McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source

"Just buy a $WHATEVER_ENTERPRISE_LINUX licence - that's a good way to support open-source developers"

is not per se true.

These "enterprise Linux" corporations do not generally go and find some way to support all the developers of all the software they ship and support, where those developers do not already have some other support (e.g. another employer, or their own consulting). They employ leading developers on high-profile projects that they care about; and they employ maintenance engineers to support all the other stuff, often engineers from outside any of the communities of said software.

And a developer on some project, who really could use some kind of security in terms of employment, that was at least friendly to some OOH or even 10% time on non-core-job free software project maintenance, may be excluded from consideration by enterprise Linux corporations for any number of reasons - from where they live (e.g., not somewhere the corp hires), to industry politics (dev has issues with some other industry corporates, and said Linux corporate has some level or relations with those other industry corporates).

So that idea above, that $WHATEVER_ENTERPRISE_LINUX corps are good ways to help fund FOSS, is not one that I could agree with at all.