Red Hat’s Mike McGrath (VP of Core Platforms Engineering) responds to the backlash from closing RHEL public source code access
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Hobestly, I can respect that. They seem to be fairly open about the motivations of that decision and who it’s targeted it without devolving into vague fluffy corporate speech too much. You can sense the author was a bit pissed by the reactions.
And I do agree that many of the reactions to the news seemed overblown and I think the actions make sense from their point of view without being super shady, even if it still has some negative repercussions for the open source world as well.I agree as well. People are well within their rights to refrain from using current/future products completely and voice their frustration, but there’s also this undercurrent of people who want to be as vitriolic as possible and try to twist the knife on the way out of the door. It reeks of insecurity and an inability to regulate their emotions.
There’s a kind of similar undercurrent/echo chamber in certain areas of the fediverse around Reddit as well, and I say this is a person who was actively using teddit pre-APIgate and has drastically reduced my reddit-browsing time as of late. Changing all of your comments to expletives about the current CEO is not as revolutionary or well-received as most people think it is
try to twist the knife on the way out of the door
That’s because they stab us in the chests while smiling about it. People are fed up and trying to lash out - it’s hard to injure faceless orgs otherwise.
Corporations like IBM have been twisting the knife for years and according to you, it’s only a problem when people do it…
Due to my lack of strict knowledge, I take it that there is a difference of opinion on whether RedHat violates the GPL in this case, and also that the outcome of the lawsuit and the market reaction is necessary in this regard.
In any case, I hope that all the engineers who contribute to the daily evolution of RHEL at RedHat are well compensated and that more of them will be happy in the future.I hope that all the engineers who contribute to the daily evolution of RHEL at RedHat are well compensated and that more of them will be happy in the future.
Redhat spends more money on salesmen than it spends on engineers, by far, like 2/1.
Due to my lack of strict knowledge, I take it that there is a difference of opinion on whether RedHat violates the GPL in this case
I don’t think there is a difference of opinion? RedHat only offering source code to paying customers (and devs) is completely legal and in line with the GPL license. But maybe there’s something more to it that I missed.
I believe the grey area is whether they can cancel people’s subscriptions for redistributing the source code.
We have to pay the people to do that work — those passionate contributors grinding through those long hours and nights who believe in open source values.
This all sounds a little too melodramatic for me to get behind. It’s nice that they want to pay people for their work, but to imply that the only way to do it is their way seems to me to be the disingenuous side of the argument. A lot of free software organizations get by just fine on donations.
Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable.
The narrative that repackaging adds “no value” is a disingeuous one, as well.
I think his post explain but does not justify de decision. This suddenly changes os RedHat are kind of unnerving.
