Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source’s foundations | Jeff Geerling
Jeff Geerling1 year ago

Jeff Geerling, writes on his blog:

Anyways, there’s more nuance to the entire debacle, but the main thing this points to is the fact that while increasing revenue via licensing might not be the only motive Red Hat had in this move, it was certainly a major factor. And the downfall of Scientific Linux and CentOS makes those who’ve built their careers or companies around Red Hat compatibility without paying the subscription fees nervous.

I was quite surprised when Red Hat “adopted” CentOS – it seemed to me that they were always hostile and against the latter to really succeed as it was, well, not ideal for their business model. But Red Hat did (and still does) so many good things for the open source community in general and GNU/Linux specifically that it was fine to turn a blind eye. Personally I couldn’t care less, Red Hat or its derivatives was never my first choice and my go-to distribution. Regardless of this all, after acquistion by IBM, I lost hope that there will be anything good coming out of it as a result. I worked for IBM and, pretty much, owe to them my entire career. But I also know that the technical and enterprise/business side of this company are two different worlds – quite often opposed to each other.

Well, Elastic dealt with it by switching to a new license, which many in the FOSS, or Free and Open Source Software Community, have decried as not being truly open source.

Didn’t this entire relicensing drama start with MongoDB? Or was it Redis? Or all of these? Does any of this actually matter? The point is that the large-scale cloud providers and AWS especially are breaking their part of the deal. The real problem though is different: there is no deal. There never was one. Either you are open source and free and you allow for a free ride or you are not and you don’t. That’s it. Relicensing and trying to play the open source card is simply dishonest, even if it’s only to help with the business side of things – and believe me, I’m first in line to cheer for open source success.