When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it.
So he’s saying that Red Hat intends to abide by licenses such as the GNU GPL, and yet…
Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source…
Red Hat is claiming that redistribution (which is explicitly allowed and encouraged by the GPL) is a threat to open source. They are also threatening to penalize customers who do exercise the rights granted to them by the licenses that Red Hat claims that they will “abide by”.
According to Red Hat the GNU GPL is a threat to open source. And they think this won’t make people angry?
This is beginning to sound like they’re calling open source piracy.
No, they’re pointing to things in the past like what Amazon was doing to Elastic, MongoDB, Redis, and others where they (legaly) took the others companies code and made it available in a very simple way an AWS for free so that people would buy other services from AWS instead of paying Elastic and the others - who do do the development job - for hosting the databases. This destroyed their business model so they had to change their licenses from Open Source licenses to closed source licenses. So in this case Red Hat is in the same boat as Elastic and they are right that this is a threat to open source companies everywhere.
So, is this something they could have solved using a different licensing strategy? Seems like they should have seen this as a possibility before banking their business strategy off of it.
Normally you start a open source project to scratch your own itch and to share it with other enthusiasts. Only once you decide to make it a business it’s kind of difficult to keep it Open Source and to make money, therefor they make it closed source and everyone is mad like this time with Red Hat.
The thing is RH shouldn’t even claim ownership of RHEL. Their business is support. The more RHEL that’s out there, the more someone is likely to pay for a support incident.
The moment they started thinking they own a particular Linux package, even one they assembled, they became evil.
Currently RedHat is publishing the sources of the components together with the build scripts, in form of source RPMs. The build scripts mostly are property of RedHat - GPL conditions are fulfilled if they provide you with the sources and changes they made to the sources if you request them. They don’t have to provide build scripts, they don’t have to provide sources unless you request them.
The phrase “free software” (or “FOSS,” “libre,” or “FLOSS”) doesn’t appear once in this article.
That irritates me. We’re talking about the GPL, and the right to look at source code is only one of the freedoms that the GPL protects. The right to redistribute is also key.
So he’s saying that Red Hat intends to abide by licenses such as the GNU GPL, and yet…
Red Hat is claiming that redistribution (which is explicitly allowed and encouraged by the GPL) is a threat to open source. They are also threatening to penalize customers who do exercise the rights granted to them by the licenses that Red Hat claims that they will “abide by”.
According to Red Hat the GNU GPL is a threat to open source. And they think this won’t make people angry?
deleted by creator
No, they’re pointing to things in the past like what Amazon was doing to Elastic, MongoDB, Redis, and others where they (legaly) took the others companies code and made it available in a very simple way an AWS for free so that people would buy other services from AWS instead of paying Elastic and the others - who do do the development job - for hosting the databases. This destroyed their business model so they had to change their licenses from Open Source licenses to closed source licenses. So in this case Red Hat is in the same boat as Elastic and they are right that this is a threat to open source companies everywhere.
edit: Some more background info about this problem: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-source-abuse/
Should be obvious, but I will point it out anyway… “Open source” is a higher priority than “open source companies”.
So, is this something they could have solved using a different licensing strategy? Seems like they should have seen this as a possibility before banking their business strategy off of it.
Normally you start a open source project to scratch your own itch and to share it with other enthusiasts. Only once you decide to make it a business it’s kind of difficult to keep it Open Source and to make money, therefor they make it closed source and everyone is mad like this time with Red Hat.
The thing is RH shouldn’t even claim ownership of RHEL. Their business is support. The more RHEL that’s out there, the more someone is likely to pay for a support incident.
The moment they started thinking they own a particular Linux package, even one they assembled, they became evil.
In fairness, IBM has been evil since long before they thought they owned RHEL.
part of the problem is that RHEL is so damn solid that most companies can use it without any support. that is why centOS was so popular
The GPL doesn’t “encourage” redistribution. It requires it.
If you’re distributing software, yes. I used “encouraged” there to include end users, who are encouraged to share software with others.
Currently RedHat is publishing the sources of the components together with the build scripts, in form of source RPMs. The build scripts mostly are property of RedHat - GPL conditions are fulfilled if they provide you with the sources and changes they made to the sources if you request them. They don’t have to provide build scripts, they don’t have to provide sources unless you request them.
The phrase “free software” (or “FOSS,” “libre,” or “FLOSS”) doesn’t appear once in this article.
That irritates me. We’re talking about the GPL, and the right to look at source code is only one of the freedoms that the GPL protects. The right to redistribute is also key.