No it's mostly from people with a commercial interest. I can't take Rocky seriously when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle.
You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.
What more should they do?
Also note, Red Hat pays engineers for the extended support, the compliance https://access.redhat.com/articles/2918071, etc that customers expect from RH. Engineers contribute both upstream (first) and backport those changes to older releases.
>You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.
They're paid to work on FOSS projects. Gnome isn't a RedHat project. Nor is the kernel. And they're IBM projects even less.
And most of those projects started without RedHat and RedHat stepped on them to become what it is first. Plus, there are thousands of essential projects they don't have anything to do with, still in the distro.
There was time today's big distros were small and they mostly took from community, packaged it and sold support for it. Rocky is small now so needs to take more from community. If it becomes big later it can also contribute back.
That's one of the benefits of open source. It helps small guys to get started and make it big. Once they become big, they can contribute back.
But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.
Then it may be worth asking yourselves "how do we get this fact publicised more widely?" since I don't recall reading about Rocky's contributions either.
(I'm not a heavy user of RHish distros, mind, I only ever anticipate using Rocky if somebody else already decided to deploy a particular project on it so you probably shouldn't put significant energy into whether -I- notice, but there seems to be a perception issue here that's sufficiently widespread that you might get a decent ROI in terms of community growth from doing something about it and I'm pretty much always in favour of community growth whether I anticipate being one of the happy users of the project or not)
Developers? What do they develop? If they have upstream contributions great, but if they are just adjustments to their build pipeline they are not developing... That is tweaking.
Does it matter if Rocky and CIQ are separate organisations? Would your or anyone elses opinion be different if the flow went client -> paid support -> Rocky rather than client -> paid support -> CIQ -> donation -> Rocky?
I'm one of the board members who replied on the forum thread. Rocky has never sold support or any other product. We make an OS for the community, that's it.
The link to the support providers page simply is that, a list of other third party providers who offer paid support services.
So a "founding partner" is now a third party provider? Frame it as you may, but there is in fact commercial interest here. Even if Rocky were a separate entity, it depends on the sponsors selling support.
Open source projects with sponsors and partners are pretty commonplace. Naturally, projects depend on having some support from others. You can frame that as a "commercial interest" but I maintain that is an inaccurate description of our sponsor and partner relationships.
Rocky is absolutely a separate entity, both legally and in practice. In fact, the project and foundation board bylaws limit undue influence in a number of ways including maximum number of board seats per employer. We try to show our values both in our words and actions.
I think you misread the post. He's clearly saying that he doesn't understand how the conclusion was drawn that there was anything shady going on. Willing to bet that the RESF builds rocky linux and CIQ does all the "shady" business dealings, which is out of their control.
They demand that Redhat pay for what they take in the only coin that the original producer ever asked for.
Redhat are the parasites, not Centos.
If Redhat don't agree to the deal that the gpl makes, they are free not to use any gpl code.
Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft, and it's an incredible expression of the art, when something is free, and yet you still manage to steal it.
No, it's not, and I've seen your comments elsewhere. I don't think you even know what the "free" in "free software" means.
You are COMPLETELY allowed to SELL free software. "Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
Red Hat is still distributing full corresponding source code to anyone they distribute a binary to. That is what the GPL class of licenses require, and that is what they are doing.
You are free to get the software elsewhere. You don't have to get it from Red Hat. And if Red Hat wants to charge you for it, you can take it or leave it.
Yes, and anybody who buys RedHat product, even for a few minutes on a shared cloud provider, is entitled to the source code, and is also entitled to redistribute the source code as they see fit. Which is what Rocky is doing.
I never said you can't sell free software. You have picked the wrong argument to try to make thinking I conflate the frees.
It's always been a fact that RH can't actually prevent a Centos-alike from reproducing the binaries from the same source, since RH are obligated to make the source available to anyone they hand a binary to. So you are right, they are still doing that. Congratulations on something that was never contested.
The problem is simply that they are trying, and HAVE at least issued statements asserting policies that they don't actually have the right to make. For instance they said that users can not legally redistribute the source they have access to, because it has RH trademarks in it. Well, fortunately that doesn't actually fly. The GPL isn't nullified by just including your cooyrighted or trademarked logo into the package. If anything, it just creates a derivative work and you just gave away all rights to your logo. Presumably they were'nt that stupid and carefully only do that to software they wholly wrote themselves, or things that are MIT and not GPL.
So just like RedHat and IBM?