Red Hat Pledges Patent Protection For 99 Percent of FOSS-ware (theregister.co.uk)

Red Hat says it has amassed over 2,000 patents and won't enforce them if the technologies they describe are used in properly-licensed open-source software. From a report: The company has made more or less the same offer since 2002, when it first made a "Patent Promise" in order to "discourage patent aggression in free and open source software." Back then the company didn't own many patents and claimed its non-enforcement promise covered 35 per cent of open-source software. The Promise was revised in order to reflect the company's growing patent trove and to spruce up the language it uses to make it more relevant. The revised promise "applies to all software meeting the free software or open source definitions of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) or the Open Source Initiative (OSI)." [...] It's not a blank cheque. Hardware isn't covered and Red Hat is at pains to point out that "Our Promise is not an assurance that Red Hat's patents are enforceable or that practicing Red Hat's patented inventions does not infringe others' patents or other intellectual property." But the company says 99 percent of FOSS software should be covered by the Promise.

Comments

"FOSS-ware" Is redundant

[Khopesh]

"FOSS-ware" would mean "(Free/Open Source Software)-ware"

The accepted terms are "free software," "free (as in speech) software," "software libre," and if you really insist, "F/OSS" or "FOSS" as expanded above. Also valid but with slightly different definitions: "GPL-compatible" (tighter definition), "open source" (looser definition, allows prohibiting modification or even sharing), and "copyleft" (looser still).

If I were to coin a new term for something meeting RMS's Free Software Definition, I'd consider "freedomware"

Re:I like Redhat

[ShanghaiBill]

Why would Oracle buy RedHat?

Patents.

Systemd

[Tenebrousedge]

The problem was that systemd was railroaded so fast through most of the major distros -- almost as if it were an insideous update to a proprietary OS, with the questionable acceptance by the Debian technical committee being the worst outcome, as it affected so many derivative distros.

This is untrue. Yes, many distros decided to adopt it in a short timeframe, but Red Hat had been testing systemd for years before that, and it's not like this was the first time that someone has either tried to replace sysvinit or someone has tried to introduce process tracking to the kernel. The pain points were known for decades, and as someone who has written a (short) book on the shell, anyone who prefers Bash as a scripting language has brain damage.

Debian's technical committee was split between systemd and upstart, with OpenRC being a distant third, and only one person who favored sysvinit. Since it is hopefully not in dispute that upstart was the worse option there, we can consider the decision to have been the best outcome. Note also that this was merely a decision about the default init system: sysvinit is still supported. The reason why sysvinit was not popular, however, was that the init scripts are comparatively more difficult to maintain, and generally slower. If Devuan has decided to shoulder the maintenance burden, I'm sure I wish them the best of luck with that.

The anti-systemd crowd here are morons, severally and collectively. No, systemd is not perfect, but there's a reason why people have been trying to replace sysvinit for the past three decades. Even OpenRC is almost entirely written in C. Either learn why, or quit complaining.