Red Hat and the Clone Wars
Red Hat and the Clone Wars
It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s an…
cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/91676
It’s been an exciting week for people who care about Linux distributions, FOSS licensing, FOSS distribution, FOSS business models, and the future of open source in general. Red Hat’s an…
You are not entitled to a developer's works. If they choose to have you pay for the binaries and include the source with full rights preserved for what you can do with that source, they are providing FLOSS. RHEL after this is still doing better work for the Linux / Libre software space than Ubuntu is by trying to push for vendor lock via snaps in my mind.
While I agree that nobody is entitled to the works of others, I find it both disingenuous and against the spirit of FOSS for Red Hat to lock its code behind a paywall just because it can still use the GPL due to some somewhat sneaky legal maneuvering so it can still call it "open source" by a very narrow technicality. At this point, why even bother? It's all just so slimy.
From a users' perspective, you still have full rights to review, modify, and even redistribute the code. Though, exercising the last one is where RH limits people to the future code and software to its customer. A positive right to the developer's future work is something that would require some kind of funding mechanism, but for the purpose of being Libre/Opensource it was something never guaranteed anyway.