Red Hat Acquires Data-Cleaning Company Permabit (fortune.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Fortune: Business software company Red Hat said on Monday that it is acquiring the technology assets of Permabit, a small company that specializes in cleaning up corporate data to make storage more efficient and data access faster. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but a Red Hat spokesman said 16 people from Permabit will be joining that company...

While the conventional wisdom is that data storage is cheap, it is not free. And with companies turning to more expensive flash storage, it saves money to remove redundant data, said Richard Fichera, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research... Red Hat, which sells a version of the Linux operating system used by many Fortune 500 companies, also offers its own storage software. And, it wants to become a more formidable challenger in data storage, a goal that can be furthered by buying Permabit's technology, Fichera said.
Slashdot reader See Attached points out that this week Red Hat also released RHEL 7.4, which introduces support for Network Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE) and system protection against intrusive USB devices.

Comments

Re:Red Hat sells support, not Linux

[r1348]

When you sell software, you sell a licence to use it, not the code itself. This licence might include support (that's what Red Hat does).
It's perfectly legal to sell a licence to a Linux distro, as long as you comply with the GPL.
CentOS repackages most of RHEL, but they need to remove any Red Hat branding. Other that that, they're perfectly in scope with the requirements of GPL (and all the other FOSS licences present in the software collection).

Re:Red Hat sells support, not Linux

[Zocalo]

"Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." — Richard Stallman (original author of the GPL). You seriously ought to go and read up on that, because you are badly misinformed about what the GPL actually aims to do and lets you do with code licensed under it. GNU.org has a whole bunch of pages on it, including an explicit statement that you can indeed sell code licensed under the GPL, so you could start there.

Re:Red Hat sells support, not Linux

[Zocalo]

From the GPL FAQ:

Does the GPL allow me to sell copies of the program for money?
Yes, the GPL allows everyone to do this. The right to sell copies is part of the definition of free software. Except in one special situation, there is no limit on what price you can charge. (The one exception is the required written offer to provide source code that must accompany binary-only release.)

Note the word "everyone" - that includes Red Hat (amongst others). Here's a more detailed piece on the matter, where they even state that they "encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." (my emphasis)