I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers
So basically all those who used CentOS and did not contribute anything even though CentOS cried for contributions for years until Red Hat eventually bought them? (=Most notably Oracle.)
Red Hat is still the biggest FOSS contributor. (I use openSUSE and SteamOS, btw, so I’m not even a RH product user.)
and then use loopholes to restrict access.
It’s really not a loophole. The GPL spells it out directly that the source code is only mandatory to be offered to those who get the binaries. A loophole is networked execution that was not even thought about when the original GPL was written and then was “closed” by the AGPL and later intended to be left open by the GPLv3.
If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.
Those actions seem to have lead to creating that new OpenELA organization, basically to what CentOS wanted for years but their cries fell on deaf ears. Simply reusing Red Hat’s source RPMs isn’t an open ecosystem. All the EL downstreams finally collaborating is.
So basically all those who used CentOS and did not contribute anything even though CentOS cried for contributions for years until Red Hat eventually bought them? (=Most notably Oracle.)
Red Hat is still the biggest FOSS contributor. (I use openSUSE and SteamOS, btw, so I’m not even a RH product user.)
It’s really not a loophole. The GPL spells it out directly that the source code is only mandatory to be offered to those who get the binaries. A loophole is networked execution that was not even thought about when the original GPL was written and then was “closed” by the AGPL and later intended to be left open by the GPLv3.
Those actions seem to have lead to creating that new OpenELA organization, basically to what CentOS wanted for years but their cries fell on deaf ears. Simply reusing Red Hat’s source RPMs isn’t an open ecosystem. All the EL downstreams finally collaborating is.
Except the only thing they’re collaborating on is obscured sharing of RHEL source RPMs to hide who is violating their subscription terms.