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

Posted Aug 3, 2023 21:03 UTC (Thu) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
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

Wonder what made them change gears, they tried to avoid distributing anything GPL for years.

Money. They could see the big revenue growth was going to come from cloud computing, and a lot of potential customers thought "cloud" meant Linux. More generally, Microsoft's desire to avoid distributing anything GPL was more about trying to FUD the concept of FOSS than any real legal difficulty. Once it was obvious the FUD hadn't worked and there was real money to be made in the FOSS space, their reluctance went away.