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Keeping Open Source Open

rockylinux.org

101–110 of 253 posts

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#101
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they will be content with: 1) having something to show their customers who has the actual expertise 2) making it clear that the Red Hat of today is significantly more open than the Red Hat of 2014 when neither CentOS Stream nor UBI existed and CentOS releases were months late despite the SRPMs being on ftp.redhat.com 3) making it obvious that they are respecting the GPL, and that no one gives a flyin…

If "they" was Red Hat then I might agree with you. But "they" is now IBM, which has lawyers like a gas station bathroom has bacteria.

Interesting how you seem to know more about the relationship between Red Hat and IBM than the people who actually work at Red Hat and IBM.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, it's not yet known for certain if the chilling effect of a terminated contract violates the "no further restrictions" clause of the GPL or not. Evidently IBM's lawyers think it doesn't. But it would be good to test it in court first.

GRSecurity started down this road. IBM though has deeper pockets

It's not grsecurity's idea, it started on the 90s when Spender was in kindergarten or so. It's always been the way free software companies made money.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Some images, bug reports, and internal build tools. What new software or features have Rocky contributed to the community they can't keep talking about? I side with RH here because I personally, every day, use a lot of software they've made available. That takes time, effort, and money. Heck, you personally benefit immensely from an acquisition they subsequently open sourced. When Rocky has something that's a…

> Heck, you personally benefit immensely from an acquisition they subsequently open sourced. lolwut?

Are you saying you don't have any material on AWX?

https://www.youtube.com/live/iKmY4jEiy_A

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and anybody who buys RedHat product, even for a few minutes on a shared cloud provider, is entitled to the source code, and is also entitled to redistribute the source code as they see fit. Which is what Rocky is doing.

Which is both brilliant and surprising that RH didn't see it coming

I'm still not convinced that 'hiding the source code' was the final end game to this.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat can't stop you from exercising your rights under the GPL to redistribute the code. You also can't compel them to do business with you. They've structured their support agreements such that if you do exercise your rights under the GPL they will stop supporting you (and decline to offer you future subscriptions). The value proposition for RHEL is ostensibly support (and a "throat to choke", for whatever that's…

Much like GPLv3 was written to counter tivoization, I’d love a GPLv4 to kill what RedHat is doing before they do irreparable the entire free software ecosystem.

In this case, is the change you imagine GPLv4 would say "you cant prevent anyone, at any point from downloading the source code from a project you create" because that is super slippery slope?

I'd also like to ask, what damage do you see this change in behavior doing to free software ecosystem ?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#108
Friendly reminder that not all open source licenses are as reassuring as the gpl is.

Keep that in mind next time you make an open source contribution (and maybe sign off copyright) to a repository that is not protected by the gpl license.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#109
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that they will be content with: 1) having something to show their customers who has the actual expertise 2) making it clear that the Red Hat of today is significantly more open than the Red Hat of 2014 when neither CentOS Stream nor UBI existed and CentOS releases were months late despite the SRPMs being on ftp.redhat.com 3) making it obvious that they are respecting the GPL, and that no one gives a flyin…

> making it obvious ...that no one gives a flying f*k about "free as in freedom" because all the uprising was always about either the free beer Indeed - Red Hat is making it obvious that IBM (like most large companies) views open source as free beer - or rather free labor. It's great when they get other people's labor for free, as long as they don't have to give away any of their own.

Per this link: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c...

"Communities we contribute to

Red Hat is a proud contributor to all aspects of the software stack, from the operating system and developer toolchain to middleware, desktop, and cloud. We financially support a number of open source organizations who help us create and maintain better open source software. We also contribute to a wide range of standardization efforts that help define future, interoperable technologies."

If RedHat were exaggerating, then those named communities would have called RedHat out by now.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#110
I originally had a strong anti-RedHat response to this change. When I thought about it and heard RH's response their sharp change makes sense.

They sell RHEL. It's from what I gather their main source of income. Revenue from this funds things like SystemD, a lot of work in Gnome, many many things that RHEL customers and other users of Linux and desktop Linux benefit from. Of course many contributions to open source/GNU tools come from folks in no way affiliated or paid by RH and RH does use these packages but RH also provides a lot of value.

So it stands to reason, to me at least, that to allow anyone to reskin/respin/or basically just ship a RHEL clone without RH branding that is "100% bug/binary compatible with RHEL" just without the license cost is giving away something you work on for free. No rational business would allow this.

CentOS, Fedora are free. RHEL is not. Makes sense.

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