Self-described Kubuntu user?

Self-described Kubuntu user?

Posted Oct 13, 2006 0:23 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Self-described Kubuntu user? by ajross
Parent article: How many Fedora users are there?

> So I ask you: is RHEL a dominant player or just a legacy platform?

Who cares. Whatever they make of their destiny as a company is their choice. If it turns out that Canonical business model is better, so be it.

Doesn't make RHEL any more or less free.

> I just fail to see how you can claim, with a straight face, that the source code availability of RHEL is morally the same as providing an installable OS.

How about you provide engineers, machines, offices and bandwidth for a free, fully supported community distro which will be timely updated for at least 5 years? Well, unless you're Mark Shuttleworth and have millions to throw around, you'll find it hard to run a successful business out of that.

Red Hat aren't even obligated to provide those RHEL source RPMS to you and me, unless they supplied the binaries to us. And yet, they do. And yet, there is CentOS (and others) that build the whole lot - but you get no paid-for support. Seems very fair and moral to me.

And please don't ignore the fact that you can download installable RHEL *now*, if you so wish and straight from RH. However, if you want timely updates (i.e. support), you have to pay. If they go broke as a result of it, it's their call to make, but what they are doing will be no more or less moral.

> The abundantly transparent purpose behind making RHEL install images "purchase only" is quite obviously to prevent the community from "freeloading" and encourage corporate users to buy licenses instead of using "unofficial" distros like Centos.

I'll be a nitpick here and I'll point out that they are not licences - they are support subscriptions. It is a contract between RH and you about provision of support.

Anyway, yes and so what? Red Hat want to make money (those corporate bastards - all of them :-) and in the process they are financing FOSS. Big deal.

> I find that insulting, frankly.

Oh, come on. Red Hat insulted you by not giving you *more stuff* free of charge?

I'm guessing your argument is probably that they are taking all this software from the community, therefore they are morally obligated to provide it to the community both as binaries and source. Well, you can find all those community codes out there - no need to get them from Red Hat. And it's not like Red Hat is a black hole into which the code disappears.

They haven't taken anything away from anyone. In fact, they contributed *a lot*. So, the moral obligation is on all of us to say thank you, as we already received plenty from them. We don't get to tell them that they have to give us more gifts. That's rude.

>And I find your insensitivity to that fact puzzling.

I'm an old bastard and the thickness of my skin grows daily :-)

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