I have no hard feelings with RedHat or IBM at the end of the day, but being labeled as a freeloader just because we can handle our problems ourselves without a license is a bit insulting to be honest.

I know it's said that "freeloader" is a term used for companies abusing their license terms or using loopholes by buying 10 licenses and using the KB with 10K CentOS nodes, but it didn't help at the end.

So, RedHat/IBM handled this very badly and roughly. Their perception slipped from "One of the oldest distributions we respect as a community" to "Another tech company which wants money" very fast and very abruptly.

This is sad.

I think it's important to point out that the "freeloader" comment was not something that Red Hat or IBM said. It's something that one or two people said internally or on mailing, as part of a larger conversation where the context isn't that clean. Muy memory is hazy but I dont' think they actually used the word "freeloader" specifically, I think that was a paraphrase in a news article or something. I'll see if I can find a link.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481006

Mike actually talked about the term in LinkedIn, trying to clarify it, accepting that it's an internal term in the process. Citing relevant part of his answer [0]:

    Finally, I wanted to say something about the term "freeloaders"  I've seen many use it.  This is a mostly internal term we have at Red Hat, it looks like at some point it slipped out in the public.  So what does it mean?  A freeloader is when a large enterprise business has 20 RHEL licenses, 150,000 community rebuild systems, and sometimes hundreds of user accounts and hundreds of kbase searches per month.  It's not the enthusiasts, it's not the hackers and coders, it's not the academics, and it's not the people that use rebuilders because they can't afford it.  We really try not to use the term, but when we do, it's about the large companies that can afford to pay but don't.

I see this as damage control mostly, because RedHat and IBM has the power to negotiate these problems on every level they want with their customers. Heck, Docker called us for 280 Desktop installs in a month (which is another story not related to my department, but I digress).

At the end of the day, we became labeled as freeloaders, even if it was unintentional. Also the quote above acknowledges us (researchers, enthusiasts, coders, hackers (in folklore sense)), and does nothing to address about the rugpull we had gone through.

The only thing we got after that was discontinuation of SRPMS like a slap on the face.

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7080669...