Comment by justinjlynn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinjlynn | Hacker News Reader

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> “The future has never looked brighter for the Power architecture,” says Hugh Blemings, Executive Director of the OpenPower Foundation, apparently with a straight face. You don’t drop your price to zero when business is good. Still, the move probably is a good one for Power as an architecture. And a good one for designers the world over, now that they have a major new choice to consider.

> Your very own IBM computer. Who would’ve thought it?

I'm stunned. Who would write something as smugly as this is written... and why?

You don't reduce the price to zero when business is good, no. IBM isn't. They're reducing the price to zero for the parts of their product to which business is now irrelevant and for which free and open collaboration is now more valuable than secrecy and proprietary ownership - and good on them for it. They still charge lots of dollars for their support, their processors and their implementations based on them - and stand to benefit massively from opening the ISA and surrounding infrastructure and patents.

Do yourself a favour and don't write like the article's author does - if you do, it'll just make you sound like an ass.

Just because the architecture is free doesn't mean IBM won't make a shitload of money from the future of this processor. There are a lot of other ways than licensing. RHEL is free since forever and still it's the biggest income source for Red Hat afaik.

Um, yes, that's basically what I said, or rather, what I meant to say - if it wasn't clear.

It was clear

Just longer

RHEL is free? I am missing something? I believe it's free only for developers and for development purposes.

Even the desktop "self-supported" version was something like $90 last time I checked.

CentOS/Scientific Linux is not RHEL.

The subscription is not free of charge, the software is free of charge. If you buy a subscription and don't extend it or copy my filesystem you can use it without problems. You just won't receive official updates or official support.

Free as in Open Source.

However, it's important to note that although the sources for RHEL packages are available as open-source, that still doesn't make CentOS an exact replica of RHEL, and therefore doesn't make RHEL itself "free".

RHEL 8 was released almost 4 months ago and there's no CentOS 8 yet. Mainly because taking the "free" RHEL sources and rebuild them isn't a simple case of removing logos and other "non-free" material. The build process itself (the sequence in which packages must be built so that all of them build successfully and with equivalent functionality to RHEL) is a major piece of what makes RHEL, RHEL, and that isn't free (or even publicly available).

Free as in Freedom to download CentOS

no really free as in free beer

> They're reducing the price to zero for the parts of their product to which business is now irrelevant and for which free and open collaboration is now more valuable than secrecy and proprietary ownership - and good on them for it.

And possibly bad for them. See Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement [1], by Gwern.

> Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified ... the pattern of “"commoditizing your complement"”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.

This move is good for IBM. Not clear what the repercussions will be for other players - even open source developers.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

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