Free has never meant monetarily free. Open-source means you can recompile, and thus maintain after the EOL of the provider, and code secrets aren’t secret. This is already a step above proprietary software.
For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code.
But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.
Yea selling an entire OS that consists of a ton of other peoples open source projects—often paid for by other companies to have somebody work on a thing — then when people say “hey we should get a copy of the small tweaks you did to all of those bits” and they say no, seems like a situation where changing the license on enough critical parts force the OS maker to not withhold the software.
What would stop Redhat from saying “we’ve decided the only customers we care about will pay us 50k to be a customer, therefore anybody who doesn’t pay 50k cannot get source from us.. and anybody distributing the source code owes us 50k..”
When people buy RHEL what are they buying? I always thought that when buying RHEL you are buying their support, build infra, signatures, testing, etc. You're essentially buying the boring stuff- NOT the actual open source code which is available freely to anyone.
Open source means you can redistribute the code having received it. If you aren't allowed to do so, the program is 'source-available', not open source.
For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code.
But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.