Remember, every corporation has a legal responsibility to its shareholders
which usually looks like (and I quote from
<http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0119-04.htm> because the author has
experience as a corporate securities attorney and I am a physical
scientist with no legal training),
"the directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers
and discharge their duties with a view to the interests of the corporation
and of the shareholders"
In essence that means, "the people who run corporations have a legal duty
to shareholders, and that duty is to make money"
It seems to me that Red Hat has achieved a balance between that
requirement and their social responsibility to the community.
Clint
Clint Bowman INTERNET: cl...@ecy.wa.gov
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On Wed, 15 Jan 2014, Jos Vos wrote:
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 09:45:01AM -0800, Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
RedHat is a company. Companies exist for the sole purpose of making
money. Every action by any company -- literally every single action,
ever -- is motivated by that goal.
This sounds as if this is bad: are you a communist?
The world runs because companies exist, trying to make money. I even
dare to say the open source world in its current form does only exist
because companies like Red Hat and many others contribute a lot of work.
So, we should not attack them, but support them.
In general, yes, companies exist for making money. The way you talk
about it ("literally every single action, ever") makes the statement
IMHO formally not true, but in general, yes, money is their motivation.
The question you should be asking is: How does Red Hat believe this
move is going to make them money?
Those were statements of fact. What follows is merely my opinion.
The best way of debating is saying your statements are "facts", yes,
but that does not make them real facts.
Right now, anybody can easily get for free the same thing Red Hat
sells, and their #1 competitor is taking their products, augmenting
them, and reselling them. If you think Red Hat perceives this as being
in their financial interest, I think you are out of your mind.
As someone else already pointed out: no, you do not get "the same thing
Red Hat sells". But for some people it may be ok for what they need.
And there are other ways to look at it: the fact that clones like CentOS
are used a lot is an indirect advertisement for the quality of Red Hat.
The fact that there is (AFAIK) no SLES/SLED rebuild does not help the
SUSE brand at all. So, there are also arguments against your theory.
SRPMs will go away and be replaced by an ever-moving git tree. Red Hat
will make it as hard as legally possible to rebuild their commercial
releases. The primary target of this move is Oracle, but Scientific
Linux will be collateral damage.
I consider all of this pretty obvious, but perhaps I am wrong. I hope I am.
It is not obvious. Instead, it is a very, very unlikely scenario.
But I might be wrong. I hope I'm not.
P.S.
There are a lot of companies abusing the open source paradigm, stating
their product is open source, providing just a tag-less git repository,
no documentation, etc. and just selling their product for money as
open source (which is in fact the only workable choice you have).
Talking bad about those companies is ok for me too, but don't judge
too early...
--
-- Jos Vos <j...@xos.nl>
-- X/OS Experts in Open Systems BV | Phone: +31 20 6938364
-- Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Fax: +31 20 6948204
