this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
23 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17966 readers
5 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I don't get why big companys are afraid of open source software.

I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!

Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.

I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn't redistribute it afterwards.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.

Some definitely have a legitimate fear - incorrectly linking their closed source app with a GPL 3 project can put them in a place where they need to disclose their source to an end user. Some people refer to GPL as "poisonous" for this reason.

The RHEL issue one is definitely an interesting beast, though. It will either improve their sales or piss off enough people in the community into not maintaining RHEL support and telling their large customers that RH/IBM are no longer trustworthy. This could be Oracle's time to actually give something back to the community and shepherd a new 'open' enterprise standard distribution, but given their track history....