Enterprise open source Toolkit

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Story: What vendors really mean by 'open source'

Posted by: conz (Friday 16 January 2009, 10:37 PM)

The GPL keeps the bastards honest

pjc158 states:

"Do you think they will stop there, not likely they have share holders and those share holders want dividends."

Red Hat can grow as much as they are able to and as much as the market will let them.

What they _cannot_ do is close-source most of their products.

The reason is that they _do not_ own 99.99% of the software they offer as products and services. Most of their technology belongs to the copyright owners of that software, who have chosen to licence it under the GPL and sundry other open source licences.

This makes it available to Red Hat (and Ubuntu and Novell and Sun and IBM etc.) But it does not allow Red Hat (and Ubuntu etc) to avoid the copyleft licencing restrictions against close-sourcing (ie, proprietarising) that software.

And as Red Hat can never proprietarise Linux and its acoompanying software components, it cannot establish a bona-fide commercial monopoly.

This is the 'safety-valve' that the GPL guarantees.

In Australian lingo, "The GPL keeps the bastards honest."

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