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Comment by k3oni | Hacker News Reader

Until they change their minds in a few months/years. I really wish they would just go 100% paid and stop pretending they care about anything free at this point. RH isn't the company that it once was anymore.

Edit: I'm sure this is not a popular opinion but it is what it is.

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>I really wish they would just go 100% paid and stop pretending they care about anything open/free at this point.

As a Red Hat employee for ~5 years, every line of code I've ever written professionally has been open source and licensed under the GPL. The same is generally true across the entire company (with the exception of contributions to external projects licensed Apache / MIT / BSD).

Can you explain what you mean by "open/free"? Perhaps "free beer" rather than "freedom"?

>Can you explain what you mean by "open/free"? Perhaps "free beer" rather than "freedom"?

You installed 16 systems and a half year later RH says, and in 1 year you have to pay for these or change to CentOS Stream, i think it's a very founded consideration after the CentOS debacle.

But not sure what he means that RH does not care about Opensource...

That was more a nod to the whole CentOS debacle and the way RH is doing business the last few years, plus this article relating to the free part. Not really related to opensource as i doubt they'll be able to escape that aspect, if they could they would have probably done that already as well.

To be honest it broke my heart a bit when they where sold to IBM. But hey there is SLES and in my opinion a much better option with the free tumbleweed, leap and the paid SLES and all the free services like OBS, openQA and Kiwi....and no i don't use BTRF...XFS all the way down ;) But if i have the freedom to choose the solution it nearly always choose is FreeBSD, one exception...OracleDB where i use OracleLinux.

Licensed under the GPL is one thing -- intentionally obfuscated to make actual compilation difficult is compatible in letter but not in spirit of the license. Red Hat's citizenship in the FLOSS community varies from "savior" to "nuisance" depending on the project...

True, then Oracle made his own UEK...and now on OL you can choose between two Kernels....good job RH.

I have been a Red hat employee for more than 8 years and we never ever intentionally made projects difficult to consume by users outside of RH. More people using the open source projects works better for us as it provides free mind share, testing and feedback. For RH selling subscription for a popular/stable open source project is a way easier problem than a project which has no mind share. That being said sometimes it is very difficult to maintain projects and branches for external contribution depending upon the scope of project and the development workflow we use for it. It is very common scene in open source projects where contributors does not maintain the documentation etc properly for easy on boarding. I can go on for long time why it is not easy to do and we should improve on it for sure.

Percent-wise I don't think there is any other company that contributes as much to open source software, I do think it was a dick move from them but let's not conflate the things.

My comment wasn't really related to opensource, but in general to their new way of doing business. Nothing wrong with changing the company's direction and trying to go full profit mode, just don't try to pretend everything's the same as before.

The change in company culture is probably real. Just an anecdata but I feel like over the years radhatters are behaving more and more corporatish compared with how it was years ago, then again that can be just the "climate" of the Internet nowadays.

That's the side effect of a company getting bigger. When a company hires a lot more and trying expand it is very hard hire only upstream contributors.

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