How Red Hat Divided the Open Source Community

In Raleigh, North Carolina — the home of Red Hat — local newspaper the News & Observer takes an in-depth look at the 'announcement that split the open source software community.' (Alternate URL here.)

[M]any saw Red Hat's decision to essentially paywall Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, as sacrilegious... Red Hat employees were also conflicted about the new policy, [Red Hat Vice President Mike] McGrath acknowledged. 'I think a lot of even internal associates didn't fully understand what we had announced and why,' he said...

At issue, he wrote, were emerging competitors who copied Red Hat Enterprise Linux, down to even the code's mistakes, and then offered these Red Hat-replicas to customers for free. These weren't community members adding value, he contended, but undercutting rivals. And in a year when Red Hat laid off 4% of its total workforce, McGrath said, the company could not justify allowing this to continue. 'I feel that while this was a difficult decision between community and business, we're still on the right side of it,' he told the News & Observer. Not everyone agrees...

McGrath offered little consolation to customers who were relying on one-for-one versions of RHEL. They could stay with the downstream distributions, find another provider, or pay for Red Hat. 'I think (people) were just so used to the way things work,' he said. 'There's a vocal group of people that probably need Red Hat's level of support, but simply don't want to pay for it. And I don't really have... there's not much we can tell them.'

Since its RHEL decision, Red Hat has secured several prominent partnerships. In September, the cloud-based software company Salesforce moved 200,000 of its systems from the free CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The same month, Red Hat announced RHEL would begin to support Oracle's cloud infrastructure. Oracle was one of the few major companies this summer to publicly criticize Red Hat for essentially paywalling its most popular code. On Oct. 24, Red Hat notched another win when the data security firm Cohesity said it would also ditch CentOS Linux for RHEL.

The article delves into the history of Red Hat — and of Linux — before culminating with this quote from McGrath. 'I think long gone are the times of that sort of romantic view of hobbyists working in their spare time to build open source. I think there's still room for that — we still have that — but quite a lot of open source is now built from people that are paid full time.'

Red Hat likes to point out that 90% of Fortune 500 companies use its services, according to the article. But it also quotes Jonathan Wright, infrastructure team lead at the nonprofit AlmaLinux, as saying that Red Hat played 'fast and loose' with the GPL. The newspaper then adds that 'For many open source believers, such a threat to its hallowed text isn't forgivable.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.