McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source

>They have been doing it all along.

No. They haven't been paying all developers. By far. And that is perfectly acceptable and fine. It adheres to the licenses that the developers chose for their code.

>By employing contributors to key projects. By sponsoring important initatives (e.g sourceware.org).
>If all commercial companies involved in free software behaved like RedHat, we'd be in a better place.

Yes, I completely agree.
Red Hat is one of the biggest single contributors to Free Software.
But it's also far from paying all of the work that goes into their product.
How much of the work do they pay? 1%, 2%? 10%? Probably not more.

And that is perfectly acceptable and fine. It adheres to the licenses that the developers chose for their code.

What is not Ok is saying things like this:

>> I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream
>> sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and
>> resources going into RHEL

because these people are just doing what the licenses permit.
These people are exploiting the *same* rights that Red Hat exploits to run their business. That is the basic concept and foundation of Free Software. These rights are at the base of Red Hat's business. It's what makes their business possible. If GNU/Linux was proprietary software, then they would have to pay for every single change set going into it.

But Free Software allows them to not pay all these bills. And that is fine.

Companies are using my Open Source and Free Software to make millions of Dollars. From where do I know? Because these companies frequently contact me for free support.

And that is perfectly acceptable and fine. It adheres to the licenses that I chose for my code. I knew that from the beginning and chose to go that route.

What would not be Ok is if these companies would put further restrictions on *my* code. E.g. by applying a threat model to stop business with their customers upon redistribution.