Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 12:26 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by khim
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

> Perhaps. But that's how GCC was developed and released for years by Cygnus.

The cygnus situation was quite different. It did not include the blackmail part.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 13:44 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (6 responses)

> The cygnus situation was quite different.

Link to CygWin 1.0 ISO (or “compatible rebuild”) would help prove your point. Preferably one which was usable back when CygWin 1.0 was current.

> It did not include the blackmail part.

Most people were happy using CygWin B20.1 for years after CygWin 1.0 release.

And I don't remember any companies which would promise to give you some version of GCC which wasn't available publicly for free.

Cygwin had no need to do what RedHat is doing because people were accepting what they were given.

Situation with RHEL is different WRT to rules enforcement on both sides: there are lots of freeloaders (and no, these not people who are building RHEL forks) and thus there are need to enforce rules.

But rules themselves are absolutely the same WRT CygWin and RHEL.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 17:46 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (5 responses)

> Link to CygWin 1.0 ISO (or “compatible rebuild”) would help prove your point. Preferably one which was usable back when CygWin 1.0 was current.

Irrelevant. Companies might have chosen not to redistribute the source for their own reason, without needing to be coerced, for example because doing so was not straightforward at the time and would only have helped their competitors.

Link to an actual blackmail clause in a cygwin support contract would help prove your point.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 17:58 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (4 responses)

> Companies might have chosen not to redistribute the source for their own reason, without needing to be coerced, for example because doing so was not straightforward at the time and would only have helped their competitors.

It doesn't matter why they haven't done that. The important thing is that they were asked to refrain from doing that and they kept that version to themselves.

> Link to an actual blackmail clause in a cygwin support contract would help prove your point.

Why would there be such a clause if there were no violators? RHEL also got it not on the day one, but only after some people started building their business around bug-for-bug compatible clones.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 18:02 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> RHEL also got it not on the day one, but only after some people started building their business around bug-for-bug compatible clones.

No, RHEL has had this clause since day one... over two decades ago.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 22:02 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (2 responses)

> Why would there be such a clause if there were no violators?

But if there were no such clause, this is not a valid legal precedent, contrary to what you claim.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 22:29 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not that CD-ROM haven't included any retaliation clauses. It was commercial product and, as such, included proprietary installer and some proprietary programs. And if you copied that you were obvious copyright violator, plain and simple.

It haven't included retaliation clause for the case where you may copy only free software from it, but without installer it wasn't much useful.

IOW: it haven't needed any retaliation clauses because it just made the whole story with attempts to achieve bug-for-bug compatibility impossible.

Whether court would consider that “the same thing” as what RedHat is doing now is open question, but practically it was much easier and simpler way to achieve what RedHat is trying to achieve.

And then RedHat bought them and tried to eat their cake and have it too (pretend that they don't sell proprietary software and yet, someone, stop RHEL freeloaders).

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 3, 2023 9:50 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Of which SuSE is the perfect example.

YaST forbade distribution for money. It was easy (and perfectly okay) to copy a SuSE CD. You could give them away, you just couldn't sell them ...

Cheers,
Wol

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 14:05 UTC (Wed) by kiko (subscriber, #69905) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh, I had forgotten about Cygnus' model. Remind me how it worked — did they provide software under a different license to paying customers and later GPLv2 the same codebase? ISTR that Artifex had a similar model for ghostscript:

"Approximately one year after a version of Ghostscript is made available under the Aladdin Free Public License and its commercial licenses, Artifex Software re-releases that version under the GPL, at which point the software becomes truly open source."
https://rosenlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/Shared-Source-Eve...

For clarity a dual-license model is different to what RHAT is doing (using a separate agreement that is additive to the GPLv2).

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 2, 2023 14:24 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

> Remind me how it worked — did they provide software under a different license to paying customers and later GPLv2 the same codebase?

They couldn't do that. RMS write GCC initially and Cygnus had no rights to relicense it.

But their paying customers were hardware manufacturers who paid for the compiler for their CPUs. Cygnus would provide them with sources and binaries but it only included sources for these CPUs and not the whole thing.

Free GCC was receiving all the patches but it was never available in binary form for most exotic chips, you had to get these from hardware maker. And it took a loooooong time for some patches to arrive in trunk.

And most of the time these were only coming in binary form, but that wasn't Cygnus problem.

And it took a loooooong time for some patches to arrive in GCC's trunk, so you couldn't pull CentOS on them and just build GCC from sources.

The closest analogue to what RedHat is doing happened with CygWin: CygWin betas are freely available while releases are only available on CD. Reminds you something?

Of course the fact that CygWin only ever released one proprietary version on CD, version 1.0, weakens the point, but that's just because there were too few buyers, even after it become apparent that most users are happy with free betas CygWin 1.0 ISO haven't arrived on any popular web sites and there were no clones.

And the most important fact is that it all was critical for success of GNU: it's unclear if we would even got i386 compiler without all that activity. And without i386 GCC compiler there would have been no Linux, obviously.

Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Posted Aug 4, 2023 5:27 UTC (Fri) by bconoboy (guest, #80928) [Link]

I suspect you're misremembering what the deal with Cygwin was. It was licensed under the GPL, rather than the LGPL. That had consequences for people who wanted to write proprietary software that linked against the cygwin1.dll. Cygnus, then Red Hat, maintained complete copyright control of the Cygwin source base, allowing the sale of a second license that let people keep their source proprietary.