[titannet]

But that's a large part of the appeal. "Binary compatible with RHEL" sells Rocky, not "another Linux".

[piaste]

Regardless of the reasons, Rocky Linux does not contribute a single line of useful code to the world.

Red Hat has benefited from previous contributors, but then added a ton of open source work of their own.

RH are open source contributors; Rocky Linux are mere users.

[omniglottal]

The majority of value comes from noncommercial activity with commercial interest. More songs sell after people hear it for free on the radio. More people buy a package only after the free samples. More license seats sell, but only after 100x more seats were free. Contribution to FOSS is not just the (SS) code, but the act of making/keeping it genuinely Free and Open. I don't care about McDonalds or Burger King when someone's going around with free hamburgers handouts - but if I'd been eating free Burger King burgers all along, it's a pretty clear choice where I'll go to buy my business burgers on the VC's dime. "Mere users" know very well, with less confirmation bias or sunk-cost rationale, what makes a good product. I trusted Red Hat more when they supported CentOS - these recent actions are clearly user-hostile and eschew the main value of FOSS being its network effects.

[raesene9]

Out of curiosity, what makes you say that Rocky Linux have never contributed a single line of code to the world?

Looking at their GH profile https://github.com/rocky-linux seems to show some public repos with code in them?

[mindslight]

Rocky routing around Redhat's attempt to hack the GPL is itself a useful contribution to the world.

[nhanlon]

TIL Nothing I write is useful.