[freedomben]

Right off the bat there's a pretty serious error:

> There’s been a lot of discussion about licensing in the news, with Red Hat and now Hashicorp notably adjusting their licensing models to be more “business friendly,” and Codecov (proudly, and mistakenly) pronouncing they are now “open source.”

Red Hat has not adjusted any of their "licensing models." They've simply stopped publishing the RHEL sources publicly. They're still published and fully available to paying customers, who are the only ones they are legally[1] required to distribute them to. None of the licenses (GPL, MIT, etc) have any requirements to publicly distribute code.

[1]: there is some dispute over whether the customer agreement violates the GPL in spirit or letter, but that's a different question. It's not a licensing thing, it's a business agreement/contract that is completely separate from the licenses. The licenses don't require you to do business with people you don't want to do business with, and they don't require you to give away your product for free.

[tomcam]

Not arguing. But in practice there’s some number of large orgs hostile to GPL (which strikes me as bass-ackwards, but there you have it).

[freedomben]

Indeed, I don't understand it, especially when it's a back-end service they're running, not even something they are modifying and reselling. The GPL is completely safe for that.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's FUD. Microsoft in particular and proprietary software companies in general have long been scaremongering about the alleged dangers of using GPL code as a marketing tactic, and some people believe them.

[BeryJu]

That is a very good point, I'll fix that in a bit