“These “Good” companies package/integrate open source, make money from it, but are net positive contributors to the ecosystem.
1. Red Hat (now IBM) — The Gold Standard
- They take community Linux (Fedora/CentOS) and package it into RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) — a commercial, supported, slightly modified product with trademarks, certifications, and support contracts.
- For many years, Red Hat was consistently the #1 corporate contributor to the Linux kernel (often 10-12%+ of all changesets).
- They are also massive contributors to Kubernetes (OpenShift is their enterprise Kubernetes platform, but they upstream heavily).
- They contribute across the stack: systemd, GNOME, Ansible, Podman, etc.
- Why this is respected: They extract commercial value but give back enormous amounts of engineering effort. The community largely accepts their model because Red Hat makes the entire ecosystem stronger.
2. GitLab — Open Core Done Reasonably Well
- Community Edition (CE) is fully open source (MIT license).
- Enterprise Edition adds proprietary features on top.
- They maintain a very transparent public roadmap and issue tracker.
- They actively contribute improvements back upstream where possible and give free powerful tiers to open source projects and non-profits.
- They ship a huge amount of their platform as open source rather than closing everything.
Other positive examples:
- Canonical (Ubuntu): Packages Debian into Ubuntu, contributes heavily to Linux, GNOME, and cloud tooling.
- SUSE: Similar model to Red Hat with openSUSE → SLES.
- Many smaller companies that regularly upstream bug fixes and features from their commercial work.
Bad Actors & Criticized Behavior
These are the ones that triggered backlash, license changes, forks, or accusations of exploitation/free-riding.
1. Cloud Hyperscalers (Especially AWS) — The Biggest Modern Villains in This Story
- AWS (and to a lesser extent Azure and Google Cloud) built highly profitable managed services on top of popular open source databases and tools with relatively little contribution back.
- Elasticsearch → Amazon Elasticsearch Service (later OpenSearch after the drama).
- MongoDB → Amazon DocumentDB (“MongoDB compatible”).
- Redis, Kafka (Confluent), etc.
- This model was widely seen as strip-mining open source: take the project the community built, offer it as a paid managed service, and capture most of the revenue while contributing minimally.
- Result: This behavior directly caused Elastic, MongoDB, Redis Labs, Confluent, and others to abandon permissive open source licenses in favor of SSPL or BSL (Business Source License) specifically to stop cloud providers from doing this without contributing back.
- When Elastic changed their license, AWS forked Elasticsearch into OpenSearch rather than negotiate or contribute meaningfully.
- AWS has defended itself by saying they contribute in other ways and hire OSS developers, but the community reaction was strongly negative. This is the textbook modern example of “using multiple open source projects, packaging them as commercial services, and giving little back.”
2. Oracle — (Strongly Criticized) Oracle has a particularly poor reputation in parts of the open source community for how they handle projects they acquire or control:
- Java licensing squeeze (2018–present): For years, Oracle JDK was effectively free for most commercial use. Then Oracle changed the licensing model (starting with JDK 11 and backporting restrictions to JDK 8). Many production use cases now require expensive paid subscriptions. Oracle has been aggressive with audits. This triggered a massive migration to OpenJDK distributions (Azul, Eclipse Adoptium/Temurin, Amazon Corretto, etc.). Many in the Java community felt it was a bait-and-switch after building businesses on what felt like a stable open platform.
- MySQL stewardship: After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems (and thus MySQL) in 2010, the original MySQL developers were unhappy with Oracle’s direction, pace of development, and licensing approach. This led directly to the creation of the MariaDB fork in 2009 by Monty Widenius and other core MySQL developers. MariaDB positioned itself as more community-driven and open. Many distributions and projects started preferring or offering MariaDB as an alternative. Oracle has been accused of deprioritizing true open development of MySQL after acquisition.
While Oracle does have some engineers contributing to projects like the Linux kernel, their pattern with high-profile acquisitions (Java, MySQL, and historically others like OpenSolaris/Hudson) has earned them significant distrust. They are frequently cited as an example of a company that takes control of important open source projects and then behaves in ways that harm the broader community’s trust.
3. Other Notable Shifts (Mixed → Criticized)
- HashiCorp (Terraform, Vault, etc.): Was once praised as a good open core company. In 2023 they switched core projects to the Business Source License (BSL) — largely because cloud providers and others were building competing services on their open source work. This drew backlash similar to the database companies above.
- Various smaller or less scrupulous companies that have taken GPL projects and tried to close them (license violations) or done minimal rebranding/packaging with zero upstream contribution.
Quick Summary Table
| Company/Type | Model | Contributes Back? | Community Perception | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat | Packaged Linux + Kubernetes | Excellent | Generally positive | Gold standard |
| GitLab | Open Core | Good | Mostly positive | Transparent |
| AWS (managed DBs) | Commercial managed services | Poor | Strongly negative | Triggered many license changes |
| Oracle (Java/MySQL) | Acquired + restrictive licensing | Mixed/Low in key areas | Strongly negative | Bait-and-switch reputation |
| HashiCorp (post-2023) | Shifted to BSL | Declined | Negative backlash | Reacted to the same pressures |
Bottom Line
The difference usually comes down to net contribution vs. extraction.
- Companies like Red Hat prove you can package open source into commercial products and still be respected (or even loved) by the community.
- Oracle and the big cloud providers (especially when offering managed OSS databases) are the clearest examples of taking open source work, commercializing it aggressively, and often giving relatively little back — which has led to forks, license changes, and lasting resentment.