Mastodawn

Gray (broken account)

RedHat, Canonoical, and Valve are net positives to FOSS and essential to the pursuit of open technology.

All of these companies contain aspects I dislike. Valve is a digital market monopoly. Redhat has extreme profit incentives and poor communication skills. Ubuntu is leaning towards proprietary back-ends and limiting user choice in some projects (snaps).

Yet, these companies fund developers and enable them to work improving #FOSS projects. These developers would not have been able to contribute the same amount of time into FOSS if they were doing it for free. Developers need to afford food and rent. A significant portion of #Linux development is bankrolled by these these titans of open technology.

It is essential to understand the source of controversy during a moment of drama, and direct steady and well thought criticism at the corporate structure responsible for policy decisions, not than the individual developers with minimal or no policy influence.

1. I will meme #RedHat for them shooting themselves in the foot and alienating the Linux community, but I am grateful to the RedHat devs who have dedicated time and effort improving Linux and #Fedora. Their contributions are so significant and voluminous, It is difficult to quantify the sheer amount of work they have contributed upstream.

2. I won't use #Ubuntu due to differences of opinion, but I still respect the time and creative energy #Canonical has spent improving the UI/UX of Debian and making Linux accessible to a larger population. Ubuntu is not my cup of tea, but it's a cup of tea that can reach people that have never tried tea before. Ubuntu is certainly a better cup of tea than the raw sewage of a Microsoft or Google operating system.

3. I am hesitant of #Valve because I am wary of being dependent on a monopoly for media ownership, but their open source and open hardware contributions have ushered in an era of Linux Gaming that was previously non-existent. They have demonstrated sound ethics in most of their policy choices, so I invest a significant degree of trust and gratitude in them, even though I remain skeptical of their digital asset monopoly.

It is disingenuous to label RedHat or Canonical as evil. Neither company is anywhere close to the dystopian nature of Microsoft or Google.

It's a matter of when, not if, companies will make poor decisions. At the scale of these entities, problematic decisions are bound to occur more frequently as policy decisions become disconnected from their impact on the community.

Lately, both RedHat and Canonical have made unwise policy decisions. Yet, I believe the good of their developers' contributions far outweighs the bad of their recent policy decisions. That balance could change in the future, but for now, both are still a solid net positive to the FOSS ecosystem.

TLDR; Reality is rarely black and white. It's often a shade of Gray.

Gray (broken account)Aug 6, 2023

If you want to use REHL, Fedora or Ubuntu, go for it! Your decision is valid, and there are many reasons to use these distros. Don't feel pressured to choose a distro based on what is popular. Research and evaluate the pros and cons to choose a distro that works well for you.

gerwingle Aug 7, 2023

@Gray Fedora isn't run or owned by RedHat. It is simply supported by them. If one doesn't want to use something that is supported by corporations, ditch Linux entirely. As much of, if not all of the stack from top to bottom has contributions/support from many major companies. You are saying this as if there are distributions that are "100% ran by the comminity" which is objectively false. Ubuntu and RHEL are examples of distributions that are actually owned/ran by companies, I'll give you that one.

Seán Fenian Aug 6, 2023

Lately, both RedHat and Canonical have made unwise policy decisions...To be fair, at this point that's not really Red Hat driving those decisions so much as it is IBM.

Gray (broken account)Aug 6, 2023

@zakalwe

<j> I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Redhat, is in fact, IMB/Redhat, or as I've recently taken to calling it, IBM plus Redhat. </j>

Seán Fenian Aug 6, 2023

@Gray yeah, I think we're on the same page there.

☃️karolherbst☃️Aug 7, 2023

@zakalwe @Gray sorry to interrupt like this, but people have to stop blaming IBM for RH's poor decisions. They are still all RH's and RH's alone.

I get that people want to hate on IBM, but RH acts pretty independently, at least more than people want to belief.

Jaroslav "Řezza" Řezník Aug 20, 2023

@zakalwe @Gray why do you think so?

@Gray As much as i trust valve in some degree, its a damn shame that developers are not more than willing to trust linux. Without Valve we really wouldn't have the gaming scene we have now. We'd all be stuck on emulators and super tux kart (atleast in terms of native support)

Gray (broken account)Aug 6, 2023

@ashiisbest Yep! This is part of why I have so much respect for valve, even though I also hold strong anti-monopolistic views. Without Valve gaming on Linux would not be a serious topic. There is still a long ways to go to convince GameDevs to seriously focus on Linux, and Valve is a key stepping stone on that path.

@Gray One needs to keep in mind that Red Hat is owned by IBM, it is very different from the Red Hat of old when they were independent. All of these changes lately are directly caused by IBM's ownership of Red Hat. IBM has a tendency of buying well regarded brands & then make them both very expensive & profit driven.

As for Valve, well, gamers largely enforced a Valve PC gaming monopoly. PC gamers tend to gravitate towards Steam and really hate when publishers do their own launchers. Heck, even Activision Blizzard admitted that making their games exclusive to Battle.net was considered a failure, hence why they started releasing games on to Steam again. EA and other publishers learned that lesson several years ago too.

Gray (broken account)Aug 6, 2023

@deltatux Yep, I understand the IBM part, but the Redhat of old is not the Redhat of today precisely because of IBM. It's good to be reminiscent on the days of old RedHat, but the current RedHat is the problem, and so I refer to them as RedHat.

Jimmy Sjölund 🇸🇪 🇫🇮 🇪🇺 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Aug 7, 2023

@deltatux @Gray Not necessarily true. It's a big difference of Red Hat of old with 2000 people and Red Hat today with 20000+ people. Large company functions differently than smaller ones no matter who the owner is.

Gray (broken account)Aug 9, 2023

@deltatux I definitely understand why steam has become a monopoly. It's because Steam is the only good option. The other gaming companies have tried to force feed gamers a pile of steaming shit. Gamers rejected that and moved to Steam.

dmvianna Aug 6, 2023

@Gray tradeoffs all the way down

doragasu Aug 7, 2023

@Gray What is really sad, is that 20 years ago, I would have put Google on top of the list, but nowadays...

Out of the three you are listing, I really like Valve because in addition to their contributions, they have a really consumer centered perspective: they try hard to put the user at the center of their products and policies. Work for your users, not against them. I suppose not being a publicly traded company helps, and I hope they can continue being like that for many many years.

Gray (broken account)Aug 9, 2023

@doragasu 20 years ago I would have also included Google at the top of the list, and I wouldn't have any regrets doing so. Companies change. Google used to be more good than bad, but has shifted to more bad than good. I think it's important to celebrate what is currently good, because focusing on what could become bad is a recipe for depression.

sumokirby (Chris)Aug 8, 2023

@Gray What the hell is this? 2,880 characters?? I thought the max limit on Mastodon was 500.

sumokirby (Chris)Aug 8, 2023

@Gray I guess it's because you're on "firefish". Which is the perfect example of how OSS shoots itself in the foot by trying to cater to everyone's niche preferences.

Gray (broken account)Aug 9, 2023

@sumokirby I'm not sure what you are getting at, other than you are mad because your account is on an instance using heavily opinionated fediverse software that implements an arbitrary character limit.

Mahmoud - محمود عبدالجواد Aug 8, 2023

@Gray yeah, it wasn't very wise of those on RH payroll to jump around calling those who criticise RH names and defend such actions.

I could be mistaken, but I forsee a near-future where RH is becoming a "Oracle" based on those interactions with those Hatters.

happyborg Aug 8, 2023

@Gray it isn't black or white until it is.

I'm pragmatic like you, but I also know that just as companies will make mistakes, they will eventually screw people because they have to put profit before everything else, including the biosphere.

So we need better ways to fund FOSS.

Henry Edward Hardy Aug 8, 2023

What is, "open technology?"

I'm pretty sure it does not mean, "embrace, modify, close source, proprietize, monetize, profit".

IBM aka "Red Hat" is far down that road by refusing to do business with anyone who uses a fork of Red Hat's "open, free software".

"The Linux Community Is Circumventing Red Hat's Controversial New Strategy"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pka3xz/the-linux-community-is-circumventing-red-hats-controversial-new-strategy

The Linux Community Is Circumventing Red Hat's Controversial New Strategy

Red Hat’s recent decision to restrict the source code for its enterprise Linux build has led open-source projects big and small to come up with creative strategies to continue to serve their users.

Randy Noseworthy 😼

When I was younger, I thought that the world was black and white, but it's not.

Reality is not a Utopian experience.

slembcke Aug 9, 2023

@Gray I like this non-hot-take. It’s well principled.

Gray (broken account)Aug 9, 2023

@slembcke Thank you. Lately I've noticed a lot of surface level hot takes and rage induced posts around RedHat and Canonical. I felt the need to acknowledge the contributions of these companies, as I feel responsible for encouraging this behavior in my meme format criticisms.

Criticism is often corrupted by hate, and praise is often corrupted by affection. It's difficult to separate personal bias from analysis. A healthy discussion is impossible without a balance of both criticism and praise derived from reason without bias.

I'm not sure if I was able to follow this idealistic mindset, but I tried.