Jon 'maddog' Hall Defends Red Hat's Re-Licensing of RHEL
In February of 1994 Jon "maddog" Hall interviewed a young Linus Torvalds (then just 24). Nearly three decades later - as Hall approaches his 73rd birthday - he's shared a long essay looking back, but also assessing today's controversy about Red Hat's licensing of RHEL. A (slightly- condensed] excerpt:[O]ver time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the "bug-for-bug" compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution. This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work. This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded. So recently Red Hat/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers. Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL. Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! " Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...] I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started. My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...] I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business. However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are). Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL. For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address. Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013. Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.
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