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Comment by bonzini | Hacker News Reader

> somehow redhat isn't entitled to give back to Linux

So it's not enough to employ more than 1000 people working on upstream/Fedora/CentOS Stream, have a strict upstream first policy for features that go into RHEL and their other products, donate to a bunch of foundations and sponsor conferences, maintain the main repository of firmware updates for Linux, be consistently in the top three contributors to Linux, open source pretty much all the closed source code that they get from acquisitions, distribute source also when not required by the license, give away two distributions for free, and possibly more things I don't remember?

Good to know, at least they tried.

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No. No it isn't.

If you know the history, if you know the license, then you know the philosophy that you're taking from. I don't think they're evil, but the people who did the early work getting this started did so with one level of expectation, and this is a different one. You get no love, Red Hat.

> So it's not enough ...

Not when you stepped in the open source and GPL arena, no. There are some pretty heavy expectations considering most of us grew up in a world where every distro was freely available everywhere, including the original Red Hat before they went the RHEL route. That's the entire reason CentOS came to be. And here we are again.

I say we... I use Arch Linux and gave up on this over a decade ago.

Give me a break.

I have been in the "GPL arena" for almost 30 years (1996). When I started using free software I didn't even have Internet access at home and had to visit relatives one hour away to download it and send emails. I used SRPMs from a Red Hat Linux CD to study source code because it was not very handy to download it with a 33.6k modem.

So you should be well aware of community expectations. And so should Red Hat.

Community expectations aren't necessarily correct and probably won't help paying the salary of thousands of engineers.

Sorry, but the people who started this in no way were prioritizing anyone's salary. They had a vision of freedom, and THAT VISION -- more than "someone trying to do a company" -- is what got the best parts of this software going. One company that can't make the numbers work ain't my problem.

And you're wrong. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

"Distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds for development". Paying salaries is a way to fund developers. Ergo, distributing free software is an opportunity to raise funds to pay the salaries of free software developers.

I said prioritizing, I didn't say anything like "didn't consider at all"

I didn't say they were correct. I said be aware of them.

It would make sense if they started out building a proprietary os (for which, btw, the count of people you mentioned is not enough, Microsoft employs vastly more people). If they contribute to open source projects and then cry for compensation, it makes no sense. They can expect compensation for services sure, but not for their open source contribution code. Those are the rules they are playing by. Not to mention that there’s vastly many more contributors who aren’t getting compensated.

They established all that when they had other priorities. Clearly they've changed their mind about a thing or two, so you can expect a lot of that to wash away, slowly.

Ok, call me back when it does.

Obviously by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

It's like when they bought CentOS - some people started making plans, fearing they would discontinue it. Others went "call me back when it happens". Then it happened.

It's been 9 years. A few tempests in a teapot later you still have RHEL rebuilds (according to TFA nothing is changing in that respect), they are more timely than CentOS ever was before the acquisition, and you also got Fedora ELN CentOS Stream as a pathway towards contributing to RHEL. So yeah, I rest my case: call me back when it happens.

Bill Cosby was a real funny dude—and also a serial rapist.

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