Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes

This is a masterfully Orwellian post. So, Redhat is threatening their customers with withdrawal of support that they depend on quite deeply, if the customers exercise their rights under the GPL. In response, the community got upset. Redhat's response is:

I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular —especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. The details — including open source licenses and rights — matter, and these are things Red Hat has helped to not only form but also preserve and evolve.

So, as of 15 years ago, the total value of what Redhat is selling was estimated at around 10 trillion dollars. The fraction of that that was created by Redhat is, fair play, higher than most companies that distribute FOSS software. They are, in terms of code, a significant contributor (especially in the kernel). But what they're building on in the first place is this multi-trillion dollar thing that they got for free. The only caveat was that they need to maintain the same freedom for others that they made use of.

So, when people ask them to do that, they say:

I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.

I see. It's yours, and we're not allowed to repackage it for our own "profit." Because:

Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable.

Got it.

Prediction: RHEL dies in the next 5-10 years anyway while everyone moves to free options. Considering the amount of containerization being run on production systems, whatever VM is running docker or k8s doesn't need to really be managed to the same level that VM/bare metal webservers required in the past.

Sure, some big orgs will still foot the license fees, but considering CentOS/RHEL was the standard previously, I don't really see a benefit for corps to pay those fees any longer. Most will probably move to some random free stable distro for their VMs, and run any production resources via lightweight containers based on something like Alpine.

Time won't solve how people are. Most people will treat free as free of charge instead of freedom.