This "righteous indignation" would amuse me if it didn't sadden me. [LWN.net]

This "righteous indignation" would amuse me if it didn't sadden me.

Posted Mar 2, 2011 2:31 UTC (Wed) by linux.whiz (guest, #73256)
Parent article: Red Hat's "obfuscated" kernel source

Red Hat spends, what, between $100 and $200 million a year improving F/OSS code. It contributes *everything* to the community via the Fedora Project. Red Hat has bought stacks of companies and then released once-proprietary code as F/OSS. Red Hat is the top commercial contributor to the kernel, glibc, X.org, GNOME, the list goes on and on. Red Hat gives more to the Linux community than any other commercial entity out there.

How do they do that? They hire the best and the brightest developers from the community, enabling them to work full time on Linux and related technologies. Then Red Hat charges a fair price for their work so they can pay those developers and support teams and documentation teams and so on.

That's completely reasonable - who doesn't want to be fairly compensated? But how is Red Hat rewarded? Oracle, CentOS and other respins take all their hard work but make sure Red Hat is not compensated. Where is all your righteous indignation when stuff that happens? Where is the hue and cry about the "Spirit of Free Software" there?

I don't recall anything in the Free Software manifesto saying "it's ok, when someone is asking to be fairly compensated, to take their work and make sure they don't get paid for it." I certainly don't imagine that was the goal. I know that it is within the *letter* of the law, but c'mon, we're talking about the *spirit* here, aren't we?

Please. Be honest, people. The vast majority of you are really saying "I'm pissed because I might not get my stuff for free anymore!!! WAAAAH!!!"

This "righteous indignation" would amuse me if it didn't sadden me.

Posted Mar 3, 2011 22:36 UTC (Thu) by xilun (guest, #50638) [Link]

> Where is the hue and cry about the "Spirit of Free Software" there?

The spirit of free software is at a place you just demonstrated with your comment that you don't understand the begining of. The spirit of free software is the ability for anybody to help its neighbour without condition (with the precision that when a definition of "help" is needed, it's right to exclude the possibility to allow third parties to remove this ability for others, because the ability to harm others and/or refuse to help them would obviously not qualify for "help"), and you certainly are not in the spirit of free software when you voluntarily undermine / deteriorate the quality of what you provide to both your customer, upstream, and the linux community at large and when you ask your customers to chose between their freedom of helping themselves and third parties and other contractual relationship with RH (faced with such a choice, my hope is that as many as possible customers of RH will indeed chose to retain their ability to help others, so will terminate their relationship with a player gone rogue that tries to be harmful to the community by distributing their work in an deliberately obfuscated way in the displayed and recognised attempt to slow down customers and the community and make their work artificially more difficult). There are indeed lots of people who even think with good arguments that this RH move is indeed even against the _letter_ of the GPLv2 (on top of being obviously against the spirit of free software...)