Technology

This is beginning to sound like they’re calling open source piracy.

No, they're pointing to things in the past like what Amazon was doing to Elastic, MongoDB, Redis, and others where they (legaly) took the others companies code and made it available in a very simple way an AWS for free so that people would buy other services from AWS instead of paying Elastic and the others - who do do the development job - for hosting the databases. This destroyed their business model so they had to change their licenses from Open Source licenses to closed source licenses. So in this case Red Hat is in the same boat as Elastic and they are right that this is a threat to open source companies everywhere.

edit: Some more background info about this problem: https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/the-crusade-against-open-source-abuse/

It’s the classic argument of “your reasonable concerns are detrimental to our business model”

Spez actually tried to justify it?

I only saw him blaming "power-hungry" moderators for being "greedy", and apollo "for profiting millions" from reddit's api.

It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.

The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.

In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.

I think the solution is the same.

Yeah, preventing your users from redistribution this is where they might get into trouble and the GPL license would be retracted and thus they would have pirated the software. But someone would need to prove it in court and IBM has a couple of good lawyers.

Maybe I'm missing something; I thought the issue here was that they "aren't" making their source code available. Just modifications to the original code that can be supplied back to the original source. That doesn't cover all derivative work though.

I'm not a lawyer, and I certainly don't know the license to that degree, but if true then it seems reasonable for them to stop freely distributing source code and I'm not sure what people are upset about.. Sucks to lose something you used to get for free, but hardly an injustice.

Sounds like there's nothing stopping these derivative distro's from purchasing the source and continuing on.

We had this already with mongodb, Elastic search and AWS. It's not sustainable to give away your work to your competitors so they can make the money.

That's fine, it's the threats about terminating support agreements or dev accounts if you redistribute the source code that's stepping really close or over the line. The license gives you the right (and in some cases the responsibility) to redistribute.