Being greedy is the name of the game
I get it. People are mad that Red Hat is basically making RHEL closed-source. Actually, I think people might be less mad if Red Hat just said, “hey, screw open source, we’re closed-source now,” instead of claiming that they still abide by the terms of the GPL license. I’m not going to claim to be a Red Hat or Linux distro expert — I’m not. But I do have some takeaways to offer:
For-profit companies are greedy. This should surprise no one. In fact, if you are a founder of a company, especially if you’ve taken venture funding, you should be greedy too. I mean that in the sense that you should be maximizing profits for your company, not that you should never donate to charity and should make your friends pay whenever you meet in a restaurant. Running a for-profit company = maximizing profits. This means the same as ‘being greedy,’ just that one is pejorative.
When you change anything from “less restrictive'“ to “more restrictive” it makes people mad.
We’ve seen licenses changes before… They didn’t cause MongoDB or Elastic to crash and burn, so I’m not sure we’ll see Red Hat crash and burn, either. But who knows?
Sometimes (in fact, often) the actual customers who fork over money for a product don’t care at all what the open source license is. They care that it doesn’t go down on Black Friday.
My core argument, though, is that companies are in the business of making money, not of supporting open source software. For some companies, open source software provides concrete, measurable benefits that help the company make more money. If that is the case, they’ll continue supporting open source for the long term. If not… maybe they shouldn’t have been doing open source at all.
The trickier question, of course, is a company that grew to its current (large) size due to open source, but feels like it’s outgrown the benefits of open source. I’m a cynic… so I think if a for-profit company is not getting a benefit from its support of open source, it should stop supporting open source, even if it got a benefit in the past.
Bottom line: If you’re running a for-profit company, you should be greedy. Your support of open source should be in pursuit of profits.
Oh, and actually there are loads of open source projects that are supported by non-profit organizations. That is a 100% legit route towards open source sustainability. Just that if you took venture funding, don’t pretend to be a non-profit organization, and don’t expect other for-profit companies to act like non-profits, either.