I don’t get why big companys are afraid of open source software.
I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!
Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.
I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn’t redistribute it afterwards.
Some definitely have a legitimate fear - incorrectly linking their closed source app with a GPL 3 project can put them in a place where they need to disclose their source to an end user. Some people refer to GPL as “poisonous” for this reason.
The RHEL issue one is definitely an interesting beast, though. It will either improve their sales or piss off enough people in the community into not maintaining RHEL support and telling their large customers that RH/IBM are no longer trustworthy. This could be Oracle’s time to actually give something back to the community and shepherd a new ‘open’ enterprise standard distribution, but given their track history…