Linux

This argument that open source somehow needs to exploit users and blatantly skirt the intent of the GPL because profit must be taken from it is absurd.

Why is it assumed that they weren’t perfectly sustainable before and why is it the end users responsibility to bear the burden of making their business model viable if they weren’t? Being unprofitable doesn’t excuse you from following the terms of your software license.

The problem is that nothing Red Hat has done justifies them breaking the rules.

Have they made tons of contributions back to open source? Yes. Do they need to make money? Yes. Are there organizations and people who are, in essence, freeloading off their work? Yes.

But here's the thing. At the end of the day, they chose to make their project open source and to build it on Linux. And that choice comes with rules that they (and everyone else that have used Linux or other FOSS projects) have to follow, no exceptions. You can argue that their motivations for wanting to do so are understandable all day long. You can argue the GPL is bad and shouldn't work this way. But they still chose this ecosystem.

Now, have they actually violated the GPL? We'll leave that up to the lawyers to decide I guess. But if we're only talking whether they should be allowed to violate the GPL, the answer is absolutely not. If they didn't want RHEL to be open source and stolen by freeloaders they should've made their own operating system with their own license.

I agree that they should be allowed a profit. However calling it open source when redistributing rhel code causes them to hold the right of canceling you access to the code and binary, eventhough gpl states that redistributing is a right under gpl rubs me the wrong way.

In the video, and in the blogpost that is effectively the transcript of the video, he clearly states that though locking away the source code is within IBM's or RedHat's rights.

What seems to have done it for him is, the subscription terms and conditions that prevent redistribution of source code by subscribers or else have the subscription revoked. This is what he argues as being borderline illegal and that RedHat could be banking on the army of lawyers on IBM's retainer.

And, knowing Oracle, what is to stop them from becoming a subscriber? That way, RedHat has a poster child of a subscriber, Oracle gets access to the code which they can and most likely will, with their own army of lawyers, repackage and publish as Oracle Linux. Admittedly this is my cynical take on Jeff's.

Time to start debating moving more projects under GPLv3 or AGPLv3 which demand more innovative ways to run a business than what IBM is doing.

It's not as if they didn't still get paid under the previous model. It's just not conducive to a profit line that has to be on an incline forever, else be axed or forever altered, such as in this case. It's greed, pure and simple. They have to find a new way to make the line on a chart go up and people who are more interested in short term gain figured they can wait out the backlash storm and rake in more profit on other businesses that are already locked in. They're not dumb, they just aren't incentivized in anyway to be concerned for the long-term health of what they are built on.

All the good things you said about Redhat should be in past tense. IBM recently laid off tons of Redhat employees, including the Fedora team lead! Redhat is no longer an organization in any real sense. It is only the name of a product now. It's as meaningful as IBM's "Watson". They are only marketing terms.

Don't expect much investment or technical innovation out of Redhat/IBM going forward. IBM is always going to put its short term (short sighted) self interest ahead of everything else.

... open source STILL needs sources of income to pay developers to work on the Linux ecosystem ....

free as in freedom, not free like free beer

I've become a lot more sympathetic to RH after learning about Oracle Linux. I still disagree with it, but another mega-corp selling support for a RHEL clone is egregious.

You should. He's done very entertaining stuff around Raspberry Pis and other fun projects.

If you like raspberry pis, SBCs, or Linux you're in for a decent time. Although he did get a bit of flack for his Eben Upton interview. Though I felta lot of that was overblown.

Don't worry, Redhat was garbage anyway. It's going to pale in comparison to Watson Enterprise Linux.

Ive only recently started to follow him, and yeah, hes awesome.

He really seems to know his stuff

And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out...

They could try that but I suspect it would be rather easy to find anomalies like that. These are ultimately patches to an upstream and already open-source project, so one can just diff the RHEL version with the release it's based on and quickly notice that random GUID in the sources or random spaces/indentation. Or have multiple sources leak the code independently, and then you can diff them all between eachother to verify if you got exactly the same code or if they injected something sneaky to track it, and remove it.

Lots of companies in enterprise also want to host their own mirror because the servers are airgapped, so they can't even track who downloaded all the sources because many companies will in fact do that. And serving slightly modified but still signed packages sounds like it would be rather computationally expensive to do on the fly, so they can't exactly add tracking built into the packages of the repos either. And again easy to detect with basic checksumming of the files.

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