Red Hat just erected a paywall in front of the source code to their Linux distribution.Are they burning bridges to the wider open source ecosystem?Referenced...
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
I was mad when I first heard about it, but now? Not so much…
You would be mad as well if a megacorp uses your successful foss to generate revenue cough Oracle Linux cough, floods you with merge requests and issues, expects you to fix them, and don’t pay you a dime. Everyone says that this is your fault: You shouldn’t have licensed it the way you did. But that doesn’t change the fact that you hate everything about your situation. You hate the people who use your work for free, and hate yourself for giving your work away for free.
But this is Red Hat. They asked their legal team how they can get out of this mess. So they found a loophole to close-source RHEL. Now… whether or not RHEL will survive this is a different beast.
Edit: Red Hat also created the following major projects:
Wayland
PipeWire
PulseAudio
systemd
FreeIPA
Keycloak
OpenStack
NetworkManager
Ceph
If that wasn’t enough, they’re also major contributors of the following projects:
Xorg
GNOME
LibreOffice
radeon
Linux kernel
If you run any Linux distribution today, chances are you use Red Hat projects. You can also say that anyone who uses the Linux kernel profits off of Red Hat.
I was mad when I first heard about it, but now? Not so much…
You would be mad as well if a megacorp uses your successful foss to generate revenue cough Oracle Linux cough, floods you with merge requests and issues, expects you to fix them, and don’t pay you a dime. Everyone says that this is your fault: You shouldn’t have licensed it the way you did. But that doesn’t change the fact that you hate everything about your situation. You hate the people who use your work for free, and hate yourself for giving your work away for free.
But this is Red Hat. They asked their legal team how they can get out of this mess. So they found a loophole to close-source RHEL. Now… whether or not RHEL will survive this is a different beast.
Edit: Red Hat also created the following major projects:
If that wasn’t enough, they’re also major contributors of the following projects:
If you run any Linux distribution today, chances are you use Red Hat projects. You can also say that anyone who uses the Linux kernel profits off of Red Hat.
It isn’t close-sourcing RHEL though. CentOS Stream is there and freely available and its basically the “git master” branch of RHEL.