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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I tend not to take seriously the opinions of people who call others who use open source software according to the terms of its license "freeloaders".

(And I say this as an open source developer myself, who has spent thousands of hours writing code for free.)

If you want to side with Red Hat on this, fine, but it's not necessary to exaggerate the actions of those with an opposing view to the point that you're trying to make them look bad.

I also in general think it's silly and unnecessary to defend a giant corporation (remember, IBM owns Red Hat now, and it's not like RH had been a scrappy little Linux company for a long while before the acquisition, even) over regular ol' community members and IT sysadmins who have a beef.

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I also don't believe in defending big corporate but Jeff's takes were wildly out of touch with what was actually happening. I do not love Red Hat or any corporation and I think their messaging could have been a lot better but I don't think the people who together make up Alma or Rocky acted in any way in good faith and I do find their desire to have everything hand prepared for them by Red Hat spoiled behavior.

The sources are all still there, they just need to work a little harder to get it. Forgive me if I shed no tears.

I had some very early, somewhat tangential, and long-discontinued involvement in the very early days of Rocky. Before CIQ was even a thing.

Generally speaking, the people who did the work to found RESF weren’t doing so in order to have someone else do their work for them and just rebrand it. There was a terrific amount of work that happened because a huge community of users had just had the rugged pulled out from under them.

(To be very clear, on a personal level I have some deep and stringently opposed views to some people in the RESF/CIQ ecosystem. I’m not offering any unconditional or personal defenses.)

Jeff’s takes were some of the most measured of the disagreement with Red Hat’s moves that I’ve seen.

You seem to be on a crusade of the same level of "hate"(your standards, not mine) too. Against a person in fact.

I very much dislike folks who use their influence to spread this stuff. Precisely because the way social media works, it amplifies into a crescendo of shallow takes and worst emotion. People with influence have a responsibility not to abuse their position. Calling them out on it (the first I've ever done) is not a "crusade".

You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text. Telling people to disregard this one persons tech content because of software-politics views. Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?

> You replied to many top level comments for a period of time the same period of time with almost the same text.

I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.

> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?

"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.

To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.

> I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.

Huh, me too. Could've sworn I saw this, and now I don't. My bad...

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