02.25.21

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IBM and Qt Don’t Understand Free Software and They Now Impose Terms and Conditions on Who Qualifies for Use of Free Software Free of Charge

Posted in GNU/Linux, IBM, Red Hat, Servers at 1:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link

Summary: Red Hat is becoming as ‘free’ as shareware or freeware in some regard; one might say that they even mimic the immorality of the 'ethical' licences while working for companies that bomb people

RED HAT (or IBM) has just announced this ‘free’ (with conditions) offer that’s already coming under severe criticism. Basically, after IBM took away CentOS from users (years after Red Hat had bought CentOS) it offers something similar, but this time with conditions, first a limit on the number of instances (up to 16) and now limitless albeit only for ‘Open-Source Infrastructure’, whatever that even means. They clearly feel the pinch, seeing that people might move away to Oracle or ‘Alma’ or ‘Rocky’ (and who knows what else is still in the pipeline, set aside non-RHEL-like distros).

ClockQt did something similar about a year ago, in effect taking away what was largely or widely regarded as Free software. They used a “bait/switch” kind of approach, in effect getting people ‘hooked’ on the free product (with high and increasing exit barriers) and now they want money. The code of many projects now depends on a proprietary stack again. Freedom isn’t an option and one needs to pay, regardless. They try to make it inconvenient to not pay, never mind if the timing is ever more sensitive due to a pandemic.

The video above contains my thoughts on this latest move and a little bit of background information. █

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