL’d packages installed on your system. RH could offer other methods to be in compliance, but as far as I know, they have not.
Eh. Not sure why people would go with red hat over debian these days.
Good commercial support
Maybe it's just me, but if you're doing something technical enough to require commercial support, shouldn't you have a competent IT team that doesn't need it?
Just seems weird to pay additional money for technical support of your OS when teams using Debian don't have to. Are they just more competent on average than teams using Red Hat?
This is totally right, but people with money like to point fingers and blame others. Ultimately paying for support is PR insurance.