The anger and resentment towards Red Hat in the open source world had always made me sad. Red Hat made linux mainstream. Before Red Hat, big expensive commercial software (engineering tools, databases, simulation software, network services, all the big enterprisey things) all ran on and was officially supported on UNIX (and maybe Windows NT): HP-UX, Solaris, Irix. People were dabbling with Linux, crazy start ups were inventing crazy new things with it, but it wasn't until Red Hat basically mimicked the commercial UNIX model of stable releases, official safety and security certifications, support contracts, etc., that Linux went mainstream and UNIX (and NT) withered to almost nothing. Linux and all other open source code has flourished because of this!

Red Hat has always been open source. They have followed the letter of the license and still do. Not only that, they make big money! And they have employed and still do employ many top tier open source developers who contribute open source code to a variety of projects. The money they make makes all of open source better!

Their business model probably isn't for you, non-enterprisey do-it-yourself HN reader. But that's ok. There's absolutely no reason for you to be bitter or resentful about that because you have many other choices of Linux distribution available to you. All of which has been improved in some way by Red Hat.

I actually wish more open source projects followed the Red Hat model. Corporations making big money using open source would actually be paying the developers of those open source projects! That would be amazing!