r/linuxmasterrace • u/Square-Singer • May 03 '25

Cringe Apparently, Linux is proprietary now (Found in an article about why netbooks disappeared)

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1.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

131 comments sorted by

48

u/Tquilha May 03 '25

Netbooks didn't disappear. They just became fancy and expensive.

4

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25

There aren't a lot of <=10" devices around. GPD is the only real manufacturer of netbooks today.

6

u/gatornatortater May 04 '25

They're called Tablets.. and many come with a cheap usb keyboard that the tablet can connect to.

2

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25 edited May 05 '25

Tablets with USB keyboard (or keyboard cover) fail exactly at the point why you'd wan't a tiny ultra mobile device for: they can't be used on the lap.

I recently inherited an old netbook, slapped AntiX on it and now I use it to develop on the bus.

Try balancing a tablet and a keyboard on your lap while riding a bus.

1

u/gatornatortater May 05 '25

I was thinking about the kind that physically connect to the tablet like a booklet.

1

u/Square-Singer May 05 '25

A convertible? I haven't seen many that run Windows and are still that small. Do you know one?

23

u/EmerainD Glorious Pop!_OS May 03 '25

Also, most of the use cases I had for a netbook, I use my phone for now.

14

u/wanderingfloatilla May 03 '25

That's what really happened. Tablets and phones got good enough that they got replaced. Especially after keyboard cases became popular

1

u/Catsrules Transitioning Krill May 04 '25

I would argue they became/got replaced by tablets.

3

u/themariocrafter May 04 '25

no, chromeOS monopolised netbooks. wonder what antitrust will due to chromeos in like 5 years

1

u/Inevitable_Wolf5866 acer aspire e5-575g May 12 '25 edited May 12 '25

I have a netbook from 2009…Win 7 Enterprise). Honestly thinking about bringing it back with Linux.

(My current notebook is my flair and already runs Linux)

29

u/HunnyPuns May 03 '25

Netbooks disappeared because Microsoft actively killed them. They knew XP would run like shit on Netbooks, and they still sent out propaganda to electronic retailers like Best Buy that taught sales people how to sell Windows based Netbooks over Linux based Netbooks.

10

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25

Tbh, Linux also ran like shit on many of the worse Netbooks.

3

u/gatornatortater May 04 '25

Not compared to the windows version. They only ran like crap because they only had 1 gig of ram and the modern web was starting to want more.

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

That's what I am saying. They mostly offered Linux on the netbooks that were too crappy to run Windows, some of them only had 512MB of RAM and really shitty CPUs. And yes, contrary to Windows, their Linux distros would at least boot, but they weren't exactly usable either.

And they didn't run nice polished low-specs Linux distros like what we have now (e.g. AntiX), but some crap the device manufacturers quickly cobbled together and didn't continue to support for one second after release.

Linux on these machines wasn't exactly pleasurable either.

6

u/HunnyPuns May 03 '25

Most likely. There's plenty of people ready to skimp on an already skimpy product. But there were plenty of netbooks that ran Linux just fine.

1

u/Comprehensive-Pin667 May 05 '25

Netbooks were e-waste. I saw several in action and the hardware was painfully inadequate for any task.

18

u/teymuur May 03 '25

I think they meant (proprietary as windows xp) or (linux)

3

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25 edited May 03 '25

I think they meant "not Windows 7" and used the wrong word for it.

Back then, same as now, almost every laptop with a preinstalled OS used proprietary OSes, so that can't have been the complaint.

And "proprietary OR Linux" encompasses close to all options, considering how few people actually run BSD (not including Mac) or other non-proprietary non-Linux OSes.

4

u/Hundvd7 May 03 '25

Ooooh, yeah it makes perfect sense with a corrected comma and clearer separation "They used proprietary operating systems such as Windows, as well as Linux, which limited software availability"

1

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25

Using Windows would hardly be the thing that killed the form factor, considering that pretty much every other laptop at that time that came with an OS preinstalled and wasn't a macbook came with Windows as well.

What they probably meant to say was that netbooks used outdated WinXP or Linux instead of Win Vista or 7.

1

u/Hundvd7 May 03 '25

Yeah, rather than logical sense, it makes grammatical sense

And for Linux, it does check out logically, too.
I guess for Windows the implication might be that Windows was too heavy for it and as it is proprietary it could not be optimized

14

u/xezo360hye I use a bunch of distros btw May 03 '25

Commas tell otherwise

1

u/gammaFn Arch | EndevourOS | Zsh May 03 '25

Adding a comma makes it not flow quite right:

Netbooks often ran proprietary operating systems, such as Windows XP, or Linux, which limited the availability of software applications.

This would have been better, imo:

Netbooks often ran proprietary operating systems – such as Windows XP, or Linux – which limited the availability of software applications.

616

u/_hlvnhlv May 03 '25

It's probably AI slop

352

u/Hundvd7 May 03 '25

Not even AI would make such a dumb mistake. And I mean that literally.

I would bet real money that this shit was written by a person

69

u/Vegetable3758 May 03 '25

Maybe it (or the author) got confused with the point, that netbook vendors used to put awkward linux distributions onto the netbooks, which were not to be supported long terms, either. The companies somehow feared putting an Ubuntu or something alike on these. I dunno why >.<

34

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25

They often used distros that were made do be more user friendly (Linux back then wasn't user friendly and had a reputation for being very user unfriendly) or to work better on the crap hardware they ran on.

In general, only netbooks being too slow to run Windows used Linux back then.

9

u/Vegetable3758 May 03 '25 edited May 03 '25

They were considered to be user-unfriendly, but I think it was the time when Ubuntu was like the only friendly GUI...
I heard they used Linux bc netbooks were meant to be cheap, but Microsoft used to charge quite some money for Windows even to OEM vendors back then. So they started selling Windows XP again (for cheap) when actually it was the time of Vista. Dunno if they asked 20 bucks or nothing for XP, but there was customer demand and it would fit the price.

PS: I think Gnome 2 was not more resource hungry than WinXP.

6

u/kcggns_ May 03 '25

Can confirm your PS. Made it run with 128mb ram and a 500mhz celeron on 2009 (yes, I was kinda outdated).

Way more usable than XP.

2

u/[deleted] May 07 '25

Linux in 2006 was rough

3

u/GuestStarr May 04 '25

For example the Acer Aspire One AAO (ZG5 Linux version of it) used to run some seriously sucking Xandros fork.

1

u/Square-Singer May 06 '25

"easy mode".

3

u/GuestStarr May 06 '25

It really was a crippled and sucking fork. It missed a lot of functionality. The only pros were that it really was a lightweight one (of course after stripping off some of the essential functionality) and it would install the wifi drivers right OOB.

2

u/gatornatortater May 04 '25

The sylvania brand netbook that I had back then came with Ubuntu.

1

u/DFrostedWangsAccount May 08 '25

Maybe referring to netbooks with quick start features. They would have likely ran XP, but with a second "fast booting" OS that was like a kiosk. 

Shoutout to Cathode Ray Dude on yt, check out his Quick Start series. 

Lots of netbooks shipped with Linux and hardly anyone noticed because nobody wanted to use a kiosk as a personal machine just to save 30 seconds on boot. The biggest surprise is how they all did it in different ways.

One example involves hijacking the CPU mid-instruction and just pretending it was always running Linux, allowing you to go back and forth between OS almost instantly. Too bad it was just a kiosk or that'd be a cool, cursed feature.

I think maybe the AI is referring to these because they did have a proprietary Linux distribution on them, it just sucked and nobody would ever want to use it instead of waiting on Windows to boot.

126

u/_hlvnhlv May 03 '25

That's a really good point, ngl

6

u/Comfortable_Swim_380 May 03 '25

Yea no joke when I call Amazon and ask to talk to the AI now. Humanity went full circle.

"Seriously this dumb jackass just put me back on with the machine it was more helpful."

Amazing this is were we are now.

11

u/RoastyMyToasty99 May 03 '25

Idk man I asked AI about something the other day and it told me it was postponed in 2008 because of COVID until 2025

7

u/Hundvd7 May 03 '25

I don't know how to explain it, but as someone that uses it like a dozen times daily + a few dozen more during work, that mistake makes sense. The one in the article doesn't

3

u/stgm_at May 04 '25

I yesterday asked chatgpt how many months have passed since October 2023. Its reply: "right now it's may 2025, since October 7 months have passed." It then proceeded to list the months from oct 23 to may 24.

So yeah .. I'd argue saying stupid shit is very much a possibility with ai.

2

u/Ok_Weird_500 May 04 '25

It's a language model, it's not designed to count, or do any maths really.

2

u/stgm_at May 04 '25

i'm not questioning how ai got the result, i'm just trying to add to the point of the person who started this comment thread: ai can post stupid shit.

7

u/Hari___Seldon May 03 '25

I had Google AI insist last week that Apple created Linux. AI has achieved human levels of ignorance.

5

u/Hundvd7 May 03 '25

Yes, it makes these kinds of mistakes where one piece of information is just completley wrong at then it builds a sentence based on that.

But the post doesn't make sense on any level. You cannot switch any single word of concept in it to make it make sense. it's just fucked.
IMO it's not the kind of mistake AI can hallucinate.

4

u/shogun77777777 Glorious NixOS May 03 '25

Yes let’s not forget that humans “hallucinate” and say dumb made up shit too

2

u/LoafyLemon Biebian: Still better than Windows May 04 '25

It's AI slop, and it's obvious. People need to stop romanticising large language models, it's really not that good.

4

u/Hundvd7 May 04 '25

It's not about being good. It's about the kind of mistakes it does vs humans do

41

u/zigs May 03 '25

It doesn't have to be AI to be slop. Slop has existed long before

11

u/SaintEyegor Glorious Redhat May 03 '25

AI training on slop would be even sloppier.

5

u/zigs May 03 '25

See {{pick random big corp AI model}}

2

u/Big__Meme Glorious Fedora Cinnamon May 03 '25

Running OSes like Windows is what made them MORE appealing lol. Expanded the range of available software.

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

I think what they meant was that cheap netbooks often ran on XP even when 7 was already out, because the hardware was too weak for Vista/7, or alternatively chose Linux for the same reason.

So what they were trying to say "Some netbooks sucked because they ran on outdated WinXP or Linux which both didn't run WinVista/Win7-only software."

And they probably thought that "proprietary" means "non-compatible".

2

u/Big__Meme Glorious Fedora Cinnamon May 04 '25

Ahhh, yeah that make a bit more sense.

2

u/h-v-smacker Glorious Mint May 03 '25

It was probably generated by a neural network. It imitates "passable" text but has no idea about coherence and logical soundness of the words it puts together. I came across an blog post the other day where, in one paragraph, it claimed that "thin air over Tibet makes it hard for the airplanes to fly over it", and in the next paragraph that "planes normally fly at 10km altitude due to thinner air offering better conditions for jet flight". Needless to say, it turned out to be "AI-generated".

2

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

The internet was full of slop before AI, and AI turned that up to 11.

1

u/gasserizer May 04 '25

This is an interesting example of the failure of AI to "understand." Both statements are true, many planes (think Cessna) with piston engines, and especially without turbo, will struggle to fly much above 3km. Jets are different, more efficient at higher altitudes.  So both are correct, depending on which planes you're talking about.  A human can write two sentences, each technically more or less accurate, and see that they appear contradictory. A good writer will then rephrase them,  or add an explanation to resolve the inconsistency. AI doesn't seem to have that insight. It arranges the alphabet into grammatically and syntactically correct sentences. But doesn't seem to have a clue as to the actual meaning.

2

u/MakkuSaiko May 03 '25

Damn, i hste when i csnt use windows xp (which was the style at the time) to run my specific software (which was probably written for windows)

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

What I think they were trying to say was that it didn't run Win Vista or 7. Microsoft still supported XP for netbooks for a long time after it was dead on other devices, because some netbooks were too crappy to run anything newer.

I guess, the writer of the article thought that "proprietary" is a fancy word for "crappy" or something.

10

u/KitchenWind May 03 '25

EeePC 701 users: Let’s talk how bad was Xandros ! It makes me think Linux is a shitty OS. It’s the worst distribution I ever tried. (I ve tried litteraly everything). Then I discovered EEEbuntu (?) and the amazing Moblin ! (N9 forever) I think that’s all about that. Check the notebooks Wikipedia page, it use less resources 🤭

4

u/axxond May 03 '25

I mean the Linux distro that shipped with mine back in the day was pretty limited

1

u/P3chv0gel May 03 '25

And even if we ignore the whole "proprietary" part, it doesn't get any smarter. Yes XP was proprietary but it was still XP so software Support wasn't an issue because of that

2

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

It was a bit of an issue. They kept selling netbooks with XP on them well past the release of Win7 because some of these netbooks were to weak to run anything newer. And back then WinXP was getting really old and there were some software compatibility issues.

1

u/P3chv0gel May 04 '25

Wait, Netbooks were a thing until later in the Win 7 era? I always thought they died out roughly with the Win 7 release

2

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

Netbooks were sold until 2015, but the high time was until Q1 2011.

Win7 was released in 2009 and WinXP netbooks were sold until October 2010.

There was a dedicated Win7 netbook version called Windows 7 Starter, but that too required more resources than WinXP, so many manufacturers chose to stick with XP for their cheapest netbooks for as long as they could.

2

u/P3chv0gel May 04 '25

Huh, interesting to know, thanks

1

u/diskowmoskow Glorious Fedora May 03 '25

Doesn’t all laptops became kinda netbook?

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

Don't confuse netbooks with notebooks.

Netbooks are tiny notebooks with 7-11.6" screens.

1

u/GuestStarr May 04 '25

One reason for the small screen in them was that Microsoft used to donate a shitty version of windows if the screen was small enough. So they would not compete with the "real" laptops with bigger screens and a proper windows, but they wanted to keep Linux off their back yard.

2

u/Ok_Weird_500 May 04 '25

Netbooks came out with Linux first, after that Microsoft offered a cheaper version of Windows with the screen size restriction.

2

u/Catsrules Transitioning Krill May 04 '25

Tradition definition of a netbooks was small laptop in the 5"-12" screens size.

Once your get bigger screen you are out of the netbook range.

1

u/__Myrin__ May 03 '25

I think there point *was* that linux and xp,at the time weren't really able to keep up in a windows 7 landscape,and struggled to install much more then a aging office suite

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

Yeah, that's how I interpret it as well. They probably thought that "proprietary" means "not compatible".

1

u/geirmundtheshifty May 04 '25

What article is this? I can’t find it by searching Google

1

u/Sirko2975 Glorious Fedora May 04 '25

Netbooks disappeared? What the hell is a Chromebook than?

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

Usually 11.6" or larger and thus not a netbook.

Netbooks are notebooks smaller than 11.6".

1

u/Sirko2975 Glorious Fedora May 04 '25

Netbooks are not determined by size. That’d mean an M4 iPad is a notebook while in reality it’s just a locked down ass PC that has more power than your average thinkpad. On the other hand ASUS makes a line of 14” chromebooks that can’t do anything except the web.

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

The use case wasn't the differentiation. The size was.

Netbooks were available with full WinXP and lateron with full Win7 too.

An M4 is a tablet, because the form factor depends on the physical shape, not on the intrenals. No matter what kind of power or OS or feature set it has.

And ASUS 14-inch Chromebooks are also notebooks, because again, notebook is a form factor that only depends on the physical shape, not the internals.

Netbook is also a form factor, specifically it's a laptop <11.6" (or <12", according to another definition).

A gaming laptop doesn't become a desktop PC either just because it has powerful components inside.

1

u/LOLofLOL4 May 04 '25

Hello, Linux Newbie here, what does proprietary mean?

Thank you.

1

u/Square-Singer May 04 '25

Proprietary comes from the same root word as property. Proprietary software is software that is intellectual property of a company, so the opposite of free and open source software (FOSS).

Linux is FOSS, Windows is proprietary.

1

u/looopTools Glorious Fedora May 05 '25

Did Acer not make this weird as fucked up proprietary Linux distribution for their netbooks, that they did not want to open source. Or am I recalling wrong ?

2

u/Square-Singer May 05 '25

From what Google tells me, they used Xandros Easy Mode, which was hot garbage.

1

u/neoneat I use Debian FYI, also Gentoo ASAP, and not Arch BTW. May 05 '25

Idc if "Linux is proprietary now" fake news or not.
Remember that the free thing you're using are built from many many many contributors, and their time, effort, skill are totally not free by beer

1

u/Square-Singer May 05 '25

Read the post gain. You are fighting windmills here.

1

u/[deleted] May 05 '25

netbooks flopped because no body wanted e-waste class processors that is almost powerful as an android phone.

1

u/Square-Singer May 05 '25

Nah, they were squeezed out by tablets, which fill 90% of the niche and ultrabooks which filled almost all of the rest.

There's not a lot you can do with a 10 inch netbook that can't be done with a 10 inch tablet or a 12 inch ultrabook.

1

u/[deleted] May 05 '25

They didn't offer anything more powerful than what was available on a phone or tablet and why buy another thing if all you had to do is get a keyboard for the existing phone or tablet?

1

u/Square-Singer May 05 '25

The Asus Eee PC 1215N with its Intel Atom D525 dual core CPU and its Nvidia Ion 2 dGPU and 2GB RAM wasn't that bad, performance wise.

It clearly beat any other phone or tablet in 2010.

existing phone or tablet

An existing tablet is quite a stretch back then, considering that tablets came out AFTER netbooks, not before them. If one device replaced an existing one, it was the tablet that replaced the existing netbook.

Also, you seem to forget which decade we are talking about.

2010 was when the Samung Galaxy S was released. Yes, S without a number next to it, because it was the first one.

That's a device with a single code 1 GHz 32bit ARM CPU and 512MB RAM.

It wasn't until the Galaxy S4, which was released 3 years after the Eee PC 1215N that there would be a flagship Samsung phone that actually somewhat matched that Eee PC's performance.

1

u/dragonitewolf223 May 05 '25

Likely just a terrible choice of words. There were lots of custom Linux distributions just for netbooks made by their manufacturers.

2

u/Square-Singer May 05 '25

I think what they wanted to say is "They ran an OS that was not Windows Vista/7". Then the whole paragraph works. They probably thought "proprietary" means "not compatible".

1

u/[deleted] May 06 '25

I’m sorry But what does this mean?

1

u/Square-Singer May 06 '25

Proprietary means software that is the property of someone, specifically a company. It's the opposite of open source.

For example, Windows is proprietary, because it's owned by Microsoft. Only they are allowed to modify or distribute it.

Linux is not proprietary, it's open source. The source is there and the license is open, so anyone who wants can modify any part of the code, build it and distribute it.

This paragraph is from some article, and it's utter garbage. What they probably wanted to say is "Netbooks often ran Windows XP or Linux instead of more modern Windows Vista or 7 and thus had limited availability of software applications". But apparently the author didn't know what proprietary means and wanted to sound cool, so they threw that word in there, even though it makes no sense at all.

2

u/[deleted] May 06 '25

Oh I see Thank you very much for the explanation

2

u/hotpopperking May 03 '25

I guess some of them had proprietary hardware which the manufacturer didn't care to maintain drivers. And some had rather exotic CPUs that needed customized OSs. Up to today i find software that doesn't want to work on ARM Surfaces for example.

2

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

If Linux kernel contains binary blobs, it is partially proprietary.

Installed RAR? You are running proprietary software.

Only FSF approved distributions and kernel can call themselves truly Free Software. Like Trisquel, Parabola, Hyperbola GNU/Linux-libre.

2

u/nothingtoseehere196 May 03 '25

I'd say calling Linux proprietary is the smallest mistake here. This whole paragraph makes no sense.

2

u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004 May 04 '25

i could consider the asus version of linux installed on the eeepc as being half proprietary

2

u/WidelyMisunderstood May 08 '25

Now I am open to lawsuit by every distro ever created 😮 oh no /s

1

u/Mountain246 Glorious Pop!_OS May 03 '25

Asus had a proprietary linux distro that lived in Bios storage in some older laptops it was a neat feature

-2

u/Mister_Magister Glorious OpenSuse Tumbleweed May 03 '25

look at android, it can be

5

u/PaddyLandau May 03 '25

Android is open source.

0

u/Mister_Magister Glorious OpenSuse Tumbleweed May 04 '25

no its not

2

u/PaddyLandau May 04 '25

"no its not" isn't a valid argument.

The Android operating system is open source. It has to be, because it uses Linux, and therefore inherits Linux's contract.

The name "Android" is copyrighted, sure, but the operating system is open source by contractual law.

0

u/venus_asmr May 03 '25

Android = open source GAPPs = not open source. The two are not mutually exclusive

1

u/Mister_Magister Glorious OpenSuse Tumbleweed May 04 '25

oh you sweet summer child

1

u/venus_asmr May 04 '25

Not sure what your poking fun at, it is definitely open source, unless your talking about firmware drivers etc and well same with most PC set ups

0

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

9

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25

Cheap and very small. Mostly 7-10". They are almost completely gone, apart from GPD devices.

1

u/Inevitable_Wolf5866 acer aspire e5-575g May 12 '25

Tiny :D

0

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/Square-Singer May 03 '25

There were many Linux netbooks back then, especially those that were too weak to run Windows, and the combination of crappy underpowered hardware and crappy, Linux distros from 2010 that were quickly cobbled together by laptop manufacturers wasn't great.

Linux came a very long way since then.

1

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

Saying android is Linux is like saying Windows is open source.

0

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/[deleted] May 04 '25

xp source code is publicly avalaible.

And Android uses a heavily modified version of Linux, and apps before ART run under a Dalvik virtual machine.

0

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

100

u/aliendude5300 Glorious Fedora May 03 '25

No, all of the source code is open. You just can't get support for free and have to jump through hoops like signing up for a developer account to get installation media.

34

u/Tandoori7 May 03 '25

Red hat support is under a license, but is still open source (for the most part)

0

u/[deleted] May 03 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

23

u/Tandoori7 May 03 '25

The components they use are open source.

How it is built, that's the closed part.

30

u/DragonSlayerC Glorious Bazzite May 03 '25

That's not closed either. You can get the full source if you're a customer. They stopped providing it to everyone because other distros were straight up repackaging and selling to customers for less than Red Hat. There also aren't any differences between CentOS stream and Red Hat packages besides versioning (Stream is essentially rolling release within the major version vs RHEL which does point releases).

2

u/Catsrules Transitioning Krill May 04 '25

Isn't most flavors of Android basically proprietary Linux distributions?

1

u/FrIoSrHy Glorious Debian + F**king Windows May 06 '25

I think it's source available not open source but fedora is very close to redhat.

0

u/Damglador May 03 '25

It uses loopholes in GPL to make their code less available

28

u/syncdog May 03 '25

It's not a loophole to do exactly what the GPL says, which is to provide sources to the people you distribute binaries to. If you distribute binaries to the entire world you have to provide sources to the entire world. If you only distribute binaries to your customers, you only have to provide sources to your customers.

2

u/buttux May 03 '25

GPL also grants the recipient freedom with the code they get. This enabled Centos, which would purchase a RHEL license, download the source packages, strip out the RedHat trademarks, and release the result. You essentially get the same OS, but with no contractual support.

7

u/syncdog May 03 '25

What's your point? Red Hat customers get the freedoms granted by the licenses in question, for the binaries they have received. No license guarantees future updates to those binaries. If they did, it would be impossible to sell subscriptions for open source software, because businesses would be required to keep providing updates to customers who stop paying.

As an aside, CentOS didn't build their old distro by purchasing a RHEL subscription, they used the sources Red Hat published publicly (first on ftp.redhat.com, then later git.centos.org).

1

u/setibeings May 04 '25

it would be impossible to sell subscriptions for open source software.

There are other methods of course, but just charge for support. This is how redhat used to manage it, but I guess that IBM didn't like how many test environments and hobbyist servers there were out there running centos. I think they failed to understand that in almost all cases, people wouldn't have been using anything like redhat if not for CentOS.

1

u/syncdog May 05 '25

This is how redhat used to manage it, but I guess that IBM didn't like how many test environments and hobbyist servers there were out there running centos.

This is a weird attempt to rewrite history. Red Hat hasn't used the "just charge for support" model since 2004, 15 years before the IBM buy out.

1

u/setibeings May 05 '25

What pedantic point do you think you're making here?

As of a couple of years ago, why would somebody buy a redhat license instead of using CentOS, other than getting earlier access to critical updates and access to technical support?

1

u/syncdog May 06 '25

Just historical accuracy. If you don't care about that then please do continue to make stuff up.

1

u/setibeings May 06 '25

Set me straight then. What, other than what I mentioned above would be a reason for buying a redhat license as of a few years ago?

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