this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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You are allowed to charge money for open source.
Its the recipe that makes the food you're eating that would need to be publicly available and free to redistribute.
Yep, you sure are. You also can’t stop someone from forking it and giving it away for free. See: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, etc.
Money in open source is one of the biggest hurdles to it becoming the norm. IMHO, governments should fund more open source projects and fund them at higher levels. We have art grants because art improves society, and we should have an equal or higher amount of open source grants because open source improves society too.
You’re allowed, but as long as anyone else can do it for free, you can’t build a business model on selling it. At most you can sell something else (support, cloud compute, some solution that makes using it easier etc.).
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. What you said is true.
It reminded me of an older writing about it:
Open source doesn’t make money because it isn’t designed to make money
Canonical seems to make some decent money off of their services.
You can build a business model on selling it, but you can't stop someone else doing the same.
Which means in the long run the cost will get down to 0.
The moment the code and redistribution rights are out in the open, anyone who tries to charge for it faces competition from people charging less — and eventually from people charging nothing. The economic pressure pushes the price down to the cost of copying, which in the digital world is effectively zero.
Technically, according to the GPLv3 you don’t need to make the source code publically available. If you sell software with binaries then their source code must be included with it. If you’re Red Hat you can also add an additional ToS to the website that states if you buy the software you can’t freely distribute the source code you download from the website or you will be sued to oblivion.
You cannot make restrictions to the distribution of the source code under the GPL
No, they don't say they will sue (they flat out can't), but they say they will cut off your access to any updates.
Now one could (and I would) argue that sounds like a restriction on exercising your open source rights. However the counter argument seems to be those protections apply only to software acquired to date, and if you deny access to future binaries you can deny access to those sources.
In any event, all this subtlety around the licensing aside, it's just a bigger hassle to use RedHat versus pretty much any other distribution, precisely because they kind of want IBM/Oracle style entitlement management where the user gets to have to do all the management work to look after their suppliers business needs.
It's not a perfect metaphor.
None are.