So he reckons that without locking out free downstream users, Red Hat would go tits up and the whole Linux ecosystem would fall into the hands of hackers and hobbyists? Fine by me.
I don't like that response at all. Jeff conflating developers and users does nothing to resolve the issues and differences in the RHEL clone community that led to this decision.
I'm going to say it: Jeff is using this issue to increase his social media footprint. I'm bored of his content and he's done NOTHING to help the community figure out a way forward. He's just saying some loud things over and over.
As long as they continue to follow the gpl which they are, and contribute back to upstream I do not see the issue. It is entirely within their right to charge for free as in freedom not free as in beer software. This is pretty much exactly what the gpl says.
That being said this could be the start of a slippery slope for red hat and Foss business models and will certainly be keeping an eye on it.
I feel the other thing missing from all this Discourse is, IBM made UNIX. If they want to act all proprietary, why don't they abandon Linux and return to their own operating system?
That's right, because of the enormous amount of free labor they get from the open source community.
Idk, on the one hand I could see the argument against organizations dodging the Red Hat fees by choosing free downstream, but then again, like, everything that RHEL does was always available? The reason you'd pay is for the support you'd get from them?
To be honest I never really understood why you'd specifically want something like CentOS over say, Debian - I mean, outside of I guess, .rpm packaging?
I've often seen set ups where Prod is RedHat because support, and Test and Dev environments are CentOS to avoid the fees on less important environments.