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by mrweasel 1080 days ago
> essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".

I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro.

Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream.

On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats move, and I'm kinda on their side. Why is it that we're unhappy with Red Hat wanting to be paid for their work. You're getting all the open source benefits, if you don't like RHEL, or Red Hat that's fine, you can still benefit from their work, but you might want to pick a different distribution.

And I can see the point, people are upset that Red Hat would like to get pay and yet they expect to be able to profit from a SaaS platform they build on CentOS or Rocky Linux. For some unknown reason, Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.

[1] https://coder.show/525

2 comments

I've started to see 2023 as the Year of Freeloader Ousting, it seems to be an overarching trend between all the things going on in tech currently.
> I've started to see 2023 as the Year of Freeloader Ousting

I'm ... oddly actually not opposed.

Things being "free" has distorted a lot of markets and ossified them--even in open source (See: GitHub, for example).

If things actually cost something, people can get paid to do them. In addition, things that cost real money don't have the same pressure to go for giant network effects in the hopes to get a lock-in monopoly. It also sidesteps the advertising pathologies.

I don't see any of these things as bad.

> Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.

no, this is not the issue. The issue is that there is a megacorporation behind Red Hat which claimed they wouldn't affect any RH decisions and RH would be the good ol' Red Hat we always knew. And they have shown this to be false.

As you said it yourself, Red Hat has a legacy of contributing to open source and this recent move to somehow paywall access to the updated git repo is literally going against their own legacy.

As I see it, very little is actually moving "behind a paywall" (not trying be demening, just lacking a better term). Is systemd moving behind a paywall, no. Neither is Podman, Ansible, kernel patches, X11 patches and pretty much everything. It will all be available in CentOS stream and Fedora or upstreamed... But that's not what people want, they want RHEL, they just don't want the cost. Red Hats contributions was never about what went into RHEL, it is about what they upstream and maintain for the benefit of all distributions, which is a lot more than many believe.

The only thing you cannot get, without a subscription, is the source RPMs and the bit of tooling they need to build RHEL for their customers.

For what I've been hearing, and reading, this is a Red Hat decision, not an IBM decision. If we trust that or not, well... Still I'm not seeing how their contribution to open source isn't intact.