<story><title>I&apos;m Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieldk</author><text>Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors. However, a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community. Secondly, a substantial chunk of those users used CentOS because they wanted all the benefits of Red Hat EL without paying for it.&lt;p&gt;That pretty much sounds like &lt;i&gt;freeloading&lt;/i&gt; to me. Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code. As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it&amp;#x27;s fine.&lt;p&gt;Red Hat puts enormous amounts of money in the FLOSS ecosystem, I think it&amp;#x27;s completely fair for them to nudge customers with deep-enough pockets to pay for subscriptions. For other users, there are plenty of other options.&lt;p&gt;[1] For non-copyleft licenses, Red Hat are of course not obliged to provide source code.</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this sort of emotional, loose-facted &amp;quot;hot take&amp;quot; style response is real constructive.  I&amp;#x27;m unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on.  For the first time in well over a decade I&amp;#x27;m re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions).  I don&amp;#x27;t believe that Red Hat&amp;#x27;s leadership cares a whole lot about open source anymore.  If they do, they&amp;#x27;ve demonstrated that they are willing to harm open source in order to (short-term at least) increase sales. (congrats salespeople, you finally won and killed CentOS.  And congrats to all the people who used to tell the salesperson &amp;quot;I can run CentOS for free, why should I buy RHEL?&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;But that said, as far as I know, &lt;i&gt;one guy&lt;/i&gt; used the term &amp;quot;freeloaders&amp;quot; and the context wasn&amp;#x27;t clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person&amp;#x27;s opinion or the company&amp;#x27;s opinion.  I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community.  But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive.  Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don&amp;#x27;t agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the goal here?  Is it to polarize into good and evil sides?  Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the &amp;quot;other side&amp;quot; seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them?&lt;p&gt;I like a lot of OP&amp;#x27;s content, but I am a little worried that he&amp;#x27;s a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it&amp;#x27;s driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Pet_Ant</author><text>&amp;gt; That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL&amp;#x27;s value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform&amp;#x27;s dominance is contributing value.</text></comment>
<story><title>I&apos;m Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)</title><url>https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>danieldk</author><text>Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors. However, a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community. Secondly, a substantial chunk of those users used CentOS because they wanted all the benefits of Red Hat EL without paying for it.&lt;p&gt;That pretty much sounds like &lt;i&gt;freeloading&lt;/i&gt; to me. Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code. As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it&amp;#x27;s fine.&lt;p&gt;Red Hat puts enormous amounts of money in the FLOSS ecosystem, I think it&amp;#x27;s completely fair for them to nudge customers with deep-enough pockets to pay for subscriptions. For other users, there are plenty of other options.&lt;p&gt;[1] For non-copyleft licenses, Red Hat are of course not obliged to provide source code.</text></item><item><author>freedomben</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t think this sort of emotional, loose-facted &amp;quot;hot take&amp;quot; style response is real constructive.  I&amp;#x27;m unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on.  For the first time in well over a decade I&amp;#x27;m re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions).  I don&amp;#x27;t believe that Red Hat&amp;#x27;s leadership cares a whole lot about open source anymore.  If they do, they&amp;#x27;ve demonstrated that they are willing to harm open source in order to (short-term at least) increase sales. (congrats salespeople, you finally won and killed CentOS.  And congrats to all the people who used to tell the salesperson &amp;quot;I can run CentOS for free, why should I buy RHEL?&amp;quot;)&lt;p&gt;But that said, as far as I know, &lt;i&gt;one guy&lt;/i&gt; used the term &amp;quot;freeloaders&amp;quot; and the context wasn&amp;#x27;t clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person&amp;#x27;s opinion or the company&amp;#x27;s opinion.  I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community.  But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive.  Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don&amp;#x27;t agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious.&lt;p&gt;What&amp;#x27;s the goal here?  Is it to polarize into good and evil sides?  Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the &amp;quot;other side&amp;quot; seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them?&lt;p&gt;I like a lot of OP&amp;#x27;s content, but I am a little worried that he&amp;#x27;s a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it&amp;#x27;s driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vbezhenar</author><text>License situation is still unclear to me. GPL explicitly does not allow to forbid further redistribution. RedHat does that. I&amp;#x27;m not a lawyer, but from a layman PoV this seems sketchy.</text></comment>