this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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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?
This is beginning to sound like they're calling open source piracy.
"Noooo, you can't copy it. That's not fair."
Actually, they're beginning to sound a lot like Microsoft. It's their job to complain about FOSS but still contribute.
Hm. Perhaps Red Hat is trying to take Microsoft's place. In that case...
"Simply ignoring licenses, without acknowledging their terms and dismissing open source practices while still contributing to the FOSS community, represents a threat to closed source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to closed source..."
Yo, Microsoft. Don't worry about the Activision acquisition. You have new competition to acquire.
Sarcasm aside, this is what we should have expected once they were acquired by IBM. You know, that company which has only ever behaved in an ethical manner for the last... century? Some fun history there. People should read up about it. Especially the '30s and '40s. And then jump to the '80s and '90s where they seem to still be stuck because they're kind of pulling a "pirates of Silicon Valley" thing here.
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/
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 GPL doesn't "encourage" redistribution. It requires it.