Wasn’t Red Hat just complaining that Alma and Rocky didn’t add value because they weren’t submitting fixes upstream?
— “we don’t like people ripping off our work without any added value”
— “Here, let me push this to your staging environment, totally breaking your quality process”
— “No”
— “Well, what the hell do you want broo?”
I don’t think they have ever hidden the fact this is about money. I don’t like the fact this is about money, but the fact that others were cloning and selling their efforts for a cheaper price is awful.
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they are not breaking any law. This is totally allowed. You can use FOSS to create a commercial product.
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they are major contributors to the Linux space. And they’ll keep contributing.
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It’s their effort, they created a business around it, and it cycles back to push Linux forward.
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this isn’t even going to affect average users. This is going to take money from companies that probably have the money to pay. For other companies, there are other distributions available.
Its funny how podcasters and commenters seem to have taken Redhat’s spin about “contributing value to the community” seriously, while to the rest of us the whole thing was obviously only about money (same as all the follow-ups from other parties… I would say “including Alma” but that would probably deserve its separate debate).
Red Hat saying that argument in-particular shows they’ve pivoted their philosophy significantly, it’s a seemingly subtle change but is huge - presumably due to the IBM acquisition, but maybe due to the pressures in the market right now.
It’s the classic argument against FOSS, which Red Hat themselves have argued against for decades and as an organisation proved that you can build a viable business on the back of FOSS whilst also contributing to it, and that there was indirect value in having others use your work. Only time will tell, but the stage is set for Red Hat to cultivate a different relationship with FOSS and move more into proprietary code.