Ubuntu is a commercial product in addition to free software project. It needs to have brand recognition and protection, vague marketing and lawyer nonsense often despised by engineers in order to succeed and be a trustworthy commercial partner to normal companies in the world. Fedora is just a free software project, a free gift from Red Hat. It does not have the burden of needing to satisfy paying customers and make promises.
It may be wise from Red Hat to have their free software project separate from their billion dollar commercial activity, but the reason for that should not be "anti-commercialism" that is somewhat popular in free software community. There's enough confusion that "free" means gratis anyway, and it's not helped by people that hate money making and/or don't understand it. Commercial work always comes with some restrictions related to how the money is made, and some of it may be aimed to make the commercial entity stronger in order to survive, but the free software is always free software and can be forked and built upon elsewhere if wanted.
I won't comment on the actual blog post, since it's legal stuff and I'm not interested in that as long as license is clear. Trademark protections, CLA:s are all ok, and often a very good thing for commercial free software products.
Power management, mobile and firmware developer on Linux. Security developer at Google. Ex-biologist. @mjg59 on Twitter. Content here should not be interpreted as the opinion of my employer.
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Re: Comparing to Fedora / Comparing to Red Hat
Date: 2015-11-20 11:18 am (UTC)It may be wise from Red Hat to have their free software project separate from their billion dollar commercial activity, but the reason for that should not be "anti-commercialism" that is somewhat popular in free software community. There's enough confusion that "free" means gratis anyway, and it's not helped by people that hate money making and/or don't understand it. Commercial work always comes with some restrictions related to how the money is made, and some of it may be aimed to make the commercial entity stronger in order to survive, but the free software is always free software and can be forked and built upon elsewhere if wanted.
I won't comment on the actual blog post, since it's legal stuff and I'm not interested in that as long as license is clear. Trademark protections, CLA:s are all ok, and often a very good thing for commercial free software products.