this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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On the future of free long term support for Linux distributions (utcc.utoronto.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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The reality is that reliable backports of security fixes is expensive (partly because backports are hard in general). The older a distribution version is, generally the more work is required. To generalize somewhat, this work does not get done for free; someone has to pay for it.

People using Linux distributions have for years been in the fortunate position that companies with money were willing to fund a lot of painstaking work and then make the result available for free. One of the artifacts of this was free distributions with long support periods. My view is that this supply of corporate money is in the process of drying up, and with it will go that free long term support. This won't be a pleasant process.

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[–] Zeth0s@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I believe that the main problem is how companies work. If I say finance that I want to donate to an open source project half of what we are paying for the licenses of the alternative rubbish commercial product we are using now, they will simply say no. No discussion at all. We always need to find commercial entities that work via licensing to support open source tools. This is also a reason of the success of red hat compared to debian. Companies don't pay debian, I couldn't even if I would like, because they don't offer a package of enterprise licenses... That is the only option finance understand

It is crazy and a pity...

[–] baronvonj@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Agreed, but there's more to it than just "we need to pay for support contract." There's also "we want a contract that indemnifies us against a FOSS reciprocal license claim against the product we sell." That is something that really contributed to RHEL's dominant position.