Ned walks us through the RHEL licensing debacle with a historical perspective on Linux, GPLv2, and Red Hat.

Show Notes

Microaggressive Licensing

Episode: 66 Published: 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

What is Chaos Lever Podcast?

Chaos Lever examines emerging trends and new technology for the enterprise and beyond. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner examine the tech landscape through a skeptical lens based on over 40 combined years in the industry. Are we all doomed? Yes. Will the apocalypse be streamed on TikTok? Probably. Does Joni still love Chachi? Decidedly not.