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Comment by jwildeboer

8 years ago

So let's discuss your argument by taking Red Hat. For-profit, pure open source company. Founded 1993. Are we (I work at Red Hat) behaving badly?

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jwildeboer

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RobertoG  8 years ago

I explicitly tried to put out "god" and "bad" from the discussion but OK, let's do that.

Red-Hat main worry is to be profitable. That's is above any other concern.

You can be sure that, if their bottom line was threatened, they will be pushed, in order to survive, to change their business model and they will not be beyond behaving in a "bad" (but legal) way if they don't see other way around the problem.

If fact, we can argue, that Red-Hat management, being it a public company, is forced by law to do that.

  • cyphar  8 years ago

    I'm sure you're aware of the Solaris exodus that happened when Oracle decided to make OpenSolaris proprietary after acquiring it from Sun. The entire OpenSolaris engineering division quit in the span of a month. Do you think the same wouldn't happen if RedHat decided to start doing horrible things to their customers or the community?

    You're acting as though nobody who works at Red Hat cares about the community which they worked with before they had a job at Red Hat. I work at SUSE, and I work primarily as a member of a community. If SUSE started mistreating their customers or the wider community I would quit.

    I hope that if you found that your company was mistreating the wider community you would also quit.

    --

    My point is not that "all companies are good". I'm saying that making a judgement that "all companies will harm free software at the end of the day" ignores the fact that companies still need humans to work for them that do said contributions. Personally I find that many people who work in free software have quite strong ethics when it comes to things like this, but that's just my anecdote.

    • RobertoG  8 years ago

      I see this touch you personally, so I want to apologize if I bothered you.

      I have no idea how Red Hat or SUSE would act, maybe they would be an exception, and, maybe, very ethical workers could keep some companies in check.

      In the other hand, I don't think that the idea of companies, in order to survive, will try anything (legal), should be so polemic.

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    • throw2016  8 years ago

      History has proven time and over it's generally a very bad idea to be dependent on others' good will that is by nature self interested and ephemeral.

      I think people are interested in their basics, income, job, family before any other priorities.

      Some people infact become so paranoid about this they may overlook even support unethical action as long as they are safe.

      Surveillance, profiling and dark patterns by leading SV companies including Google, Facebook, Palantir etc composed of tens of thousands of engineers who may at one time have loudly proclaimed contrary values is just one example of this.

    • s73ver  8 years ago

      But how, in the end, did that affect Oracle? Did their stock price drop? Were they unable to sell things? Or did business kinda go on as usual?

      The comparison isn't as appropriate, as Oracle is a much bigger company, and is able to handle the loss of that many people in a better way. But the jist is similar.

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  • Silhouette  8 years ago

    If fact, we can argue, that Red-Hat management, being it a public company, is forced by law to do that.

    You could argue that, but you would almost certainly be wrong. It is a myth that management at a company is always required to seek profit above everything else. Indeed, many companies explicitly do not do this, for example by having policies about operating in an environmentally friendly way for ethical reasons.

    • RobertoG  8 years ago

      Companies have policies until they stop having them.

      I'm not saying that companies have to search profit above everything, I am saying that it's its main concern, otherwise they will not survive.

      Indeed, management will have space to be nice when things go well, but they, automatically, will receive pressures from investors to change their nice ways when things go bad.

      This is the way that it's intended to work and there is, I think, nothing surprising there.

      1 reply →