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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion.

Yeah, Red Hat wasn't the one that called them "freeloaders", this was language The Register used in an article:

>> Having given the move time to successfully eliminate most of the clones, Red Hat then killed off its own official free version of its paid-for flagship product. Instead, it switched to offering a free test version, an announcement which it made accompanied with lots of positive-sounding language about community involvement, and so on. In fact, what it was really doing was cutting off those that might be seen, from its perspective, as a bunch of freeloaders. The move was accompanied with free production deployment of RHEL for developers – but only up to 16 machines.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

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Hi there. I am the author of the Register article that you quote:

> this was language The Register used in an article

So, in response to that, I'd like to point out a few things.

1. This is, I feel, now widely and well-established language in this discussion. For example, note its use in the comments to this article about the discontinuation of CentOS Linux three years ago: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

2. Others are using it in the context of this story; for example, here: https://fosspost.org/red-hat-is-shooting-itself-in-the-foot-...

3. The direct personal reason that I used the phrase "a bunch of freeloaders" is that this is a Douglas Adams quotation, or rather, paraphrase. I am not an especially big name, but those who do know my name may recognise it: I was once the president of ZZ 9 Plural Z alpha, the official Douglas Adams appreciation society. I was interviewed quite widely in media around the world at the time that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film came out. I used the phrase in order to refer to the Douglas Adams line about "a taxi service for a bunch of degenerate freeloaders." For reasons which I trust are obvious I removed the adjective.

So amazingly primitive they even think a digital watch is a pretty neat idea.

Ford?

Yes?

There's an infinite number of monkey outside, who want to share a single digital watch.

More Arthur.

Many NeXT machines have had their hostnames after Hitchhiker characters. My favourite name been “zaphod”.

If we’re very lucky, will Red Hat read some poetry to us first?

What a bizarrely appropriate screen name. I wonder if it will be friends with me?

Thanks for the clarification. I'd just like to add it wasn't a knock on your journalism or a suggestion it was a pureposeful misrepresention, just wanted to re-cite the authors citation in his Youtube video here

There have been two instances I have seen where the word 'freeloader' was used by someone internally at Red Hat.

And there are a number of examples in public comments (one recently in the Fedora mailing list[1]) where you can easily substitute the phrase 'freeloader' for a longer description of the downstream communities. The same sentiment comes across either way.

[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe...

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