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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

> Red Hat is a for-profit company

... built on top of software and labour contributed by others.

What you're missing is how the open source ethos works.

Isn't that basically all for-profit software though? not to mention exactly how most of the people on this board have paying jobs?

I would argue that it's exactly how the open source ethos works

It would also still go in the other direction as well would it not? Meaning contributions via paid Red Hat devs would still benefit the wider Linux community, even as they close off the free forked versions.

I'm not sure exactly how much Red Hat contributes to Linux though but if I remember correctly it's quite a bit. Maybe Red Hat making more $$ = more devs. Or maybe this is just a net negative for the ecosystem code-wise (as opposed to just hurting the current users of the forked OSes) as it pushes more devs/software away from a very popular 'platform', reducing exposure, free online support on forums, testing, etc.

>... built on top of software and labour contributed by others.

the irony of Rocky, Oracle, and etc just flat out ripping off Red Hat.... which is the exact move that caused this change lol

If they sold for profit and started putting their changes behind a paywall, that would be terrible. But they're just benefiting from Red Hat the same way that Red Hat benefits from upstream Linux. Red Hat is the one misbehaving here.

If they don't like it maybe they should change their licensing

You say that and it feels like Red Hat never contributed a single line of code to any FOSS projects or doesn't hire any developers to work on FOSS.

It doesn't really matter if they've contributed or not. They still need to abide by the terms of the license.

In what way is Red Hat not abiding by the license? My understanding is that Red Hat is making the source code available to their users via their customer portal. I don't think that they have an obligation to make their source code available to non-users.

They have an obligation under the GPL to allow end users to redistribute. Terminating the subscriber agreement for redistribution is punishing the user for exercising his right granted to him by the GPL.

I had missed this point earlier. Thanks for clarifying. This does indeed look like RH has put themselves into a quagmire.

End users are allowed to redistribute the source they received from Red Hat at their hearts content. What Red Hat is terminating, from my understanding, is the future access to new binaries and sources due to the service contract becoming void.

Your server will keep running, you'll have the sources for all the server's binaries, but no more support.

Red Hat is a huge contributor to Linux. They also are responsible for making it a trusted OS for people coming off traditional Unix in the 90s. They aren’t doing anything on the backs of others.

Red Hat are relying on innumerable folks who do the work of certifying that their products work on RHEL, potentially creating lock-in for Red Hat.

Most of the code they ship isn't written by them, whatever metric you choose.

If that's the bar to being a good open source actor then who is?

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