this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Red Hat / Fedora drama? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by Kaidao@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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What do you all think of the Red Hat drama a few months ago? I just learned about it and looked into it a bit. I’ve been using Fedora for a while now on my main system, but curious whether you think this will end up affecting it.

My take is that yes, it’s kinda a shitty move to do but I get why RH decided to stop their maintenance given they’re a for profit company.

What do you guys think? Do you still use or would you consider using Fedora?

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[–] EmbeddedEntropy@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 months ago

Again, less than half of RHEL is even software released under the GPL.

I would be completely shocked if this were true. I'm calling BS here.

I used to be my company's primary contact for our Red Hat TAM for almost 13 years. Our TAMs were very proud to claim that all of RHEL was FOSS software, licensed under the GPL or sometimes other FOSS licenses.

I spun up a RHEL 9.2 instance and ran:

$ sudo dnf list --all | wc -l
6671
$ dnf info --all | grep "^License .*:.*GPL.*" | wc -l
4344
$ python -c "print(4344/6673 * 100)"
65.11767351221705

So 65% of RHEL 9's packages are under a GPL license.

Much of the software that is GPL was authored by Red Hat themselves. According to the text of the GPL itself, Red Hat is not required to distribute the code to the totality of the RHEL distribution or even to more than half the code.

Half?!? Again, where are these mysterious numbers coming from?

It doesn't matter if Red Hat authored those packages or not. What matters is if they were distributed under a GPL license. If you're claiming that Red Hat multi-licensed those GPL'd packages that they exclusively wrote so they don't have to comply with the GPL, please point those out to me (or at least a few), so I can check them out.