[safety1st]

I've been watching this "crisis" unfold since the original announcement from Red Hat and I think most people are. Not giving Red Hat carte blanche here but fundamentally they are one of the largest contributors to open source, they're not violating the GPL (yet), and they're unhappy with Oracle and VC funded rebuilders using Red Hat's brand value for a free ride. Anyone with a foot in the business world at least kind of understands their position.

What seems to have happened is "influencers," including many who have no skin in the game and shallow takes, have seen an opportunity in this topic to make a few bucks by churning out populist clickbait. It's a discussion about business and licensing which has been perverted into a culture war. As usual all the nuance is lost and the loudest personalities have ended up dominating. /barf

[cbzoiav]

I'd view it more similarly to the whole Reddit fiasco.

There is a valid problem. The business has tried to solve that immediate problem without worrying about the knock on.

In this case blocking large funded competitors ripping off your work is valid. The way they've approached it has cut off a large number of valid use cases that have arguably driven adoption of RHEL in the first place.

In Reddits case for profit firms were hammering APIs and costing Reddit significant amounts. 3rd party apps also cut off ad revenue. A flat high fee cuts off those 3rd party apps entirely when your own product has significant deficiencies it upsets your most valuable users (contributors and mods).

In both cases there was potential for a more nuanced change that works for both sides.

[safety1st]

I don't think Red Hat's been quite as thoughtless as Reddit, but you have a good point. Personally I have a vested interest in FOSS, I'm a big proponent of it and I operate a business around it, consulting/integrating/extending etc.

From my view, Red Hat is a company which is doing something similar and as long as they comply with the GPL (which in fairness may be a bit of an open question with Red Hat now, but we'll see), then I don't really care what else they do, they have a business to run, and in the grand scheme they're still one of the good guys compared to companies with proprietary business models.

There is a lot of outcry among the "FOSS community" which frequently seem to be people that I don't relate to (and some don't really contribute to any FOSS projects or run any FOSS businesses, they just make content). This reminds me of the time that Canonical added an Amazon lens to Unity. It was in poor taste, there was some subset of the FOSS community which went apeshit over it. It took me all of twenty seconds to uninstall that lens and move on with my life and I continue to wish Canonical all the best in terms of making money in a GPL-compliant way. Businesses sometimes do things that are in poor taste but as long as they continue to contribute they are still part of the team as far as I'm concerned.