Comment by hardwaresofton

7 years ago

Thanks to CoreOS and all the other teams under RedHat who have done amazing work up until now. To be fair I've used (and enjoyed/been impressed by) your software for free so obviously I'm not owed anything but I'm gonna be looking for alternatives.

I'm suuuuuuuuuper glad I jumped off of CoreOS Container Linux earlier after the acquisition by RedHat and subsequent bundling into Project Atomic. I avoided OpenShift all together for other reasons, mostly complexity. Now I can watch from a relatively relaxed standpoint and start figuring out how to make sure no IBM sneaks into my stack, if they start tanking products. As others have noted, this is more than RHEL. Keep in mind:

- Ansible is GPLv3

- CephFS is GPLv2 w/ some mix of BSD and others

I assume licenses will serve as a canary for when things start shifting. I might even be so bold as to predict some variation of the LICENSE + PATENTS.md clause.

3 comments

hardwaresofton

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bonzini  7 years ago

Red Hat does not have CLAs, not does it own all the copyright, on either Ansible or Ceph. It cannot change their licenses unilaterally, that can only happen with permissive (non-copyleft) terms.

  • hardwaresofton  7 years ago

    Yes, this is true right now, but does not mean it will be true in the future -- I meant to imply that Ansible was the safest, due to it's GPLv3 licensing (from what I understand GPLv2 is more permissive).

    My second point was that I expect those terms to change depending on how IBM moves forward, and movement on that front (from the current state of things) should act as a canary.

    • bonzini  7 years ago

      _Anything_ that does not have a CLA and is copyleft is safe. That's pretty much the definition of copyleft; IBM cannot do anything about it, and they know.