The GPL requires you to distribute the GPL source code along side artefacts generated from it.
Red Hat used to share everything with everyone, they never needed to do that. To meet the requirements they need to share the code sources with licensed customers. This is what they have switched to doing.
This is my problem with the GPL, it feels like a cult of personality built around Stallman. With people assuming its somehow a magical license.
Businesses largely treat GPL as libraries they don't modify (or legal gets frowny face) so they don't have to share their code.
The "less free" licenses are generally ok to use and modify (the WTFPL caused fun with legal in one job). If you modify an open source project its normally easy to build a business case/convince a client to upstream the changes.
All the Red Hat changes demonstrate is another step towards an Oracle/Microsoft licensing model. Which is a good reason to not use RHEL or Fedora.
The legal loophole RedHat found I'm guessing is something that might trigger GPLv4 to stop this behaviour (effectively punishing someone for exercising their GPL rights).
You're right that most use of OSS doesn't involve modification so it doesn't really matter, but packaging changes are still useful.
I know Stallman was the strongest advocate of the GPL but personally I like the principle of reciprocity which it enshrines. For all of their contributions it's important to realise that companies like RedHat are very much building on the work of OSS developers.
What sort of tools are you going to use? I make ambient synth music and will often record and edit in Audacity. I use all analog hardware though, so it's different if you're using software. Only music focused distro I've ever heard of is the gentoo one, but I know there's gotta be others.
I never heard of gentoo studio. Im looking into it now and it looks like a decent possible alternative.
I want to run a DAW like Reaper, with multiple midi tracks playing through vst instruments. I had no problem doing that on windows 7 with my 4th gen i7 processor and 16GB of RAM, so my 8th gen processor should be able to handle it. But it's a "power saving" processor that actually benchmarks very close to my old 4th gen, so I do want to keep the OS and desktop environment light.
Edit:
I see gentoo studio isnt listed on distrowatch, but you can get it theough his site.
I learned about gentoo studio through the gentoo wiki. For music production where I use software I typically boot into my separate windows ssd, just because I've had so many head aches when trying to work with linux software and hardware that isn't fully supported. I'd love to do everything in linux, but some daws just don't work. Especially when I've got so much stuff set up already in mpc or guitar rig.
Easiest solution for windows with one pc, in my opinion, is get an external ssd and do windowstousb. I use that, and it works like it's native. Set me back about 100$ for a 1tb ssd. I've played games on it, made music, and other things. Works really well, so I'd suggest that before making a whole separate pc for windows alone.
I'm still in two minds about this. We have a lot of infrastructure build on RHEL rebuilds and there's no way we're buying enough RHEL licenses to cover it.
I can look at Devian based alternatives but switching is going to be a time consuming process. If Alma and Rocky get this figured out then I'm still tempted to stick where I am. These distributions have been very stable, and I don't need support for them. Even if RedHat don't like this I'm fine with doing it on the basis that they have an obligation to release the source (at least for GPL code).
Tbh you are best off start new projects on Debian, and slowly move your old stuff over. It's linux - the main difference will all be in the package manager and versioning.
It's a bit more than that unfortunately. Changes in conf file location, selinux Vs apparmour etc. There are a lot of little things which can catch you out if you're building something relatively complex.
Interesting, though I'm unsure why you'd bother with this. The script just searches for equivalent flatpaks and converts them. If there's no flatpak in existence for an app, it doesn't do anything to it. Just download the equivalent flatpak to begin with? Am I missing something?
I look forward to Plasma 6. Right now I'm stuck on Gnome Wayland because it's more stable than Plasma's implementation of Wayland for my hardware currently. But it's great to see the effort to squash bugs for Plasma 6's release.
Another cool new feature for Linux users in the Firefox 115 release is the ability to open links or search for text that has been copied on your clipboard by middle-clicking on the New Tab button. This is a productivity feature as you no longer have to open a new tab and paste the copied text or link you want to search/open.
I have to remember to use it, it'll be incredibly useful.
Linux can and is used on airplanes, flight control systems is not where it lives. There is a layer of abstraction, the auto pilot, which allows for Linux to be used and the safety of flight risks to be mitigated.
Linux is a general-purpose OS, and that is generally a bad choice for safety-critical real-time applications. And it is not something that Linux can just be adapted for – the biggest problems are: the kernel is big and the code is complex. Anything added do Linux to 'solve that' would just make it even bigger and even more complex. And removing stuff for kernel would just make it worse general-purpose OS.
The solution for proprietary RTOSes used there would be to create a new, open-source one. This should be doable as those are small and simple by definition (to some extent – only as simple as they can be for given task). I guess this will happen one day, though it is harder for it to happen naturally, as that is not something hobbyists would do for their own needs in their own time and that is usually what starts an open source projects.
On the other hand – Linux can co-exist and I am sure it does co-exist with those specialized RTOSes. I would assume that even on a Boeing airplane there are many Linux instances running… or even Windows ones.
A FreeRTOS derivative has gone through the effort of getting certified for safety critical applications, but that derivative is sadly proprietary. Even if FreeRTOS itself can't meet that bar, though, the work wouldn't have to start from scratch.
Wouldn't it be possible to make a Linux kernel for real time applications? That would obviously be very stripped down, but you're not going to run Crysis on your avionics computer anyway.
The problem with modern distributions is that nobody ever has to deal with their own kernel anymore and nobody learns how to trim one down and build it.
I'm one of those rare end-users of Linux (by choice) so I'm not the best when it comes to understanding how to pop a kernel or summon daemons or whatever. But my impression of Linux is that it is adaptable. Rather than relying on proprietary systems locked into vendors, it seems to make sense to shift into a non-proprietary model going forward. But again, I'm not popping any kernels for daemons.
Given the open-source nature of the Linux kernel, it seems that a company could customize it to their needs in order to mitigate the majority of these concerns. Most of this sounds like a corporate shill making excuses rather than giving specific examples of deficiencies in the Linux kernel.
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