43
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
43 points (93.9% liked)
Linux
48157 readers
720 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
Hello fellow Raleighen.. Raleighite… Raleighian?
I also don't know what the terminology is. I'm in North Raleigh, and I sometimes go to downtown.
Used to live in Cary, now in Clayton (house prices… geez). Work at State so I see that giant Redhat building everyday. Hell I’m on Centennial campus so they used to be down the street.
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".
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.
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.
-
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.
-
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.