• dartanjinn@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I always thought the Red Hat business model was based around service and support with the OS being a secondary product which is why the free forks existed. When did the OS become the product?

    • Baron Von J@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      When did the OS become the product?

      When other companies made a business out of building a clone distro from the source RPMs with trademarks removed.and selling support contracts for it. Oracle being the absolute worst about it. Fuck Oracle.

      • Raphael@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When other companies made a business out of building a clone distro from the source

        This has a name… someone help… tip of my tongue… aaaaah… FREE SOFTWARE?

        Did Red Hat invent linux? Did Red Hat write bash?

        • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
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          1 year ago

          No, but Red Hat created the following major projects:

          • Wayland
          • PipeWire
          • PulseAudio
          • systemd
          • FreeIPA
          • Keycloak
          • OpenStack
          • NetworkManager
          • Ceph

          They’re also major contributors of the following projects:

          • Xorg
          • GNOME
          • LibreOffice
          • radeon
          • Linux kernel

          If you use Linux, you directly use or benefit from Red Hat contributions. As simple as that.

            • Fedora@lemmy.haigner.me
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              1 year ago

              This is an ethical problem. You can rebrand RHEL as Oracle Linux, copy Red Hat’s business model, and dump the work on Red Hat, but should you do that? Nobody at Oracle stopped to think about that question. According to the software license, sure. But is it ethical to exploit the good will of foss to these extremes? I would personally say no, especially considering Red Hat reinvests money into foss. Money now in the pockets of Oracle.

              Imagine you develop a foss and license the software under MIT like everybody else does. Now a company roams around and makes your foss a core part of their business after a massive success. Perhaps they’re the next FAANG company, who knows. You generated billions of dollars in revenue for that company, and never saw any of that. You regret your careless licensing decision, yeah. But at the end of the day, you will feel exploited.