bimblesticks
Am using Firefox with uBlock Origin if that affects anything
Chromium is in that awkward position where it is technically an open-source community-driven project but in practice operates like a closed-source one. Google has complete control over decisions and can make changes that serve their profits (see: JPEGXL debacle).
Of course, you can make the same critique of Firefox, but at the very least they are a nonprofit foundation and don’t have enough market share to abuse their power.
Opportunity cost is a central concept in economics. When deciding between decisions A and B, companies will consider the revenue they would gain from either decision. If companies accept the revenue from decision A, they are doing it at the cost of the revenue they would have made from decision B. This is what I mean by “lost revenue”. By choosing to shut down git.centos.org, RH loses the revenue they would have gotten from keeping the repository open and gains the revenue they believe they will get from shutting it down. My apologies if this sounds condescending, but you keep insisting that there’s no such thing as “lost revenue” and I genuinely don’t know how to respond to that without just explaining opportunity cost.
I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.
I genuinely cannot think of a company that contributes more to open-source projects than Red Hat. They to do this through hiring hundreds of talented engineers and adhering to an incredibly generous upstream-first policy, where most of the work they do gets made available for everyone else. No matter what Linux distribution you use, you are running a huge amount of code written by Red Hat.
Unfortunately, because we don’t live in a utopia, they need to be able to pay their engineers to do this work, and clones that simply redistribute their packages pose a serious threat to their ability to do this. Previously, Red Hat went out of their way to make the exact RHEL sources available to these clones. Now, Red Hat is still publishing all the code they write through Stream, but they do not have a specific repo for the exact RHEL patch set. I don’t see how this isn’t completely reasonable.
If you led a company making a product, and were responsible for thousands of employees, and some other company simply took that product and repackaged it, released it for free, while (in the case of Rocky and Oracle) running ads to compete with you in the process, are you telling me you would go out of your way to publish the exact patchsets to a special repository to make it as easy as possible for them to do this?