Red Hat, where are thou?

 If you are involved with Linux, including just an interest, you may have heard that Red Hat is putting restrictions on access to their RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) source code to clients only.  There are posts, podcasts and videos going over this and with any controversy like this, there are differing views on it fanned by heated emotions and an army of numskulls who jump on the emotion and don't bother to look any deeper.

First things first, people more involved with the licensing and legal aspects of the GPL have looked at this and I have only heard their summation being that it Red Hat is fully in their right to do this and still be GPL / Open Source compliance.  Many responses are long the lines of "it's a dick move, but it's allowed" so skip over that angle.

From what I have been reading, the summary is that Red Hat is limiting access to their source code because of freeloaders making money from Red Hat's work which takes away revenue that Red Hat could use to pay their developers to work on not only Red Hat projects but many other projects in the open source community.

When the various clones (CentOS, Rocky, Alma, Oracle and others) take the source code, 90% of the work is done for them.  When there is a patch or update Red Hat works to squish those changes into their distribution and it is passed downstream.

Red Hat argues that this puts a heavy burden on their engineers and then along comes the clones that siphon off potential business revenue by these clones offering service packages for less because they have done less to create the product in the first place. 

At least this seems to be Red Hat's take on the situation.  And they may not be wrong.

I would be curious to see how much these Clones have actually contributed back upstream directly. I may suspect that the majority would be from CentOS only because they have been around the longest, but the others may have, as some have claimed their involvement for 25 years or more!

It is interesting that the loudest critics seem to be coming from these clones that are seeing their free ride drying up and being forced to find alternatives.

For the Clones, however, a lot of the contributions may not be "from" them, but that doesn't mean they aren't facilitating individuals who use these clones who contribute to a number of open source projects, many of which may not be in what would be considered "enterprise" software and hardware.

To the benefit of Red Hat, the clones offered a chance to lure potential customers into the Red Hat ecosystem which may move to full Red Hat support once their need becomes great enough. Clones also allow small businesses and individuals with access to enterprise grade systems without breaking their bank.  Not all companies can pay Enterprise-level support costs.

Outside of the community backlash and smudge on their reputation, by removing the clones Red Hat removes easy access and progression for smaller and medium-sized companies which may turn into paying clients.

So on the one-hand I can see why Red Hat is doing what they are doing and honestly I cannot fault them.  They are a business and need to make money.  That they were a billion dollar Linux and open-source company provided a significant level of stability and legitimacy to Linux as well as the ability to throw developers at the not-so-sexy projects that are vital to a working OS.

On the other hand, the clones approached people not big enough to go the whole paid-for support and individual developers working on open source projects and contributing their way.  Usually used for servers, Red Hat's community focus in Fedora is not a suitable replacement.

Whereas in the past I could use Red Hat for work, CentOS for personal server and Fedora for desktop is whittled down to Red Hat for work and Fedora for desktop.  Or, and I may not be alone, I can go Ubuntu LTS for work and personal server and [*]Ubuntu for desktop.

Red Hat is smart.  It is only a matter of time to see if this move of theirs is beneficial for them, or not.