Microaggressive Licensing [CL66]

February 14, 2024

Microaggressive Licensing

Episode: 66
Published: 7/11/2023

Red Hat Open Source Ex-Pat Causes Big Spat

• Several prominent open-source people like Jeff Geerling have roundly denounced Red Hat��s latest licensing strategy (https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/im-done-red-hat-enterprise-linux)

• The kernel was developed and is still maintained by Linus Torvalds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)

• GPLv2 license, which requires that derivative products made available to the public must also make their source code freely available on request (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePostedPublic)

• JBoss, CoreOS, Gluster, and StackRox all have their source code freely available (https://tools.jboss.org/getinvolved/)

• IBM spent $34B to acquire Red Hat (https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-landmark-acquisition-red-hat-34-billion-defines-open-hybrid-cloud-future)

• Seriously, from 2012 to 2022, IBM had four, FOUR quarters of growth (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IBM/ibm/gross-profit)

• Revenue decreased every year from 2011 to 2020 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/265003/ibms-revenue-since-1999/)

• Red Hat conducted layoffs of about 4% of their workforce (https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/red_hat_layoffs_union/)

• Community Enterprise Operating System Linux, commonly known as CentOS was a distribution of Linux based on the upstream of RHEL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS)

• June of 2023 they made the decision to remove the public GitLab repos hosting the RHEL source code (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream?channel=/en/blog/channel/red-hat-enterprise-linux)

• Mark McGrath, published a follow up blog post attempting to justify the change (https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes?channel=/en/blog/channel/red-hat-enterprise-linux)

source

centos 7