Thomas Di Giacomo (SUSE) comment on Red Hat’s recent changes

I don't know of any source that condenses a decade+ of this bs.

In the early 2000s ms got a shit load of patents that Linux and later android were supposedly infringing on, and so they demanded that distro companies, hardware manufacturers, and basically everyone using Linux commercially pay them royalties. Every distro was holding their ground since it was obvious patent trolling.

Novell (owners of suse at the time and creators of opensuse) saw it as an opportunity to catch up to redhat. So they made a deal with Ballmer (the dude that called Linux a cancer only fit for communists) that they'll confirm they're infringing those patents and that they'll pay them royalties on every sale because of that. In return they won't get sued and they'll be promoted by ms.

One of the oldest commercial distros admitting that Linux is infringing on those patents gave ms a leg to stand on and bully every other distro.

Later on they renewed their deal with ms, and started selling them certificates. The purpose of those was to protect ms customers using Linux from getting fucked by ms trying to fuck Linux. Even later on Novell died, suse got purchased again, and ms bought some of their patents.

This lasted from like 2006 to 2018, and in the end ms realized they can't get to extinguishing before first embracing and extending. So they open sourced their 60k patents (suse got sold again after this). Now they're using Canonical to finish what they've started.

Like yeah, they're under new management as an independent entity now, but I'd wait a bit more before calling them some beacon of FOSS values.