Even the companies behind paid distros tend to release free versions. What they’re really charging for is support.
Comment on Why there are a lot of people migrating from Windows to Linux these days?
hddsx@lemmy.ca 4 days agoLinux is free? I think you need to have a talk with the folks over at IBM about RHEL or the folks over at EQT about SLES
TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 4 days ago
hddsx@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
That doesn’t feel like the case for RHEL anymore. See my post here: lemmy.ca/post/47329016/17562982
anothermember@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Free as in freedom. But also free as in cost for most PC use cases. Red Hat and SUSE are mostly selling enterprise services.
hddsx@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
You took a joking jab at red hat and suse a bit too seriously. But let me address at least the red hat portion of it.
IBM changed took away the Debian equivalent of RedHat: CentOS. They now have CentOS stream which is not what CentOS was – the free and open RHEL byte for byte compatible operating system. Arguably at the time, yes, I would agree with you – they were just selling enterprise services. But that’s not what it is anymore. They took away the stability of CentOS and had everyone migrate to RHEL or away. There were talks at the time that they were violating the linux license at the time. However, it was argued that they weren’t. Because they provide the source code for enterprise license customers, they did not violate the license. HOWEVER, they were cancelling enterprise licenses of people who were taking the source code to make RockyLinux and all the the other distros that came up to replace what CentOS was.
While yes, you have the freedom to do with the source code as you’d like when you have access to it, IBM is violating the spirit of what that means by throwing access to it behind an enterprise license.