• Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space
    111·
    1 year ago

    Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open source software, would begin to reserve the source code of its flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to paying customers only.

    I think they should have done that in the first place. You can sell open source software just fine; you shouldn’t be expected to make the sources public—only to those with a binary copy of your software who ask for it. Organizations that write and maintain open source software should be paid for their work.

    In 1984, a researcher named Richard Stallman released a software project called GNU. Stallman licensed GNU for free, with his only stipulation that users sign an agreement called the GNU General Public License. […] To Stallman, freedom meant no restrictions — not necessarily no costs. “Think free as in free speech, not free beer,” he is quoted as saying.

    Yes. Stallman sold copies of GNU Emacs on physical media back in the day.

    This article doesn’t touch on the contentious issue, which is that RHEL’s terms say, if you share the Red hat sources as a customer to a non-customer, Red Hat may stop serving you as a customer. The controversy isn’t about cost. It’s about being punished for exercising the freedoms Red Hat gives you.

    Of course, SUSE and Ubuntu Enterprise have had the same terms for years. Red Hat was the outlier until now.

    • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
      103·
      1 year ago

      Everything is still FOSS.

      HOWEVER, they are no longer dumping the 1:1 RHEL source code. So the changes to RHEL will still be available, but freeloading for-profit projects will have to locate and integrate the packages separately and at their own time and expense i.e Alma, Scientific, etc.

      Basically certain companies would sell their cheaper RHEL clones on the promise that they were “bug for bug compatible” with RHEL, but cost a lot less overall, because they weren’t shouldering any development costs.

      • Joker@discuss.tchncs.de
        91·
        1 year ago

        Exactly. To add on to this, there were companies deploying clones and then buying a RHEL license to get access to support for all of it. These are the same kinds of people who run their businesses on pirated software. We should have zero sympathy for them.

        Projects like Rocky and Alma may have been valuable for developers and small projects, but they were also enabling freeloaders. Looking at this whole thing objectively, it is clear that Red Hat is targeting the freeloaders who run their business on CentOS and are scamming support. That is evident in the fact that they are giving away free licenses for small projects.