Some mix of wrong and right, the exact proportions of which I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.

  • Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.spaceEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I can’t find a lot in here to disagree with. Of course I appreciate Red Hat for all the free software they’ve developed, funded, and profited from over the past few decades. I use GNOME on Wayland, Systemd, Pipewire, libvirt, virt-manager, and plenty of other software, I’m sure.

    A grsecurity enabled kernel is “just” their patchset and any version is only available to their customers, no developer program or anything, there’s no open upstream they provide with their patches or anything.

    Red Hat is doing something positive for the community they don’t need to do, which is nice. Personally, I would prefer fewer people wrote this off as a requirement or something “expected” without understanding how the GPL works.

    The question is rather what’s the reason to actually redistribute recompiled code when most of it is available in their own funded upstream?

    You should be able to share software you find useful with your neighbor; preventing people from doing so is enforcing antisocial behavior. Redistribution is what makes free software work. Whether most of it is available somewhere else or not, that’s something customers have the right to do.

    While it would be nice, in this scenario, if Red Hat could say, “you can’t redistribute this; you need to make significant changes,” it just wouldn’t be free software if they could say that. For the same reason, I don’t think the Anti-Capitalist Software License is good (think how much worse things would be if the kernel was licensed under that!). If the Linux kernel was licensed under a non-copyleft license, I’m sure Red Hat would have adopted an “open core” model. Or they would do what Codeweavers does with CrossOver.

    Profiting from free software is hard. Sourcehut isn’t profitable yet, but they’re close to breaking even (and they don’t even require you to pay!). But if we remove any of the freedoms the GPL provides, we end up in a situation where the software controls the user, and the developer controls the software, so the developer controls the user. Every freedom is necessary, because without them, it will become proprietary software the user can’t control.

    Their first release of Red Hat Linux was in 1994, when the kernel was about three years old and I guess by most people considered a toy rather than an alternative to UNIX. I’d wager that without them, the Linux ecosystem today would look much different, if more than a niche at all.

    More than likely, FreeBSD would have taken GNU/Linux’s place, assuming the GNU/HURD people couldn’t manage to organize themselves by that time. The legal problems with FreeBSD would be resolved around that time. Novell was another commercial free software contributor at the time, though, so perhaps they would have been responsible for more programs if not Red Hat. I still use Evolution today. But yes, it’s impossible to deny the positive impact Red Hat had in its formative years and over time. I think it’s disingenuous or ignorant to pretend otherwise.

    At the same time, it’s thanks to Linus that Red Hat was able to be significant. If it was released under the original anti-commercial license, things would be far different again.

    Personally, I would still sooner deal with Red Hat than Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Google, or any other conglomerate…

    • Laser@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      You should be able to share software you find useful with your neighbor; preventing people from doing so is enforcing antisocial behavior. Redistribution is what makes free software work. Whether most of it is available somewhere else or not, that’s something customers have the right to do.

      This is a bit of a strawman in my opinion. I’m sure Red Hat won’t care if you, as a customer, use their sources, rebuild them and “share it with your neighbor”. They won’t terminate an account over that, at least I’d be very surprised if they did. I don’t consider “downloading all sources, removing any branding, rebuilding, offering for free and selling commercial support” the same though, but there’s no mechanism in the GPL to differentiate between those.

      Redistribution is what makes free software work. Whether most of it is available somewhere else or not, that’s something customers have the right to do.

      Agreed, and nobody is denying them this right. However, at the same time, Red Hat has the right to terminate the accounts with customers if they decide that the business relationship costs them more money than it makes them. The right to choose who to have business with is not stronger or weaker than the GPL.

      At the same time, it’s thanks to Linus that Red Hat was able to be significant. If it was released under the original anti-commercial license, things would be far different again.

      Yes, I did not want to imply that it was all Red Hat that mattered. I just wanted to go against what some people imply, that Red Hat is just freeloading on Open Source and now want to restrict this right to others. E.g. in a video in another thread, Jeff Geerling says something along the lines “Red Hat didn’t build the Linux kernel, nor do they own it” which I think is disingenuous: they never claimed they own the Linux kernel, and they’re the second largest contributor to it after Intel, and relevant portion of Intel’s contributions are drivers specific to their own hardware and as such, only usable in their ecosystem. Plus the kernel is still available in CentOS Stream, which goes above and beyond GPL requirements.

      I can see people being upset losing free enterprise-grade distributions (though personally in my limited experience could find nothing to like about it), but at the same time, most of the complainers weren’t actually covered by the GPL at all because Red Hat did not supply them with the binaries anyways.