> Almost every major open-source project is actively contributed to by Red Hat, or has been at one point.
That's nice... but Redhat's entire business is also built on the open source software contributed by tens of thousands of others, much of it licensed to them under copyleft terms like the GPL. Yes, RedHat absolutely did contribute immensely to that ecosystem, but once they (or corporate-daddy IBM) decided to take a big fat stinky dump in the collective sandbox and stopped sharing their toys, the rest of us are kinda allowed to be pissed at them, no?
"We will give you the SRPM because we legally have to, but if you actually exercise any of the rights afforded to you by the GPL that software was licensed to us under we will immediately terminate you as a customer" *may* (a court will ultimately decide) fit into some legal loophole that exists in the void between contract vs. copyright law, but it certainly does violate the spirit of term#6 of the GPL, i.e. "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein".
RedHat pulled what is commonly known as a "dick-move". Ef them and the horse they rode in on.
> RedHat pulled what is commonly known as a "dick-move"
I'm sorry, but isn't that EXACTLY what CIQ has been doing with Rocky Linux. Taking RHEL, rebranding it and then undercutting Red Hat on support contracts? Sure, it was always completely legal and even to some extend supported by Red Hat, but the support contracts is probably what drove Red Hat to make this move. What the hell would Rocky Linux even do if they where successful enough and Red Hat went out of business?
Just replace Rocky and Alma with Oracle in any of these complaints and all of the sudden people starts having less sympati.
If people are so upset, why didn't they migrate to something like Debian or SuSE when CentOS got axed? I really don't see why people want to stick with a RHEL clone when they're are so upset with the company behind most of the work.
> If people are so upset, why didn't they migrate to something like Debian or SuSE when CentOS got axed?
Many people did. The remainder were too tied up in the RHEL ecosystem (including CentOS) to make the move, but red hat's recent shitcanery will push many more away.
As far as I can see Fedora and Stream still exist. You're basically talking about ~6 months of stable branch work that Red Hat would like to keep confined to their paid product.
> You're basically talking about ~6 months of stable branch work that Red Hat would like to keep confined to their paid product.
Sure. The GPL doesn't have a carve out for "but we'd really like to not be open source for a little while". (And if you threaten your customers for actually exercising their rights, I struggle to believe that you're complying with the license.)
> RedHat pulled what is commonly known as a "dick-move". Ef them and the horse they rode in on.
To be fair, nobody forced you to use RHEL. Nor is RHEL a prerequisite to using the open source software that RHEL depends on.
> That's nice... but Redhat's entire business is also built on the open source software contributed by tens of thousands of others... "We will give you the SRPM because we legally have to, but if you actually exercise any of the rights afforded to you by the GPL that software was licensed to us under we will immediately terminate you as a customer"
I'm sorry but your reasoning doesn't make much sense. We all should have the right to cease to do business with anyone for any reason, whether it's a good reason or not. I don't think that is a right that we should be so quick to abolish.
Your rights to the source are not being infringed. Yet you want to force RedHat to do business with you on your terms, and in so doing deny them their right to cease to do business with you for any reason.
How does their right to cease to do business affect your ability to distribute/modify the source? It does not, not any more than a pizza shop's refusal to continue to do business with you affect your ability to take home and consume a pizza you bought.
If, by analogy, buying one pizza gives you a perpetual and unconditional right to demand that you be served another pizza, I don't see how such a line of reasoning could be implied as a violation of your rights rather than theirs. Put another way, your rights to the source doesn't translate into a right to perpetual service.
>Furthermore, Red Hat is the top commercial contributor to the Linux kernel
This is a little tricky to define. By line count or commit count, it usually isn't, however the "top" contributors by those metrics are often hardware vendors committing large quantities of auto-generated hardware definitions in the form of header files, such as the AMDGPU driver. Red Hat also employs a lot of subsystem maintainers, who don't contribute much code themselves, but whose work is still important.
So there's no perfect way to decide who is "top", exactly. I think top 3 would be fairly uncontroversial.
Furthermore, Red Hat is the top commercial contributor to the Linux kernel, and contributes more to the Linux kernel than SUSE and Canonical combined.