[bonzini]

Quoting Reddit: "The problem of rebuilders has been around forever. Things heated up a couple of months ago when we detected what we think was a continued bad-faith action from one of the rebuilders, not on the code/engineering side but on the commercial/money making side of their house. That's as far as I'll go publicly. After that it was just a matter of discussion on what to do about it, so we landed on the announcements I made last week."

[luma]

Post-IBM RH always falls back on this: we took a free operating system and made billions from selling it to others, and now we're extra-mad that somebody else is doing the same.

[bonzini]

Why the fixation with "post-IBM"? Ever heard of PNAELV?

https://lwn.net/Articles/578768/ for the history (up until 9 years ago).

[pipo234]

Curious to learn who the bad faith actor was. Oracle? Rocky Linux? Alma? VMware? All of the above?

And what avenues of negotiating a better outcome did they try before opting for the nuclear tactics?

[bonzini]

I don't have a view in which rebuild they saw bad-faith action from; but I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.

[pipo234]

Disclaimer: I'm an ex-oracle employee.

Making millions on DB software only withhold RedHat the pocket change they absolutely deserve is absolutely pathetic. Even with the helpful support and hand holding of then co-workers, I found that Oracle's unbreakable linux is a close to useless rip off, littered with subtle gotchas, pitfalls and please-insert-yet-another-license-key-here.

Installing, tuning and maintaining an OS professionally on enterprise hardware to run enterprise software is the bread and butter of RedHat. I never understood why they insisted pushing their own mediocre engineers instead, and did not want to pony up the (relatively) modest cost of reselling the license.

> I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.

I guess so. It still mystifies me why they haven't gone out of business wearing the emperors cloths.

[josephcsible]

> Oracle's unbreakable linux is a close to useless rip off, littered with subtle gotchas, pitfalls and please-insert-yet-another-license-key-here.

I've never heard of Oracle Linux needing a license key anywhere before. Can you provide a link to somewhere that talks more about that?

[omniglottal]

Their business model allowed for greater ease to actually download and run unregistered/unlicensed copies, but higher costs with per-core licensing and clauses which required (i.e.) the per-core licensed OS plus the per-core licensed database if you wanted to use the latter. It was both easier to run for free and way more expensive to run in legal compliance.

[account42]

That quote is someone complaining that others are making money of "their" work, not that Red Had isn't making enough money to fund development.