I don't think the average Red Hat customer will base their business decision on HN sentiment. Also, they're probably using software certified for Red Hat Linux and don't have the freedom to pick another OS if they want the support they're paying for.

None of the suits cared about Linux in the early days when we sysadmins were extolling it's benefits. The idea that Linux could ever take on commercial Unix offerings from companies like IBM was laughable. It's so strange to me that the argument that suits don't care what geeks think is still being made. Current users will stick with Red Hat until they fear they won't be able to hire for it. But that's what happened to AIX and why IBM bought Red Hat in the first place.

Linux did not win on technical merits back then (it wasn't very good). It did not win because its geeky simps pushed it. It won because it was cheaper, good enough, and (more importantly) another company (Red Hat!, Caldera) was willing to walk you through compliance, offer support, and take the blame if shit went sideways.

Maybe your experience was true for your company. But it feels like revisionism to me, a fellow 90s Linux professional who introduced it to many orgs.

I was there when Linux overtook proprietary UNIX in the late 1990s / early 2000s and agree completely.

The Solaris and HP/UX stalwarts who laughed Linux off as a toy for hobbyists changed their tune pretty quickly when Oracle announced support for their flagship database on Linux. Adoption quickly accelerated as other software vendors announced support. Obviously Red Hat was the winner in all of this, but they could easily lose their lead if another Linux vendor gets serious.

FUD is also pretty lame. The FOSS code is up on the CentOS Stream repo. Knock yourself out!

This is simply not true: GPL requires you to share all code needed to build the binary you shipped including their minor patches. GPL also has a clause: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.".

The people the binary is shipped to can access it via weather means red hat provides. If red hat does not provide you a binary, they do not need to give you access to their code.

And here is the punchline. People don't pay Redhat to mess with the source code themselves, they pay Redhat so that they don't have to mess with it.

Yeah Red Hat does share all the code for customers who purchase binaries and they are not imposing further restrictions on recipients of those binaries with their EULA. If the EULA is violated Red Hat is simply exercising their rights to not distribute future binaries and source thus not violating the GPL clause you mention

And yet they promised to use blackmailing tactics to severe relationship with those customers who want to exercise their rights to the code and republish it.

Those terms hve been in the Red Hat enterprise license agreement for … 15? 20 years?

Nobody cared, in this case, until the git.centos.org sources were gone.