Microaggressive Licensing

Episode: 66Published: 7/11/2023

Red Hat Open Source Ex-Pat Causes Big Spat

• Several prominent open-source people like Jeff Geerling have roundly denounced Red Hat���s latest licensing strategy
• The kernel was developed and is still maintained by Linus Torvalds
• GPLv2 license, which requires that derivative products made available to the public must also make their source code freely available on request
• JBoss, CoreOS, Gluster, and StackRox all have their source code freely available
• IBM spent $34B to acquire Red Hat
• Seriously, from 2012 to 2022, IBM had four, FOUR quarters of growth
• Revenue decreased every year from 2011 to 2020
• Red Hat conducted layoffs of about 4% of their workforce
• Community Enterprise Operating System Linux, commonly known as CentOS was a distribution of Linux based on the upstream of RHEL
• June of 2023 they made the decision to remove the public GitLab repos hosting the RHEL source code
• Mark McGrath, published a follow up blog post attempting to justify the change

Intro and outro music by James Bellavance copyright 2022