FeedMe

SSL is almost a old as Shakespeare now.

Obs?

I did. Occasionally visit old.reddit.com put of nostalgia, but never logged in, never controbute. It’s not as busy here, but i like it. Lemmy has an OG nerd feeling to it.

Wat?

Don’t worry. I work in a bank. We employ very expensive IT consultants. After the initial PPT that sold the project to our management, all they do is Word documents (“concepts”), mostly copy paste from other documentation. And all the links are file://C:/User/Joe/Temp/MuFiles/…

My personal take is that this is not a about code, or licensing, and certainly not about money made from direct sales.

The code is open source and free software. Red Hat used to be proud, that all their code is free software. Even if they change this mindset, 99.99% is already available as free software for anyone who cares about it.

Red Hat provides some value on top of what’s available elsewhere, but they don’t have a monopoly on this added value either. You can get a full-fledge linux distribution from Ubuntu for free, you can also buy professional services from plenty other vendors.

What’s the problem? People, in particular people you can code, trust Linux or Red Hat because the code is public. I don’t want to compile from source; I don’t want to review this huge pile of code. However, since the code is widely available, widely used, and transparently built from a common code base, chances are that someelse has looked at the source code. It’s much harder to hide a backdoor, intentional or not, if the source and build process is public.

Maybe you can compare this to elections in a democracy. Everything is public. Anyone who cares can watch the whole thing. This generates trust in the system.

Red Hat or IBM is changing the system, creating doubt. Realistically the code in RHEL will not differ much from what’s publically known, but there’s a wall of fog now. And those who know is discouraged to disclose the delta.

Also, culturally, Red Hat is signalling they want to talk to ‘corporate’ buyers, not their ‘actual’ users. Sure, RH and the clients have always been corporates, but friendly.

Red Hat was one of the first distros and the first big player in open source. Now, open source is everywhere, but Red Hat is dead.

They should have replied:

0 rows changed. OK.

Or:

BOT.EXE: Command not found

just to see if the other guy keeps trying.