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EmbeddedEntropy, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago) to linux in The Linux Kernel Preparing To Drop Infrastructure For Old & Obsolete Graphics Drivers - Phoronix

I must be ancient then. I recognized, and I think used, all of those cards/chips.

Some personally. Some at work. At work I used to maintain and MS-DOS / early Windows graphics program. I had to test the program’s compatibility with a stack of graphics cards.

EmbeddedEntropy, 1 year ago to linux in Red Hat paywall?! How the Raleigh giant divided the open source community.

Not what they did on the surface (limiting source to only customers). That’s allowed by the GPL. But they went beyond that which imo makes them non-compliant.

1. RH will cancel your access/agreement if you share the GPL’d source with others. That’s directly forbidden by section 6 of the GPLv2. RH is free to cancel your agreement when they want, but not because you exercised your rights under the GPL.
2. Once your agreement is canceled, you also lose access to the matching source for other GPL’d packages installed on your system. RH could offer other methods to be in compliance, but as far as I know, they have not.

EmbeddedEntropy, 1 year ago to linux in Red Hat / Fedora drama?

Again, less than half of RHEL is even software released under the GPL.

I would be completely shocked if this were true. I’m calling BS here.

I used to be my company’s primary contact for our Red Hat TAM for almost 13 years. Our TAMs were very proud to claim that all of RHEL was FOSS software, licensed under the GPL or sometimes other FOSS licenses.

I spun up a RHEL 9.2 instance and ran:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ sudo dnf list --all | wc -l
</span><span style="color:#323232;">6671
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ dnf info --all | grep "^License .*:.*GPL.*" | wc -l
</span><span style="color:#323232;">4344
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ python -c "print(4344/6673 * 100)"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">65.11767351221705
</span>

So 65% of RHEL 9’s packages are under a GPL license.

Much of the software that is GPL was authored by Red Hat themselves. According to the text of the GPL itself, Red Hat is not required to distribute the code to the totality of the RHEL distribution or even to more than half the code.

Half?!? Again, where are these mysterious numbers coming from?

It doesn’t matter if Red Hat authored those packages or not. What matters is if they were distributed under a GPL license. If you’re claiming that Red Hat multi-licensed those GPL’d packages that they exclusively wrote so they don’t have to comply with the GPL, please point those out to me (or at least a few), so I can check them out.