Linux

That would not convince me. First, Red Hat contributes an enormous amount of code and infrastructure to the Open Source world. RHEL ships with a relatively small set of packages and Red Hat is the largest contributor to many of them—certainly many important ones.

More important though is that, for individual projects and code, Red Hat is a regular member of the community. They use code, they contribute code, they distribute all their code for free. When Red Hat creates new projects, they almost always choose the GPL as the license. Their contributions to Open Source projects are available to everyone. They are an unusually staunch Open Source supporter.

When it comes to distributions, Red Hat created the Fedora Project with the express intention of creating a mainstream Linux distro that was explicitly community led and committed to Open Source. The fact that Fedora does not want to ship non-free codecs is an example of the dedication to free software that is by design and part of the Red Hat plan.

Red Hat also runs CentOS Stream which is also Free Software in the licensing sense. CentOS is available to everybody for free. In my mind CentOS is not really a “community” distribution though as its purpose is explicitly to prepare software for selection into RHEL. So, Red Hat is a staunch gatekeeper and the way they manage the project is weighted heavily towards their own interests. It is still completely public and free though. Anybody can do whatever they want with it ( like AlmaLinux does ). This is again, all by design.

Both Fedora and CentOS are explicitly PUBLIC projects. The entire distro, not just the individual projects and packages, is available for free. Red Hat “distributes” these to the world which has particular implications for some of the licenses.

All of the above is 100% Open Source and represents more activity and investment than pretty much any other Linux company. It is an awful lot to ignore by the “Red Hat is proprietary now” crowd. It is a lot for me to ignore when deciding if “leech” is a word applicable to Red Hat.

I am not a Red Hat customer or even user by the way. I used them quite a bit many years ago. I have not used any RPM based distro in quite a while.

Red Hat of course also makes RHEL. RHEL is not a public Linux distribution. Red Hat only “distributes” RHEL to customers. You can be a customer for free ( as in beer ) but you are still a customer and you have to agree to that before Red Hat will distribute anything to you. The reason that I stress this of course is that Red Hat’s legal obligations around RHEL specifically are to their customers and not to the world—not to the public or any self-proclaimed “community” that is not a customer. When I say legal obligations, I am including software licenses which of course includes the GPL.

Red Hat makes 100% of the RHEL code available to their customers of course. This is not just GPL software where they have to but everything, including all the MIT, BSD, and Apache licensed stuff.

There is essentially no software available in RHEL that is not also available in CentOS. There is A LOT more software available in Fedora. People are not interested in RHEL to get access to the software or its capabilities. It is one of the most limited distros as a software library. People that want RHEL specifically want “the distribution”.

What does that mean? RHEL is not just a list of packages. It is a very specific expressions of those packages. It is specific versions. It is specific sets of patches and back ports. It is a substantial body of documentation detailing the behaviour of those specific packages. It is, most importantly, the commitment that Red Hat makes around those packages. Red Hat makes a series of promises. They can do this because of the substantial amount of time and investment they make into testing and profiling those packages—not just individually but as a complete distribution. Perhaps one of the most important promises is that Red Hat promises to maintain and support those packages for many years including timely security updates.

Only a small part of the value of RHEL is “the software”. The software is available from many sources, including in other ways from Red Hat. People wanting RHEL clones want access to all that other stuff that is not software. That is why they have to be “bug-for-bug” clones.

The exact recipe to build each package in RHEL is not meant to be public information. In my view, there is nothing wrong with that.

Can a Red Hat customer distribute the software they get from Red Hat? Yes. The various licenses allow them to do that. They cannot distribute images, logos, docs, and other trademarked stuff of course. But they can distribute the software. They can do that and Red Hat will not stop them ( or at least I am not aware of them ever trying ). Of course, if a customer distributes the exact builds of software they get from Red Hat, Red Hat no longer considers them a customer and will stop distributing FUTURE versions of RHEL to them. Actually, I am not even sure they have done that to anybody. They reserve the right to though. And that, threatening to not distributing their future efforts, is what has upset everybody so much. That is what makes them a leech, or unethical, or evil, or proprietary.

I am not convinced.