On Thu, Nov 01, 2018 at 12:58:47AM -0400, Eddie O'Connor wrote:
One question: If Red hat has been "purchased" by
IBM....what happens to the
GPL license?..after all IBM is a "proprietary" company. What will happen to
the licensing of CEntOS?....Fedora?...truly troubling times. I might have
to go down the Yellow Brick Road and take up Debian as my regular OS. 😢
From the press release:
"With this acquisition, IBM will remain committed to Red Hat’s open
governance, open source contributions, participation in the open source
community and development model, and fostering its widespread developer
ecosystem. In addition, IBM and Red Hat will remain committed to the
continued freedom of open source, via such efforts as Patent Promise, GPL
Cooperation Commitment, the Open Invention Network and the LOT Network."
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-hat-comple...
Remember also:
"The top 10 organizations sponsoring Linux kernel development since the
last report are Intel, Red Hat, Linaro, IBM, Samsung, SUSE, Google, AMD,
Renesas, and Mellanox."
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2017/10/2017-linux-kernel-report-hig...
Looking at the numbers, together Red Hat + IBM would be number one, beating
out Intel.
We can't predict the future, but IBM has definitely contributed
significantly to Linux and to other software under the GPL in the past —
and the press release does give a strong commitment as well.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader