Final thoughts on the Red Hat thing: every supporter of the Red Hat move told me that "it's normal to want to prevent people from stealing the hard work and making a clone of it".
If you think grabbing the code and reusing it is "stealing", you don't understand FOSS.
No matter what RH clones contribute, or if they're worth it. That's not the point. The point is, RH builds their stuff using the GPL, and they have to redistribute using the GPL.
Making access to a specific part of that code harder on purpose goes against the principles of Free Software.
Period. Money doesn't factor into this, value, contribution, they don't matter. FOSS is free to use, whether you contribute or not. FOSS is for everyone, "freeloaders", developers, anyone. That's the very point.
Yes, the code is still technically available with a bit more work in Stream's repos. That's not the issue. The "people are stealing from us" talk is the issue.
When a company that works in FOSS, and depends on it to operate, calls people using their GPL rights "freeloaders", you know they've lost the plot.
That's the problem. The value, the contribution, the development, the clone or not, the business: it DOESN'T MATTER.
@thelinuxEXP And Mike McGrath's justification is something of ridiculous and insubstantial... and even if he has been and is with Fedora and Red Hat for such a long time - in the end he has sold his soul to the masters of IBM and betrayed the ideals of Open Source.
I was a Red Hat fanboy for more than 2 decades, but this betrayal to the community now leaves me with only more anger in the end. I want nothing more to do with this company and their products.
I found this interview a useful companion to the blog posts:
https://podcast.asknoahshow.com/343
Mike asserts IBM had nothing to do with the decision. He says
1) RH wants to prevent people from selling the #RedHat promise of compatibility and long term support without paying into that ecosystem,
2) the CentOS repo is not part of their GPL compliance plan,
3) source remains available to the community in CentOS Stream + they will continue to upstream patches.
Mike McGrath joins the Ask Noah Show to discuss the changes Red Hat is making in how they make their source code available.
Nick @ The Linux Experiment
Peter Bronez