Imho it’s all just a purity test, coupled with so much of the tech community just loving drama. This is our equivalent to reality shows where there’s a celebrity train wreck.
I agree with you, Red Hat are a huge contributor to open source. Their business model lets them make money and then they use that money to contribute to projects in the wild. To me, it’s a win win.
I can understand why people would be upset with the changes. I don’t understand why they would be angry though.
The choice of down stream repackage distros has always been at RH’s convenience. This has always been clear since the day CentOS was a thing, and Rocky/Alma after it. Their product model depended on the whims of another product.
Ask yourself how many things RH has done for the community also directly contributed to their bottom line.
Now combine that with its new business leaders that promise explicitly to pare back efforts that don't help or even hurt the bottom line.
Would that make you happy with them? Sure, they aren't under an obligation to drive FOSS, but there is an obvious and notable change in direction here.
That’s pure speculation and conjecture though without any specifics.
What notable change has their been to their contributions has their been? Please point to some reduction or drop in quality.
Without a concrete talking point, the statement is so empty that I could say the same about any distro, for example Ubuntu or Suse which also have commercial components to their businesses
"There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder."
These comments are explicitly about a focus on doing the things that directly drive revenue. Their actions correlate with their stated direction.
We can debate whether the direction is right or wrong for them (I'm explictly not making a judgment here), but the direction and intent are clear.
I agree with you, Red Hat are a huge contributor to open source. Their business model lets them make money and then they use that money to contribute to projects in the wild. To me, it’s a win win.
I can understand why people would be upset with the changes. I don’t understand why they would be angry though.
The choice of down stream repackage distros has always been at RH’s convenience. This has always been clear since the day CentOS was a thing, and Rocky/Alma after it. Their product model depended on the whims of another product.