Upstream as well. The spirit of the GPL and other FOSS licenses of its kind is that any modifications to a package have to be published as open-source as well if someone publishes a binary package.
The reason is pretty simple: when a company makes a profit from using an open-source package, it should be forced to contribute its improvements back to the community in turn.
No, what you said could be featured on a “open source misses the point”
All this started with a simple thing “user freedom” or “end user freedom” if you prefer.
It’s not about community or upstream, neither efficient or bug free software, rather that we as users are not helpless with some piece of code. We can inspect it, learn modify and share it, this also means we can go to anybody else for help.
None of that cares about upstream.
But that indeed includes that if I’m a customer of some company that provides me software, and its under a free software license, and they start to treat me badly, i can go and pay somebody else to help me with it
The upstream that is mostly Red Hat funded development?
My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. I'd much rather an ecosystem of enterprise Linux, such as Ubuntu and SUSE rather than a pile of free Red Hat clones.
> The upstream that is mostly Red Hat funded development?
Yes, RH (and others) are doing pretty significant work in the open-source space. I'm not denying that. But without the previous work that all the other non-Big Money-funded people did, RH, SuSE, Oracle MySQL and others wouldn't even be in business.
> My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well.
Agreed on that one. Open Source in general lacks decent funding mechanisms.
The reason is pretty simple: when a company makes a profit from using an open-source package, it should be forced to contribute its improvements back to the community in turn.
The best example of why that's needed is Apple.