Look, don't act like RHEL is the only distro in existence. There's also Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, and tons of other distros.
Even for boring old enterprise stuff there's Ubuntu LTS.
Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.
It's an amazing idea - copying RH meant no work had to be put into actually supporting the Linux community and keeping all the profits. Massive margins were made.
It's just that the angry HNers think that RH should continue to just give things away to repackagers for free and let them profiteer off their work.
The only people making serious money that I can see are RH themselves, maybe Google if you want to count Android. They're earning $3.4B a year in revenue, compared to $140M for Canonical. Everyone else is scrounging around between the couch cushions for spare change by comparison.
RH deserves kudos for being the biggest corporate OSS contributor (by far), but I'm just not buying this argument at poor RH can't sustain themselves against freeloading competitors when they seem to be the only ones making serious money.
RedHat's current business model is selling (via copying) the work of millions of other people, then refusing to adhere to the license terms they used to copy all of that work.
Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors just the same - the "classic" and accepted FOSS monetization way was to provide paid support with SLAs for customers. This work cannot be copied by anyone else, just the business model - but that's ordinary business competition.
Which FOSS contributors? The repackagers? Who are free to repackage Ubuntu, Debian, etc.?
The reason is pretty simple: when a company makes a profit from using an open-source package, it should be forced to contribute its improvements back to the community in turn.
The best example of why that's needed is Apple.
My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. I'd much rather an ecosystem of enterprise Linux, such as Ubuntu and SUSE rather than a pile of free Red Hat clones.
Yes, RH (and others) are doing pretty significant work in the open-source space. I'm not denying that. But without the previous work that all the other non-Big Money-funded people did, RH, SuSE, Oracle MySQL and others wouldn't even be in business.
> My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well.
Agreed on that one. Open Source in general lacks decent funding mechanisms.
All this started with a simple thing “user freedom” or “end user freedom” if you prefer.
It’s not about community or upstream, neither efficient or bug free software, rather that we as users are not helpless with some piece of code. We can inspect it, learn modify and share it, this also means we can go to anybody else for help.
None of that cares about upstream.
But that indeed includes that if I’m a customer of some company that provides me software, and its under a free software license, and they start to treat me badly, i can go and pay somebody else to help me with it