Links: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

Jon “maddog” Hall has written very long but very good history of open source and how we got to the IBM/Red Hat issue this past June. I generally agree with everything he says in the last few paragraphs, but I still think Red Hat has violated the spirit, if not the letter, of free software and open source by restricting source code access. Freedom Zero in the Free Software Definition states that free software must grant, “The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose”. For better or worse, that includes the ability to create clone distributions.