[cratermoon]

By picking his own definition of what open source means, is the author really arguing for paying people to work on open source? Or is his argument more one of being in favor allowing a bunch of things that happen to pay people to work on them be counted as "open source"?

For example, if RHEL still counts as open source, then Red Hat's programmers are paid open source developers, but if RHEL is now proprietary, then there are fewer people being paid to work on open source.

[cipherboy]

Even with the changes to RHEL licensing, Red Hat developers are still encouraged to upstream changes before landing them in Fedora (and in turn, before landing them in CentOS stream and ultimately RHEL). Nearly every developer at Red Hat working on RHEL will do work in the public, on OSI-licensed packages upstream, before landing changes in RHEL.

The change to RHEL licenses is not around source availability of the packages themselves, that has not and cannot change by Red Hat's hand. And it is a risk to Red Hat's business to heavily (internally) diverge packages from upstream as it makes future updates harder.

Is it a good move? Many think not. But that doesn't change the vast amount of upstream (OSI-licensed) work that Red Hat directly or indirectly sponsors, past RHEL into their JBoss and OpenShift orgs as well.

[cratermoon]

This is mostly irrelevant to my question. I wasn't speculating about RHEL specifically, but about source available under non-OSI, non-FSF licenses generally.

If what counts as "open source" can be anything the author says counts, there are potentially lots of projects not previously considered open source, and the developers paid to work on them as "paid open source" developers.

[cipherboy]

I don't see how it is irrelevant: you ask if they still count, and the answer is yes, because they contribute rather heavily to OSI-approved code, so they'd count regardless.

The real question is, would we consider MongoDB or my former employer, HashiCorp's products, presently open source projects?

In the latter's case, the answer from the community at large has been to fork (edit: not always successfully), giving a fairly good indication as to the answer...

(Whether this is as a result of the act of relicensing the code base or as a result of the license choice probably cannot be fully understood without parallel universes... I'm sure someone would complain and potentially fork if they had relicensed, e.g., from MPLv2 to AGPLv3--another OSI license, but a more restrictive one--though probably nobody would care enough to fork if they had suggested e.g., MIT instead, because the MIT is more permissive.)

However, developer categorization into OSI/non-OSI buckets is rather meaningless.

What we've by and large found is that Linux businesses (regardless of license model, even fully proprietary) can usually find funding, due to the large number of companies willing to pay for support & contract development on it. Many more businesses have been successful here: vendors like RH, Canonical, SUSE, Oracle, and even Microsoft and AWS, but also many smaller vendors & independent developers who make smaller livings and profits.

What's been harder has been the non-Linux Open Source/Free Software business model.

And that's what needs to be solved, one way or another. Perhaps that's committing up front to a license (if you want to use the BUSL, so be it, but don't expect the community to be happy if you do so after your project becomes successful).

But more likely, its by raising awareness and making sure people at the top of the organization (board members, shareholders) understand the value of OSI licenses and how their companies can benefit from it. And on the flip side, how changing the terms of contracts afterwards can cause problems. :-)

[richardfontana]

There were no changes to RHEL licensing whatsoever.

[cipherboy]

I agree.

I think what OP is talking about is change in the (for rebuilders) source distribution availability, e.g., https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s... -- but as a later blog post points out (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour...), the source is still available in a different location, though perhaps at a slightly different point in the release cycle: forward looking to RHEL next.

My response is in that context, that even if one were to consider the removal of those source locations somehow a "license change" (and I agree with you, it is not), nearly everyone working on RHEL would still be an OSI developer, for reasons pointed out by Mike.

Which is a very good thing, and as a former Red Hatter, thank you for helping to keep that possible Richard!