Red Hat is going full evil mode and Fedora, which is largely controlled by Red Hat, is also pushing forward with questionable decisions. At this time, as some Fedora users look for a new $HOME there are many recommending OpenSUSE but before doing this, please read the post below.
Permalink to post: https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]
About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them.
As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.”
So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.
This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.
In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier.
deleted by creator
Lab rats is a strong term (not wrong by any means) but people seem to forget that Red Hat is also one of the big players trying to make Desktop Linux better. And when Fedora users report bugs to Red Hat, they fix the bugs not only for themselves, but for the entire Linux Desktop community (they are large contributors to the GNOME Project, as well as making efforts to make Wayland better). Their decisions as a company may be causing community backlash, but without those big players (Canonical, SUSE, Red Hat) Desktop Linux wouldn’t be nearly as good as it is today. I see Fedora as a Debian, but company-backed (say what you want about this statement, but the Fedora desktop experience has been the same for a while, and will not change any time soon.) Fedora is also a Project, not a Product. A distinction that Red Hat takes seriously. Fedora is not profitable to Red Hat (the bug-fixes, as I stated above, benefits everyone in the Linux community, not Red Hat alone), that’s why it’s 100% free (both as in freedom and as in beer). Also, they have full-time employees working on GNOME and Wayland
I started using Fedora after RH killed CentOS, mainly for this reason. However now I feel bit differently about all of this.
At the end of the day, it’s clear RH is not doing this out of good of their heart. They are looking for mutually beneficial relationship, yes. But importantly they are also steering the Linux ecosystem towards that mutually beneficial direction.
And I no longer feel like I can support that. I don’t trust Red Hat as a company to keep innovating and improving the ecosystem in such way it is truly mutually beneficial in long term. I expect that they are mainly interested in directions that benefit RHEL, and allow RHEL to maintain commercially viable, private codebase.
I think that without pushback, they will make desktop linux like so many other Open Source projects: in practice the commercial product is the only really working and well-rounded implementation, because developing alternatives is very complex and requires so much developer time.
So I’d much prefer sending my bug reports to some other community with some other domain. And I’d like to contribute towards pushing the mutually beneficial relationship to a direction where RHEL is just another distribution, and Gnome just another DE. I don’t want a future where it makes sense to say a user is missing Gnome-functionality or RHEL-features, when discussing software that has no reason to be exclusive to either.
If RH is the primary developer of Fedora, and Fedora is the exclusive testbed for desktop-linux, I feel like that’s likely to happen.