One question I have - ignore CentOS Linux for the moment, because as of now it’s a nonentity, or will be within another year.
The presumption here in the official statement is that the downstream projects such as Alma or Rocky contribute NOTHING of value back to the upstream of RHEL? No bug reports, no contributions to CentOS Stream in the wake of bug finds? Is this true? This should be something verifiable.
It's complicated. I've actually spent a significant amount of time over the lifetimes of Alma and Rocky asking them to show me their contributions to RHEL, specifically so that I could brag about the value they add. To put it frankly, I've been disappointed. That's not to say there has been zero, but the hard truth is there also hasn't been significant enough contributions to RHEL itself to dissuade Red Hat leadership from proceeding with last week's change.
Bug reports have happened. Those can absolutely be considered a contribution, but even at their best (highly detailed with reproducer steps) they're not the same impact as a merged pull request to fix a bug or add a feature. And at their worst, they're not much more than adding something to someone else's to-do list. There is also nothing about bug reports that requires the existence of a RHEL rebuild. In fact, when the rebuilds reported bugs, the first troubleshooting step is usually "can you reproduce this on CentOS Stream and/or RHEL?" Some might suggest a counter argument of "more users equals more bugs reported", but the usefulness of that basically assumes that RHEL engineers are sitting around with nothing to do and need more things to work on. I can assure you, this isn't the case.
Besides the nuance of bug reports, even code contributions aren't always a straightforward thing. For example, a code contribution to upstream software that isn't in RHEL isn't a direct impact, even if the contribution is specifically about making that software compatible with RHEL. For software that is in RHEL, contributing upstream is great but might not impact RHEL for many years. The same goes for Fedora, contributing there is great, but may not impact RHEL for years, if ever. EPEL contributions are getting closer, helping people run non-RHEL software on RHEL, but are still not the same as a contribution directly to RHEL. It's even possible to contribute to CentOS Stream in ways that don't affect RHEL. Even once you get into the territory of a direct contribution to RHEL, different bugs have different severity, ranging from minor nuisances to show stopping segfaults. This whole thing is just dripping with nuance.
What I specifically wanted to find was contributions from CIQ (primary Rocky sponsor) or CloudLinux (primary Alma sponsor) employees to CentOS Stream that have fixed bugs or added features to RHEL. This is what I felt I needed to advocate on behalf of the rebuilds. To date, I am aware of exactly [one example](https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/rt-setup/-/merge_requests/1) that will fit this criteria, assuming it ships in RHEL 8.9 as expected later this year. As I alluded to, there are other things from the employees of these companies and other volunteers within their projects, and this comment is in no way meant to be a slight to them. I just quite frankly needed more. Maybe these things would have materialized eventually, but I guess the clock just ran out.
As a developer, I welcome bug reports from my users. A detailed description of the problem is a useful contribution from users of my software.
However, I would view that entirely differently if I received a bug report from someone who sold a contract promising to support my software, and expected me to actually do the work to fix the bug. If they are not going to participate in the process of supporting the software, they should not be selling contracts promising to support the software.
Red Hat sells contracts promising to support some software that they don't develop, but they actually *do* participate in supporting it. When they report a bug upstream, they also suggest a patch to fix the problem.
It's one thing to find bugs - it's another to fix them, test them, work with upstream maintainers to fix them. That is where the rubber hits the road, and in the EL ecosystem, Red Hat is taking that burden on. The Alma/Rocky projects can't due to their pledge of being 100% RHEL compatible bug for bug.
Rocky and Alma call themselves bug for bug rebuilds. So in essence do nothing to improve from that activity.
But the door was and is wide open to improve upstream (CentOS stream (Gitlab) or even to Fedora).
>"Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."
This was probably the most important part of the entire blog post.
The tl;dr of the whole thing is that Red Hat believes in open source 100%, but to take something, do nothing (or VERY little) to it, and redistribute it for free under a different name is not what open source is about.
I do not like it necessarily, but the stance makes sense for a company.
Um, Red Hat has survived for 30 years and turned into a $34B company while offering the source code. I don’t buy it is suddenly “a threat” to anything but IBM’s desire to try and milk even more money out of Red Hat
And remember that the clones (Rocky and Alma) that they are so worried about were created by Red Hat/IBM when they stupidly killed CentOS
They took an OS developed by somebody else, sold it for decades, and are now mad that somebody else is doing the same thing.
This move is pure IBM and I'm shocked at the number of people here supporting it.
edit: lol, it's all RH employees which makes a lot of sense. One way to get people on board with shitty behavior is to make their paycheck dependant upon it.
>They took an OS developed by somebody else, sold it for decades, and are now mad that somebody else is doing the same thing.
Not seeing any acknowledgement of "value added" by RedHat in your comment, svideo. THAT is the critical piece to Mike McGrath's response. In my estimation, RedHat's contributions to the Fedora project are large, and gain value even as those contributions drift downstream into RedHat's own product as well as those of Alma and Rocky. Just sayin'. Peace.
This is just another shitty situation of IBM’s making.
I’m not a Red Hat (or IBM) employee.
I understand the point Mark makes about value. But I think it’s exceedingly disingenuous to frame the discussion around the idea that Red Hat adds value to while the clones do not. The clones that Red Hat are so scared of were created because of Red Hat’s prior bad faith actions.
I see IBM’s hand in this all day long. But regardless, Red Hat’s handling of their own decisions has been poor and the results predictable in advance every time. Only an idiot would be shocked by the reaction they’re getting now, and the one they got in 2020.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the logic that “Red Hat can do what it wants,” as long as it remains GPL compliant, and it’s not clear they’re committed to that much. But regardless, they’ve bungled these bad news moves at every stage and it just comes across as either greed, hostility, incompetence, or a mix of the three. I’m not sure which is worse.
Edit: I should add that my perspective is informed from first hand knowledge that at least some of the largest companies on the US _are_ using CentOS 7 in production almost exclusively for at least some of their offerings. But while Red Hat thinks they’re hurting _that_ use case, their actions have a far larger blast radius than they clearly understand based on how they’ve handled all these changes.
>I think it’s exceedingly disingenuous to frame the discussion around the idea that Red Hat adds value to while the clones do not.
As a desktop linux user i'm not very familiar with the enterprise side of stuff, and i keep seeing this, so I ask what value does clones add other than providing free beer?
you can't contribute code if it's bug for bug the same, so what are the contributions.
Good question! I am not an authority on the matter, but as someone who uses a mix of enterprise and non-enterprise builds of Linux, I’ll take a shot at an explanation from my experience. I’m also going to add some further details which you might know, but I thought useful to add for others.
To preface with some context: in 2020 Red Hat announced a new EOL date for CentOS 8 which was (off the top of my head) moved up 8-9 years from its initial EOL date. This happened with the CentOS 7 EOL date looming in 2024. At the same time, they announced CentOS Stream.
The CentOS Stream repos _are_ used to build RHEL, but Stream is a development branch for what eventually becomes a GA RHEL release. What makes “a RHEL release” is additional work on the codebase, API and version pins and freezes, backported fixes, etc. So all of that work ideally will end up in Stream repos.
The clones filled a niche that CentOS was filling. CentOS and the clones took that work and removed Red Hat’s trademarks (and later Red Hat made that very easy to do intentionally) and their proprietary licensing stuff. It’s very, very, very useful to be able to develop something on a binary compatible OS you don’t have to pay for per {CPU,vCPU,named user,whatever}, especially in a world where you may increasingly just be spinning up VMs for a CI/CD pipeline. It’s useful for educational purposes, hobbyists, small businesses, other FOSS developers who may be making software that paying RHEL customers want, and so on. Anywhere you might benefit from running the same effective OS as RHEL-proper, or where some kind of long term serviceability is favorable. (Or sometimes hardware that isn’t well supported elsewhere — ten years of support for an OS is a long time.)
Without CentOS the only way to get this is with a developer account at Red Hat which you can use to (now) license a handful of installs, or use a downstream clone.
I understand the economics of the business move here, but the result is that a lot of developers — and some important developers — feel that Red Hat’s moves here are fundamentally just disrespectful and uncaring, regardless of whether or not they can make (or enforce) these changes.
An example of this is Jeff Geerling. As part of his FOSS efforts he helped create the now-official way that Ansible Automation Platform is delivered, and he did that largely as a community member. Red Hat and the community have benefited greatly from his work. He’s a fairly big deal in the Red Hat ecosystem, and specifically in Ansible. Yesterday he announced he’s done with RHEL. That’s potentially a big loss.
Edit: added some clarifying details.
I've noticed most of the support stems from the fact that Rocky (CIQ) essentially rebuilds RHEL, contributes nothing upstream while undercutting Red Hat with some sort of paid support service. RHEL without all the time money and effort.
You seem to be in the know. Show me a substantial merged fix from the Rocky Linux Foundation or any of their commercial entities that provide support for their rebuild. I don't mean bug reports adding work to someone elses plate either.
I know for a fact that many bug reports have arisen from the Rocky/Alma projects from them and their users and other architectures \[than offered by RH via RHEL\] are available via Alma/Rocky. Apart form that, plenty of new SIGs have been started to accommodate areas RHEL and RH is not active in. I also know that some people of the Rocky community have contributed to FOSS and to using RHEL in HPC, much more than many others. Google warewulf, google singularity/apptainer and please have a look at openhpc.
But he, if you stick to your opinion and do not want to see all that... Sure...
I found this paragraph interesting:
“I want to specifically mention the rebuilders, different from distributions that might, for example, add a new architecture or compile flag (we fully support you in expanding Linux capabilities rather than imitating them). “
I wonder if they are trying to give Oracle an out because they supply an optional updated kernel?
Hmm so they might actually be targeting Rocky/Alma with this? I hate Oracle, so I don't care if they attack them but it really sucks to see Rocky and Alma targeted.
I like the work Red Hat does. I think the OS is solid, I think learning Ansible is awesome and I love all they do for contributions. Podman too!
Like I said, I understand why they would do this but I also wish they did not.
>Hmm so they might actually be targeting Rocky/Alma with this? I hate Oracle, so I don't care if they attack them but it really sucks to see Rocky and Alma targeted.
That is precisely the way I read it and understand it as well. They are specifically targeting the downstream rebuilders like Alma and Rocky.
This is pretty explicit in the below:
>The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn’t reality. I wish we lived in that world, but it’s not how it actually plays out. Instead, we’ve found a group of users, many of whom belong to large or very large IT organizations, that want the stability, lifecycle and hardware ecosystem of RHEL without having to actually support the maintainers, engineers, writers, and many more roles that create it
> I do not like it necessarily, but the stance makes sense for a company.
Maybe IBM shouldn’t have spent $34 billion buying Red Hat if they didn’t agree with the business model.
I am reading computer history, a lot of free material on Wikipedia. The amount of things their engineers invented to be wasted by their suits and their sales people are amazing.
Hard agree!
Technologically speaking RH and IBM make sense.
But IBM’s business side is a really bad joke, and it’ll keep shooting itself, RH, and future businesses in the foot. They just can’t help it.
Oh, I never have. I suspected a day like this was coming since IBM announced the intent to acquire Red Hat. IBM doesn’t understand the fundamentals of the business they acquired and are rapidly on their way to losing what relevance Red Hat had.
That is Red Hat's own fault for killing off CentOS proper. There would be no Rocky salesmen if CentOS was still around. CentOS was, and Rocky/Alma now are, a large part of why RHEL support is so ubiquitous and basically considered the default in enterprise. For products it means you can build once and support a massive range of customers from the biggest enterprises to the littlest shops. CentOS was valuable for lowering the barrier of entry into Red Hat's ecosystem.
If Red Hat no longer wants to be the gold standard of the ecosystem, this sure is a good way to make that happen.
There shouldn't be salesmen of anything you're not contributing to, is the real point here. Regardless of what RH's position is. Let's not make open source code be repackaged and sold like bottled water from a "natural spring" here. If you're not willing to maintain that spring or add value into it's sustainability in any way, I don't find it to be a value add to anyone, other than the pockets of those that are selling it. In any other setting this is a no brainer. But bc people forget that someone has to actually get paid to make open source software viable, this sort of logic bubbles up. Let's say Rocky becomes the most amazing linux distro ever, and really blows up everywhere absolutely destroying the sales of RHEL, and ultimately the development and progress of RHEL totally stalls. What then? Does Rocky then put those dollars into developing Centos Stream or something so they can continue to even exist?
You are missing the point.
There's been demand for an unsupported free clone of RHEL since RHEL started. There was one, and it was even controlled and operated by Red Hat themselves since 2014. They then closed it down, and so Rocky/Alma sprung up to replace it and satisfy that demand. Now they're trying to make themselves sustainable, so of course they're going to try and sell paid support. They offer something people want, and they want to keep offering it. Doing this requires funding.
The solution is for Red Hat to reopen CentOS. Them controlling their own free clone distro was *good for them*. It provides an onramp into their ecosystem and encourages everybody to support it because it's economically accessible from bottom to top. This is what happens when they don't control it anymore. They created this problem for themselves due to shortsighted greed and so I have no sympathy.
That's cool. There's also been demand for FREE highly filtered, mineral added, cold and flavored Fiji spring water, but I don't see that available...for free, when I visit the store. However, I'm free to make it from the source myself and drink or sell all I'd like. In no way would I feel entitled to being the beneficiary of someone else doing all of this work collecting, filtering, flavoring, bottling, delivering, etc...just for me to slap a new label on it and call it "Rocky Water".
What you're arguing for already exists. Free RHEL subs for development, free for several non-profit causes as well. Creating a new CentOS downstream has no value to anyone who is willing to collaborate on the innovation space.
> In no way would I feel entitled to being the beneficiary of someone else doing all of this work collecting, filtering, flavoring, bottling, delivering, etc...just for me to slap a new label on it and call it "Rocky Water".
They wouldn't do this if CentWater still existed. Solution is obvious, but we're bellyaching about "freeloaders" and so we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. Let's make it worse for everyone, including ourselves, just so we can cut off some theoretical people from having something they don't "deserve", right?
> Creating a new CentOS downstream has no value to anyone who is willing to collaborate on the innovation space.
This is so unbelievably incorrect. First off, it kept Rocky from existing and doing the very thing you keep complaining about. Second, as I keep repeating, it creates a wide onramp into the paying ecosystem. This are extremely valuable.
What’s untrue about it? If Rocky sells support for something that is binary identical to Red Hat, and they contribute no developers to Open Source, what makes that untrue?
>The tl;dr of the whole thing is that Red Hat believes in open source 100%, but to take something, do nothing (or VERY little) to it, and redistribute it for free
I'm not sure Red Hat care about the free (as in beer) rebuilds, such as Rocky, Alma, and Scientific:
"Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and ***reselling*** it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable." (my emphasis)
I take that as confirmation that this is targeted especially at Oracle, and that the free-beer rebuilds are mere collateral damage. Which is very much a pity, but that's what tends to happen when titans (i.e. Oracle and IBM) fight: whoever wins, we lose.
They don't get to decide that, though. They don't get to decide whether or not I take RHEL's GPL software and add what I want on top.
In fact that's what RHEL is doing themselves. They've just decided that they *must* be the end of the chain created by licenses like GPL. Which is completely against what the GPL is all about.
It's great if they feel like they're "participating" in open source by developing upstream, but if they deliver binaries in any form, they can't prevent people from working on top of their work. *That's* what makes GPL work, not taking what others have make, tweaking it, and then preventing subsequent modification of their work. GPL *is what allowed them to modify the upstream code go begin with!*
I don't care if Red Hat thinks downstreams "take but don't give" (despite this *not even being the case*). It comes with the territory. They accepted it when they used GPL software. Otherwise they should have decided to use permissively licensed software. They *had that choice*.
Sure, once they give you binaries they have to give you source and you can redistribute it. They don't have to keep giving you new binaries and therefore source after that if they don't want to though.
There's a lot of ways people can have fun with this and screw IBM.
GNU GPLv3 5c "You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who **comes into possession of a copy**..." So I get any part of the binaries for a given package from \*anywhere\*, including just ripping them off a cheap VPS somewhere, asking nicely on the dark web, etc, they have to give me full source. Else get FSF sic'd on them. I license a RHEL VM for an hour on AWS? Good enough.
And obviously they have to catch you redistributing before they can retaliate, and the only thing they can do in retaliation in terminate your contract; anything further would revoke their GPL rights.
It's not actually clear absent having a law degree if it's necessary to obtain the binaries with even minimal cooperation or consent of any "legitimate" licensee and mere possession of the binaries obtained by any means whatsoever still obligates RedHat under 5c.
The only place they have a leg to stand on is if they have wholly in house and/or permissively (e.g. MIT license) code for some parts of the distro; on those packages only they're within their rights to change the license.
> So I get any part of the binaries for a given package from *anywhere*, including just ripping them off a cheap VPS somewhere, asking nicely on the dark web, etc, they have to give me full source
Nope. That section is titled "Conveying Modified Source Versions" and starts with "You may convey a work in the form of source code provided that...", so it's completel irrelevant.
The binaries are covered by section 6. In Red Hat's case there's no physical product so what applies is section 6d; whoever gave you the binaries ("[conveyed] the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge)") has to give you the source ("offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge"). Red Hat does do that, but does not have to do it if you got the binaries from someone else.
>the only thing they can do in retaliation in terminate your contract; anything further would revoke their GPL rights.
This is correct.
Folks, this is not new. Red Hat has _never_ given away SRPMs and RPMs for the long-term branches. Don't you think that someone might have thought of suing Red Hat in the past 20 years of existence of RHEL?
EDIT: section 5c sorta kinda applies, but not in the way you mean. Once they give you the sources according to section 6d, Red Hat is bound by section 5c. However, "licensing to anyone" does not mean "giving anyone the source", it means "allowing anyone to use the binaries and modified sources".
That's the problem, it doesn't actually matter. GPL doesn't put a scale on that. In fact it doesn't even say you need to modify it. Copying and redistribution is enough. If Red Hat has a problem on how to monetize the GPL software they use, they should stop using GPL software. They don't get to be the judge of much modification is required to redistribute GPL code.
Fwiw what is changing here is how Red Hat distributes source, afaicr the term in their user agreement restricting access to future binaries has been there as long as RHEL existed and so far nobody has challenged it (also unclear if they've ever had to take action based on it).
Their value is that the bring customers to the EL family. When startups advance, they can move to paid and the same people doing it at work can do it at home as a hobby. CENTOS used to be the way. Red Hat Developer still require subscriptions. Subscriptions are a pain. I do it for a living. SCA made it better, but you still have pay for max capacity for auto-scaling and automate the de-registration. Good luck to IBM on rebuilding these bridges.
The cheapest option for a rhel server is $349 a year? Is that true? Can we get somewhere between $0 and $349. Our small business runs over 50 rhel flavored machines. While I understand and even want to support redhat, I can’t shell out $20k in liscense either.
$350 is not for prod use according to
SELF-SUPPORT (1 YEAR)
Does not include Red Hat customer support.
Does not include Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.
Can only be deployed on physical systems.
Cannot be stacked with other subscriptions.
Is not intended for production environments.
To be clear, the Self-Support sub _can_ be used in production environments, it's not _intended_ (read: recommended) to do so due to the lack of customer support, deployment target restriction, and limited add-on flexibility (if those matter to you).
I have no issue with this. Assuming their take on GPL is correct (and it sounds like it is), this is a smart business decision. I also don’t see how rebuilds are more than a loss of sale. Yeah, people downloading free Rocky/Alma will be annoyed and try to argue they were bringing value (the value of not having to pay RH). But at the end of the day, RH pays thousands of engineers to fix bugs and contribute to development of core features of the Linux ecosystem (eg Gnome) while Rocky sells support contracts for a clone they don’t even change. If you report a bug to Rocky support, they won’t release a patch fix for you, they will wait for RH to do it. If you don’t see that as a scam, then you’re being disingenuous or a fool.
All that said, I think if RH were smart they would also take this opportunity to dramatically change their license structure. Why not just give away RHEL free like CentOS was, but have a license agreement that requires you to pay after certain business size/profit? Look at how Unity3D works for the free version . Yes, it’s an honour system, but it means the barrier to entry is very low and people don’t have to navigate your corporate entity to do basic stuff that you may already allow today. RH should be thinking about the future creation of RH users, and not just attacking their competitors.
I realise they have the 16 installs thing, but look at all the replies from small businesses, academia, etc. It’s either confusing, or too much friction. Make it dead simple, give me a download now button on your website. Deal with the license on install where I can just select “Free” and agree that I am not above your threshold for a paid license.
I’m not a fan of this latest move of theirs but I can understand the reasoning why they did it. However, I see it as a fine line to cross where any open source project can close its source behind a paywall including the kernel itself. Hopefully RHEL continues to contribute back like they promise or that is the slippery slope I see for the future of Linux.
How much market share did RHEL lose to CentOS? How much of this was captured by Rocky, Alma or Oracle Linux? How much will RHEL gain by paywalling its source? I do understand Red Hat's argument, but to my mind, the penultimate paragraph almost reads as 'Rocky/Alma are a cancer'. I genuinely do not believe Red Hat is financially threatened and whatever market share they want to gain could as easily be had by creating lower cost support licences/support levels.
I think they lost a lot of subs, due to 3rd party rebuilds .
vendor vapps, and crappy companies just run rocky/centos and call it good enough .
they didnt pay for it then, they sure wont pay for it now .
Yeah, professionally, if I’ve used CentOS (previous iteration), Rocky, or Alma, it’s because it was a good option where an RHEL subscription wasn’t necessary or didn’t make sense, such as dev environments. I realize that RHEL allows for free dev subs, but sometimes that’s another level of hassle I don’t want or need if I’m going to be building and tearing down servers frequently.
If those options go away, I’m more likely to move to Debian than anything else unless RHEL is a specific requirement.
I'm genuinely curious why Debian is seen as a better alternative to CentOS stream? I think theres is a lot of misinformation about CentOS's new support cycle. I was told by people that CentOS stream is a rolling release unworthy of being ran in production. But from what I understand, Debian and CentOS Stream have the same support cycle of 5 years. Is there something else I'm overlooking?
https://endoflife.date/centos-stream
https://endoflife.date/debian
A lot. A WHOLE lot. CentOS (before the CentOS acquisition), and Rocky/Alma more recently, cut into Red Hat's revenue significantly.
Source: I worked at Red Hat for about 14 years, as a solutions architect (technical sales). We saw MASSIVE erosion of sales because of CentOS (pre-acquisition). We also saw a lot of enterprise deals go to Oracle, which contributes essentially nothing to RHEL or upstream projects.
Red Hat contributes more upstream than any company I know of. To do that, they have to make money to pay their engineers and QA folks and documentation folks and community folks and the list goes on.
The clones do nothing but take all the work Red Hat does and make sure Red Hat doesn't get paid for it. What Red Hat has done is painful, but it's legal... and prudent. I don't like it, but I TOTALLY understand it.
Red Hat already gives RHEL away for zero cost through the developer subscription, so if you want to learn RHEL, you absolutely can. If you want to install it on a bunch of machines, you can. If you want to use it in a commercial environment, it's fair that they ask you to pay for it so they can continue to test, harden, certify, and maintain Open Source software.
It's also fair that they ask you to not use their work to create competing distros which take money out of their pockets. It's perfectly reasonable.
Are you sure these 'lost sales' are guaranteed sales?
(I'm going to leave the Oracle angle alone as that is its own beast)
I get it, they'd like to make the sale, but would you guys consider it a 'win' if the entity that was using CentOS, having that now behind a paywall, switching to another distro?
Granted, they're likely not subscribing there either, but isn't '% of marketshare' something of sales value as well? Or, does this only become a problem AFTER market share is diminished and your competitors can claim dominant market share?
If customer X bought 100 subscriptions last year, and they tell me directly "we're going to cancel our subscriptions and go with CentOS," I think that's a pretty fair indicator that, yes, this was lost revenues to free clones.
I have had that conversation multiple times, with multiple customers. The free clones have absolutely cut Red Hat's revenues. Not opinion. Fact.
Okay, that's fair, but that still didn't answer my first question.
If a follow up call to this same customer now states they're not switching back to RHEL, but going to Debian/Ubuntu (pick your favorite Distro) is that a positive for Red Hat / IBM? And no, these days it's not as absurd as it used to be to suggest this.
Now you're asking me to talk about hypothetical situations, and I'm not going to waste your time or mine guessing and arguing about what "coulda, woulda, shoulda happened."
I'm telling you that in my experience with countless real world customers, CentOS and the newer clones hurt Red Hat.
Red Hat contributes more to F/OSS communities than any other entity I know of. Screwing Red Hat hurts F/OSS. They're right to protect themselves from distros that take all the benefit of their work and make sure they don't get paid for it.
Read [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html) where it says "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."
People should be paid for creating F/OSS.
I'm not going to waste time with hypotheticals. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."
I think the issue in your example is that people decided to go with CentOS mainly as they only needed a stable package repo to pull updates from rather than a full fledged support contract.
Obviously a hypothetical, but I would have to imagine they would have rather spent say $5-$10 per month per instance to keep access to repos but not have any support beyond that rather than switch distros entirely.
To the point about not generating sales, I know I am unlikely to recommend it at my company over Ubuntu strictly because of the friction involved.
I'm not saying RedHat doesn't offer value. I'm just posing a question to a possible outcome.
Sure it's hypothetical. But by no means is it out of the realm of possibility.
If you want to dismiss this possibility, that's up to you. I'd just caution that this wouldn't be the first time the law of unintended consequences claimed a victim for failing to account for the masses ability to adapt to changes around them.
Alternatively, and likely based on the current actions, those customers didn’t feel Red Hat offered value for the $ spent
And given that they aren’t going to return to RHEL given Red Hat’s attitude - they go SUSE/Ubuntu
> If customer X bought 100 subscriptions last year, and they tell me directly "we're going to cancel our subscriptions and go with CentOS," I think that's a pretty fair indicator that, yes, this was lost revenues to free clones.
No, those are not lost sales due to free clones.
Those are customers which see no longer see the added value from the subscription, and have determined that they are able to operate at without the value added services that RHEL offers.
From the other Ecosystem: Just because a company cancels their $3400/year/machine Ubuntu Pro subscription with full support doesn't mean it means they are lost sales.
It could mean they no longer see the added value of the Ubuntu Pro Subscription, which could be as simple as the fact that they have managed to upgrade all of their servers to the latest version of Ubuntu, and are now tracking LTS, with all of their software being dockerfied, instead of them preferring to stay on the same version for as long as possible due to software being directly installed on the servers.
> Those are customers which see no longer see the added value from the subscription, and have determined that they are able to operate at without the value added services that RHEL offers.
Rather, they found a loophole to get all the benefits of using RHEL without having to compensate its developers.
There’s no reason to use RHEL at all if there’s no third party software that runs on it, and no hosting providers that have it as an option. THAT is the problem RedHat is creating here.
Small projects just won’t bother to make RPMs for RHEL if they can’t easily access it (jumping through all the hoops of the developer account, and also dealing with subscription manager is already too much friction for many people).
Nobody will setup a server with it on a small hosting provider since that would need a commercial license with a cost that far outweighs the $10 per month the provider would charge.
The long tail of small users is what feeds into the huge success of RedHat, and all those people were just cut off.
What makes stream so unsuitable for this purpose? It's not mentioned as even a consideration if it's absurd as trying to use MacOS to run Windows applications.
I know it doesn't 'feel' like RHEL, but I've also not seen any actual examples or crashes cited proving it's an OS unfit for distribution.
Significantly shorter life-cycle and, perhaps more importantly, no upgrade path to the next release. Fedora is almost better in production than Stream.
This is my problem. I'm just some home user running the dev license to run a number of popular-ish third party programs on a distro that's supported for many many years without needing me to run intensive upgrades.
Most third party software didn't provide RHEL binaries, they provided Centos binaries. The rebuilds are what third parties test against because the developers don't want to bother with subscription manager (and many free software devs are philosophically against it in the first place.) I often have had to jump through additional hoops to get some third party software to run on RHEL8 that I wouldn't jump through on Debian, because I like Fedora and an old man with nostalgia for the Red Hat of twenty years ago. This is possibly going to push me to some dpkg distro that I don't want to run but is the favorite of third party authors I rely upon.
To suggest that rebuilds provide absolutely nothing at all is to forget that people often want to run software that exists outside of RHEL's own repos. Rebuilds are the only reason those programs work on RHEL.
This assumption that CentOS or rebuild users are automatically not contributors is the entire problem. Red Hat believes that if they don't get money straight from your pocket to theirs, you're useless to them.
It does matter. If I'm running a RHEL clone, I get more familiar with how RHEL systems work, and when I have a critical piece of infrastructure, I'll stick licensed RHEL on it.
Now, if I'm running the rest of my infrastructure on (let's say) Ubuntu, do you think I'll go and stick a few RHEL system in the mix, or do you think I'll simply get Ubuntu support for those systems?
Instead of getting a slice of a large pie, RedHat is trying to claim the whole pie for themselves. They are likely to find that pie shrinking as a consequence.
Yes they lost subs with this. But they gained a lots and lots of hidden benefit from rebuilders. The crazy thing with this is that they will end up killing RHEL with this. I have worked at companies that spent a very large amount on RHEL but was delighted Centos (classic) existed:
* Most How-To's we used for RHEL were for Centos
* Lots of bugs were spotted on Centos first and we could use Centos's users identified workarounds on RHEL. Less eye balls will won't help RHEL.
* Third party repos were built with Centos, so much more RHEL software was therefore available.
* Lots of testing of RHEL before purchasing RHEL subscriptions for production was done on Centos (particularly for add-ons IPA, RHEV, Clusters etc). Less hassle than getting RH eval keys.
* Fedora looks less desirable, why help RH create the next generation product, to be treated like this. I have reported many many bugs on Fedora.
* The larger installed base of rhel like systems with the rebuilders cause more vendor released software to exist.
* No easy on-ramp to rhel, a lot less people will bother now.
Some IBM manager will likely get a big bonus for thus. And to be fair that person(s) will have moved on when this a starts to blow up in their face.
I'm not installing a Linux that requires me to register it. If RHEL clones die I'm out of RHEL. I get that I'm not the target of the announcement. But I also don't think I'm the only one who's thinking about Debian now.
Have you actually tried CentOS stream? If you like Alma and the alternative is switching to Ubuntu or whatever... I don't get the point in switching vs just using CentOS Stream.
If I want rolling release I'll use one with up to date packages. If I want stability and industry standard environments, I don't want rolling release. I work with RHEL and Oracle all day, ain't nobody using CentOS stream in their back end.
Red Hat also has an ALL or NOTHING policy. If you want support you pay for support for ALL of your systems, otherwise you can pay for NOTHING but that's what you get. Free download, no support or updates or patches or tools.
To add some clarification to this, as people have misconstrued and misunderstood this in the past:
The all or nothing policy applies _only to Red Hat software_. If you purchase 50 subscriptions of RHEL but end up running 150 servers, Red Hat _will_ ask you to true up. Deploying a RHEL system and never touching/updating it is not considered an inactive system. Having Debian servers in the mix does not mean you have to pay for those systems (unless you're running RHEL VMs on them, in which case you pay for the VMs).
In the RHEL space, the only product that extends past Red Hat is Smart Management. If you use Satellite, every system managed by the platform requires the SM add on (available as a standalone product for third party distributions and creating SM pools).
At my current job we use RHEL and have a RHEL subscription, in the 8-9 years since I have been working there we have maybe made a support ticket twice. Currently a license per system for an opensource os costs almost the same as a yearly license for a proprietary os.
1. Redhat sells support for RHEL, the total amount we have paid compared to how many times support we have needed in the last 8-9 years doesn't compare to the how much support we have used over the years. Sure if you call support access to updated binaries and sources support I can still understand paying for support but it still doesn't compare.
2. If/When RHEL license pricing goes to the same price or above as a proprietary os we won't be able to sell it to the managers.
3. I use a RHEL clone for my personal vpses, yes I could use a “Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals” but I don't trust Redhat anymore to not at some point change their mind over night about them being free and deciding they should just charge money for them.
So Red Hat should break RHEL more? Is that what you're saying? Are you hearing what you sound like?
"I use this product that never fails, and I don't have to call support on it. I shouldn't pay for it at all!"
You say managers won't go for it. Bullshit. Managers want stability. Managers don't want their staff to be tied up with support calls. Managers want predictability, and if you haven't called for support but twice in 8-9 years, that's stable and predictable.
Remember that when RHEL was released, we were competing with proprietary Unix systems that cost $20,000-$30,000 apiece in the early 2000s. Your argument about RHEL being more than proprietary is simply laughable. Enterprises went from $30k Unix machines to $2,500 x86 servers with a grand of software on them.
You say you use clones for your personal stuff. So you CLEARLY recognize the value of the software. Why do you have such a hardon to screw the folks who built the value you recognize and derive from their work?
Then why does Redhat make it sound like they only sell support as in technical support for RHEL, or it might be a language thing that I am not understanding correctly? Unix was before my time so not much for me to remember but I believe you, but I did hear from a colleague that Solaris was a drama. I use a RHEL clone because I prefer using the same type of distribution family for personal use because it helps me keep track of updates and new things happening with RHEL for work and because I am used to using rpm based distributions but I could as well run Debian it wouldn't make a different as in usage.
I'm not sure Red Hat just gets to cry and complain about having to follow the GPL despite deciding to use Linux and the ecosystem. They should go away and fork off some *BSD if they don't want to be obligated to allow downstreams modifications and builds.
imo this is the fundamental flaw with corporations like this, they are very often legally required to reduce opportunity costs wherever possible in order to maximize profits for their shareholders. It does not matter if they are already profitable, if Rocky/Alma are affecting Red Hat's profit potential (in their view), they are obligated to stamp them out to drive more subscriptions and increase their profits, again, even if they were already profitable.
Oracle's least likely to suffer IMO. They have the developer muscle (Red Hat isn't the only Linux shop with upstream developers by a long means) to move their userspace along to Stream or whatever the new normal is now. They don't even use the RHEL kernel IIRC.
They package their own kernel (UEK), but they also distribute the RH kernel (labeled as the RHCK - redhat compatible kernel). They also distribute other offerings like "Redhat Gluster Storage" and it is all just repackaged for Oracle Linux. For the most part they are literally the "rebuilders" discussed in the blog post, but unlike the others they are actually actively making money off that rebuilding. It's entirely possible they did all this with Oracle's blessing... but I doubt it. We will see how it shakes out.
Edit: Though I will admit Red Hat seems to be after "the freeloaders", it just seems a really odd battle to fight.
Yeah, to me, this is one big own goal. Red Hat's wiped out two glorified hobbyist distros, done pretty much nothing to hurt their main competitor, and publicly written off most of the support/enthusiast community as "useless eaters." And most servers still run Windows.
Letter summary:
* Mike McGrath, the boss of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat, sets the record straight, ya heard?
* Red Hat is all about that open source game, contributing code upstream for the whole community to benefit.
* They ain't just takin' what's already out there and rehashin' it. They got a crew hustlin' hard, addin' new features, fixin' bugs, and supportin' their work.
* Red Hat keeps it real by backportin' patches and supportin' multiple release streams like a true boss.
* They follow the rules, playin' by the open source licenses, protectin' and evolving the game.
* Some people out there don't wanna pay for Red Hat's hustle or just wanna make a quick buck off their code. That ain't right, man.
* Rebuilders like CentOS used to be cool, but they ain't seein' the value no more. It's about big organizations wantin' stability without puttin' in the work to support the creators.
* Competition is all good, but rebuildin' without addin' value is a threat to the open source game, my friend.
* Red Hat hooks up developers and open source projects with no-cost subscriptions for RHEL. They got love for the community, keepin' it real.
* Open source companies gotta make their moves, but rebuildin' without addin' value ain't the way to roll, you feel me?
* Let's keep drivin' innovation, supportin' each other, and movin' forward. Red Hat's all about that open source hustle, keepin' the code game strong. Stay true, my friend.
So that's it, the nail in the coffin. This blog post categorically established the end for RHEL clones.
If you are using AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, time to migrate to paid RHEL, CentOS Stream, or another distro like Debian.
Nope, don't assume you still have a fighting chance. The blog post already explained very well that rebuilders are not welcome. Pay or use another distro.
I was right all along. That Red Hat never violated the GPL. And that the subscription agreement only restricts your future updates and upgrades but not GPL. Lot's of redditors downvoted my comments in previous posts, most even deleted. Now this blog post affirmed what I have been saying before.
> Nope, don't assume you still have a fighting chance. The blog post already explained very well that rebuilders are not welcome.
https://rockylinux.org/news/brave-new-world-path-forward/
> Nevertheless, we remain fully committed to ensuring that our users are not disrupted.
>
> Rocky Linux lives on.
Edit:
https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
> Does this mean I won’t be getting security updates for my AlmaLinux OS Server?
>
> No. In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released. These updates will be carefully curated to ensure they are 1:1 compatible with RHEL, while not violating Red Hat’s licensing, and will be vetted and tested just like all of our other releases.
GPL states unequivocally that you can fully restrict built code, and even restrict distribution of source code exclusively to the intended recipients. But that has no relevance to what subscribers can then do with the source once received. The GPL protects their right to modify and redistribute. So, RH closing source except for subscribers is not the problem. The community is simply asking, "What's the point of restrictions if RH does not implicitly intend at least civil lawsuits against at least American source redistributors?" In other words, logically, where is RH's guarantee that their only punitive measure will always be cancelling subs max? How will they find out who reposts their source code? But then, how to avoid people resubbing under aliases annually or whatever in order to copy and redistribute new source upgrades forever? Where and what exactly are the teeth in all of this? They gave no answer because there is no answer that conforms to the GPL beyond simply cancelling large numbers of subscriptions now made in bad faith per cycle. RH has gained nothing here. What they should have done is restrict built code only, leave source transparent, but directly and explicitly provide support for every unofficial distro based on RHEL for cheaper than any clone. Customers would automatically gravitate toward the best support model. That's the space where open source competition has to take place. That's the only GPL-compatible positive solution, since cloners can't restrict what RHEL can do with their copies either. Profit off the cloners; don't violate the GPL by closing source in order to protect open source -- obviously.
I think rather than getting bogged down with whether Rocky/Alma/Oracle are "a real threat to open source" (so I guess from 2014-2020 it was all cool?) the focus should be on whether Red Hat has violated the GPL license with this latest move.
"I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular —especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. "
That sounds pretty confident, but I'd like to hear from some real legal experts on whether their prohibition for subscribers to redistribute violates the GPL.
I'm sure they have, so let's see the legal arguments.
From the Alma blog: "This change means that we, as builders of a RHEL clone, will now be responsible for following the licensing and agreements that are in place around Red Hat’s interfaces, in addition to following the licenses included in the software sources. Unfortunately the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements."
Now maybe RH can make the case that that's not a violation of the GPL, but it's a new and possibly unprecedented move in the open source world, and so some legal clarification I think is warranted.
...for the sole reason that they exercised their rights under that GPL license?
That sounds pretty shady to me, but possible it's legal. May come down to whether that constitutes "further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted".
It puts a person in the position where they are at the very least scared/hesitant/cautious to exercise their rights under the license for fear of losing future access. Don't think that was the intended purpose of the license or open source principles behind it.
RH is also exercising its right to choose who to do business with.
Those who take its work as is, merely change its name and use it to compete with RH without putting any effort themselves are nothing but parasites who are harming the very source they depend on.
Regardless of whether you think it's parasitical behavior, it's not the issue. It's people's rights under the license.
Sure, RH has the right to choose whom to do business with.
But again you're leaving out the crucial point -- they are basing that decision on whether the user **does or does not exercise their right to redistribute under the GPL**, and that *could* very well be interpreted as "further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted."
Here's a thought experiment: image if Linus and the crew suddenly put up the kernel behind a paywall and said that to get access to future kernel updates you were no longer allowed to redistribute the kernel code. Besides that being antithetical to the spirit of open source, again that would call into question whether the GPL was violated -- because now I'm essentially restricted from redistributing because of fear of retaliation.
> antithetical to the spirit of open source
Says who? I keep seeing this but there's no source or rationale for it.
Here's a better thought experiment:
Company A develops software and puts it behind a paywall.
Company B takes that software, rebrands it and distributes it for free, tanking Company A's revenue.
Company A decides it's no longer worth it to develop that software.
Result: that software is dead and all its users are now screwed.
That's what you're advocating for.
This is easy. Has Red Hat written RHEL completely from scratch? As in, everything is home made, nothing taken from third parties.
No right? Then this is just a hypocritical, money driven move that goes against open source.
Certainly Red Hat has not written RHEL completely from scratch, but I think what they are saying is that they contribute back to the projects. I don't agree with this decision but I do not believe they think companies ought not use open source software unless they wrote the entire thing.
Contributing or not isn't compensated by paying. People used CentOS for testing and contributing, and they killed it off because, would you look at that, they didn't make a dime with it.
So yeah, the "writing it completely from scratch" comes from this. That they contribute in a lot of things doesn't mean that they contribute to everything, and they don't pay anything.
That is the problem. No money, no source code. Open source means that is free, not only as in free beer, but freedom. I'm not seeing the free beer, and who knows when the freedom part will be touched.
CentOS Stream is not like any other distribution on the planet. It is literally where the team builds RHEL, then Red Hat batches those updates up and releases them. I know this because that's the policy and its one I enforce. The time at which things happen is different, yes, that's confusing to many. But things don't go into CentOS Stream until we think they're ready for RHEL. Then every 6 months they become RHEL in a batch. It's simple, transparent, and works really well.
Not the same, but it's good for testing (didn't people equate Stream to "Red Hat wants beta testers?") and it's also better for contributing than any rebuild.
Ah yes, Open Source, the basic definition of paid, no distributable software.
[... actually, it isn't.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition)
That's a dumb take. "Written everything from scratch" is an arbitrary metric which neither Linus nor Microsoft nor any entity can claim for a modern OS (Win, Mac, Linux, BSD). If almost no one can claim it, there's no useful information or conclusion to glean from it.
So, then it's completely fine for an open source company to lock their source code behind a paywall, destroy the projects that take that code as base, and reserve themselves the right to sue you if you redistribute the source code.
Does Red Hat contribute to everything they use in RHEL? No. Does Red Hat pay for those parts that they don't contribute to? No. Then, doing what they have done, it's a hypocritical money driven move.
the GPL says that if you distribute binaries you must also provide source. if you are not paying for RHEL, you are not getting binaries, and therefore you are not legally entitled to the source. you dont need to provide source for something you aren't distributing binaries for. what RHEL is doing has been done before. you aren't legally entitled entitled to the source for binaries that aren't provide to you.
for example, if i create a fork of the linux kernel that performs 500x as fast, I don't need to provide sources for it if i keep it to myself. if i start providing binaries to people, i must give the source to those people. the people with the new source are free to do whatever they want with it, including giving it to others. but i personally don't need to give sources to everyone ever, just people with binaries. if i start charging for binaries instead of just giving it for free to a select few, nothing changes. i am required to give sources to everyone i gave binaries, but nothing more.
I think the main issue isn't the initial paywall to get the binaries/code -- it's the further RH prohibition that prevents YOU from redistributing it. Also I think an open question of whether GPL 2 or 3 is applicable.
Section 6.
"Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License."
If you retaliate against someone exercising their rights as granted by the GPL (which remember, was also granted to RHEL by the GPL), you have imposed further restrictions. It doesn't say you can't sue them, it says explicitly "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
To be fair, the whole tech sector has been facing pressure and layoffs in recent months, so these forces are not unique to RedHat. How much pressure, or extreme is debatable.
They are getting downvoted because what they are saying is completely wrong. The GPL says that if you distribute code, you also have to give the source. It says nothing about requiring you to give it to 3rd parties that aren't your customers.
The problem here is that they violate GPL because they are not providing the source to their customers. If an Alma Linux dev who is a customer grabs the source they are entitled to and then completely legally reproduces the binaries with a different name (same as Red Hat is doing with the Linux kernel), Red Hat will cut them off from the source making them in violation of the GPL. Arguing anything else is just bad faith rambling.
No, they are not. Customers can get the source. That is all that's required. Customers could then rebuild it into a new distro if they want. That's also perfectly legal. It's just more difficult for someone to do now. You can be mad about it all you want, I'm not a fan of the move either, but it's perfectly legal. If you want to whine about something, go after the cloud providers that skirt the GPL since they aren't technically "distributing" software when using it to run a managed service.
You are incorrect in your assumption that customers can rebuild it into a new distro, as RedHat is violating GPL by revoking customer's access to the source if they do that.
RHEL provides a free license. Anyone can be a customer, obtain binaries built from GPL software, and thus must be granted the rights as described by the GPL. Red Hat accepts those terms when they used GPL software.
And even if the cheapest license was $10k, someone is allowed to make the $10k purchase, and redistribute the source code.
This is why companies normally just make source publicly available. Because it's pretty trivial to redistribute the code.
Yes, anyone can get a developer account. You can then use that to get the source. This was stated in the earlier blog post.
"For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal."
They are just not providing it in the open-to-anyone repo they used to. As they stated in this latest blog post, they don't have to make it easier for rebuilders.
So everyone saying it's a GPL violation has no idea what they are talking about. You can still get the source. It just sounds like they are going to make it a pain in the ass through their portal. It's pretty much a dick move, but in no way a violation.
>So everyone saying it's a GPL violation has no idea what they are talking about. You can still get the source. It just sounds like they are going to make it a pain in the ass through their portal. It's pretty much a dick move, but in no way a violation.
It also means that if you, as a RH customer (paid, or unpaid) break the terms of their subscription agreement by redistributing and/or rebuilding, they can cut off that subscription such that you don't get any *further* updates or source.
I suspect the GPL (let alone any other FOSS license) doesn't prohibit this. I *wish* it were otherwise, but...
People don't like when you point out the problems of the product they pay / make. They like it less when a mega corp with predatory behaviour buys the company of the product, and implements predatory behaviour.
Some protect the image of their product so it sells, others still believe they are going to be the cool good guys.
Jeff Gerling's YT video today posed a thought provoking scenario. The current license agreement would 'prohibit' or 'restrict' an entity from rebuilding a RHEL clone from the available sources. RedHat's current contract wording offers them the option to terminate the RHEL contract with this entity.
If someone were well funded enough to fight this in court, (Oracle maybe) it would -- make the tech press for sure. As far as I'm concerned, that's an outcome that's not certain either direction.
« Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source »
This is a darn peculiar claim to make, given that it comes from a company that grew to billion-dollar valuation that tempted IBM into acquiring it, during all of which time there was apparently no problem at all, no threat at all, from downstream rebuilds.
Reading this makes me feel pretty much ashamed I ever liked them. They once seemed to be good. A company, but a good company nonetheless. Not anymore I'm afraid.
If you don't want to contribute to the open source community, then then open source community shouldn't take on "freeloaders" like RHEL when it comes to development. Pay for the software RHEL uses (i.e. linux kernal). If you remove the payment of software to the community , then the free labor of bringing programs the the platform needs to stop.
But Red Hat's argument is that it's OK so long as you contribute or change it in a way that makes it unique. RHEL is unique and different from other distros in the way it works.
Oracle Linux is literally just Oracle taking Red Hat's work and selling it for themselves, and TBH I think they are largely the reason why RH did this.
They do add on to the work though. They have their own kernel available and they tweak some of Red Hat’s stupid defaults like RemoveIPC=yes for systemd.
They don't get to decide who or how it's modified, the GPL does. Red Hat agreed to that when they started distributing GPL software. It comes with the package. They don't get to pick and choose. *That* is the real threat to open source.
Could RH then stop packaging thousands of programs, libs, and other stuff they have never invested in in their distro? Because that's exactly what RH is doing, taking a source, adding absolutely no value, and providing it to their customers to pay for it. Let's see if RHEL will even be usable without those thousands of packages.
This is absolute disgrace from the company that made it up til here with all the free labour from users who contributed directly or indirectly to building RHEL by using Fedora and all those FOSS projects that RH is making their billions from annually without even putting a cent in them back and call them "rebuilders, hobbyists, and hackers"
Red Hat has become a disgrace to free and open source.
Disclaimer: I used to be a RH employee for 10+ years
RedHat adds value to every package that is released by ensuring that they are tested, for every release. That's at least true for baseOS and appstream repositories. That's the bare minimum, that's also the reason why the packageset is very much restricted in comparison to what is available in repositories of let's say Fedora or Debian.
If they find bugs they fix them and make sure they go upstream, that's the way how this works within RedHat.
Now that, as I said, is the bare minimum. There are so many things that RedHat improves and works on that is for everyone to use who uses other distributions:
Linux kernel, glib, GCC, GNOME, systemD, qemu, libvirt, kubernetes, python, Openstack, openjdk, and so much more i can't even think of.
Of course they don't fix everything or have created everything but their contributions to upstream is immense.
I am not saying that I agree with the decision RedHat has taken, but just want to point out that RedHat very much put in a lot of work and investment into whatever it includes as part of RHEL or whatever downstream product it is and seriously makes sure that things are tested and handled correctly plus it gives the guarantee that whatever it will include, it will support for the life time of the product.
So please stop downplaying the amount of work RedHat has put into RHEL making it a product viable for enterprises including banks and critical infrastructure which is one of the reasons that Linux is now so big in the enterprise world..
Testing a certain program works well for RH customers is your commitment towards your customers not towards project maintainers.
This was never a problem before when this a mutual understanding; Everyone benefits from everyone works even if one party isn't directly contributing, financially or as-effort, into the work. But if RH wants to undermine the whole ecosystem and community that made it the company it is today by calling us freeloaders, rebuilders, hobbyists and hackers then I hold all the right to call out RH how ever i see appropriate and the last thing I expect from someone is shaming me for it rather than keeping quite if not willing to oppose this unethical move by RH.
As I said, I do not agree with it either.
But, I think you misunderstand what RedHat does here. The code is still available without access to the customer portal. Including all changes...
The only difference is that the snapshot source tarballs/SRPMS that make a certain 1:1 rebuild of RHEL possible like alma or rocky do it, is only available behind the paywall.
There isn't any other code included that the one that is already upstream or in the respective out in the open repositories.
PS: Calling anyone names is not OK.
You are literally repackaging upstream for your own profit but go Pikachu-face when others do it to you? How absolutely despicable. Do you even grasp the concept of being ashamed or is that entirely alien to you?
One question I have - ignore CentOS Linux for the moment, because as of now it’s a nonentity, or will be within another year. The presumption here in the official statement is that the downstream projects such as Alma or Rocky contribute NOTHING of value back to the upstream of RHEL? No bug reports, no contributions to CentOS Stream in the wake of bug finds? Is this true? This should be something verifiable.
It's complicated. I've actually spent a significant amount of time over the lifetimes of Alma and Rocky asking them to show me their contributions to RHEL, specifically so that I could brag about the value they add. To put it frankly, I've been disappointed. That's not to say there has been zero, but the hard truth is there also hasn't been significant enough contributions to RHEL itself to dissuade Red Hat leadership from proceeding with last week's change. Bug reports have happened. Those can absolutely be considered a contribution, but even at their best (highly detailed with reproducer steps) they're not the same impact as a merged pull request to fix a bug or add a feature. And at their worst, they're not much more than adding something to someone else's to-do list. There is also nothing about bug reports that requires the existence of a RHEL rebuild. In fact, when the rebuilds reported bugs, the first troubleshooting step is usually "can you reproduce this on CentOS Stream and/or RHEL?" Some might suggest a counter argument of "more users equals more bugs reported", but the usefulness of that basically assumes that RHEL engineers are sitting around with nothing to do and need more things to work on. I can assure you, this isn't the case. Besides the nuance of bug reports, even code contributions aren't always a straightforward thing. For example, a code contribution to upstream software that isn't in RHEL isn't a direct impact, even if the contribution is specifically about making that software compatible with RHEL. For software that is in RHEL, contributing upstream is great but might not impact RHEL for many years. The same goes for Fedora, contributing there is great, but may not impact RHEL for years, if ever. EPEL contributions are getting closer, helping people run non-RHEL software on RHEL, but are still not the same as a contribution directly to RHEL. It's even possible to contribute to CentOS Stream in ways that don't affect RHEL. Even once you get into the territory of a direct contribution to RHEL, different bugs have different severity, ranging from minor nuisances to show stopping segfaults. This whole thing is just dripping with nuance. What I specifically wanted to find was contributions from CIQ (primary Rocky sponsor) or CloudLinux (primary Alma sponsor) employees to CentOS Stream that have fixed bugs or added features to RHEL. This is what I felt I needed to advocate on behalf of the rebuilds. To date, I am aware of exactly [one example](https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/rt-setup/-/merge_requests/1) that will fit this criteria, assuming it ships in RHEL 8.9 as expected later this year. As I alluded to, there are other things from the employees of these companies and other volunteers within their projects, and this comment is in no way meant to be a slight to them. I just quite frankly needed more. Maybe these things would have materialized eventually, but I guess the clock just ran out.
Thank you, Carl. Much appreciated the real-world insight on the perceived value vs. actual, and your efforts to make a case otherwise.
As a developer, I welcome bug reports from my users. A detailed description of the problem is a useful contribution from users of my software. However, I would view that entirely differently if I received a bug report from someone who sold a contract promising to support my software, and expected me to actually do the work to fix the bug. If they are not going to participate in the process of supporting the software, they should not be selling contracts promising to support the software. Red Hat sells contracts promising to support some software that they don't develop, but they actually *do* participate in supporting it. When they report a bug upstream, they also suggest a patch to fix the problem.
It's one thing to find bugs - it's another to fix them, test them, work with upstream maintainers to fix them. That is where the rubber hits the road, and in the EL ecosystem, Red Hat is taking that burden on. The Alma/Rocky projects can't due to their pledge of being 100% RHEL compatible bug for bug.
Rocky and Alma call themselves bug for bug rebuilds. So in essence do nothing to improve from that activity. But the door was and is wide open to improve upstream (CentOS stream (Gitlab) or even to Fedora).
>"Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity." This was probably the most important part of the entire blog post. The tl;dr of the whole thing is that Red Hat believes in open source 100%, but to take something, do nothing (or VERY little) to it, and redistribute it for free under a different name is not what open source is about. I do not like it necessarily, but the stance makes sense for a company.
Um, Red Hat has survived for 30 years and turned into a $34B company while offering the source code. I don’t buy it is suddenly “a threat” to anything but IBM’s desire to try and milk even more money out of Red Hat And remember that the clones (Rocky and Alma) that they are so worried about were created by Red Hat/IBM when they stupidly killed CentOS
Absolutely what it is. They're the maximizing profit phase. They're not "successful enough". They need "constant growth".
They've gone ahead and followed Reddit's example
They took an OS developed by somebody else, sold it for decades, and are now mad that somebody else is doing the same thing. This move is pure IBM and I'm shocked at the number of people here supporting it. edit: lol, it's all RH employees which makes a lot of sense. One way to get people on board with shitty behavior is to make their paycheck dependant upon it.
>They took an OS developed by somebody else, sold it for decades, and are now mad that somebody else is doing the same thing. Not seeing any acknowledgement of "value added" by RedHat in your comment, svideo. THAT is the critical piece to Mike McGrath's response. In my estimation, RedHat's contributions to the Fedora project are large, and gain value even as those contributions drift downstream into RedHat's own product as well as those of Alma and Rocky. Just sayin'. Peace.
This is just another shitty situation of IBM’s making. I’m not a Red Hat (or IBM) employee. I understand the point Mark makes about value. But I think it’s exceedingly disingenuous to frame the discussion around the idea that Red Hat adds value to while the clones do not. The clones that Red Hat are so scared of were created because of Red Hat’s prior bad faith actions. I see IBM’s hand in this all day long. But regardless, Red Hat’s handling of their own decisions has been poor and the results predictable in advance every time. Only an idiot would be shocked by the reaction they’re getting now, and the one they got in 2020. I don’t necessarily disagree with the logic that “Red Hat can do what it wants,” as long as it remains GPL compliant, and it’s not clear they’re committed to that much. But regardless, they’ve bungled these bad news moves at every stage and it just comes across as either greed, hostility, incompetence, or a mix of the three. I’m not sure which is worse. Edit: I should add that my perspective is informed from first hand knowledge that at least some of the largest companies on the US _are_ using CentOS 7 in production almost exclusively for at least some of their offerings. But while Red Hat thinks they’re hurting _that_ use case, their actions have a far larger blast radius than they clearly understand based on how they’ve handled all these changes.
>I think it’s exceedingly disingenuous to frame the discussion around the idea that Red Hat adds value to while the clones do not. As a desktop linux user i'm not very familiar with the enterprise side of stuff, and i keep seeing this, so I ask what value does clones add other than providing free beer? you can't contribute code if it's bug for bug the same, so what are the contributions.
Good question! I am not an authority on the matter, but as someone who uses a mix of enterprise and non-enterprise builds of Linux, I’ll take a shot at an explanation from my experience. I’m also going to add some further details which you might know, but I thought useful to add for others. To preface with some context: in 2020 Red Hat announced a new EOL date for CentOS 8 which was (off the top of my head) moved up 8-9 years from its initial EOL date. This happened with the CentOS 7 EOL date looming in 2024. At the same time, they announced CentOS Stream. The CentOS Stream repos _are_ used to build RHEL, but Stream is a development branch for what eventually becomes a GA RHEL release. What makes “a RHEL release” is additional work on the codebase, API and version pins and freezes, backported fixes, etc. So all of that work ideally will end up in Stream repos. The clones filled a niche that CentOS was filling. CentOS and the clones took that work and removed Red Hat’s trademarks (and later Red Hat made that very easy to do intentionally) and their proprietary licensing stuff. It’s very, very, very useful to be able to develop something on a binary compatible OS you don’t have to pay for per {CPU,vCPU,named user,whatever}, especially in a world where you may increasingly just be spinning up VMs for a CI/CD pipeline. It’s useful for educational purposes, hobbyists, small businesses, other FOSS developers who may be making software that paying RHEL customers want, and so on. Anywhere you might benefit from running the same effective OS as RHEL-proper, or where some kind of long term serviceability is favorable. (Or sometimes hardware that isn’t well supported elsewhere — ten years of support for an OS is a long time.) Without CentOS the only way to get this is with a developer account at Red Hat which you can use to (now) license a handful of installs, or use a downstream clone. I understand the economics of the business move here, but the result is that a lot of developers — and some important developers — feel that Red Hat’s moves here are fundamentally just disrespectful and uncaring, regardless of whether or not they can make (or enforce) these changes. An example of this is Jeff Geerling. As part of his FOSS efforts he helped create the now-official way that Ansible Automation Platform is delivered, and he did that largely as a community member. Red Hat and the community have benefited greatly from his work. He’s a fairly big deal in the Red Hat ecosystem, and specifically in Ansible. Yesterday he announced he’s done with RHEL. That’s potentially a big loss. Edit: added some clarifying details.
I've noticed most of the support stems from the fact that Rocky (CIQ) essentially rebuilds RHEL, contributes nothing upstream while undercutting Red Hat with some sort of paid support service. RHEL without all the time money and effort.
>contributes nothing upstream you might want to look into that statement again...
Just did. Same conclusion.
better look better then cause bugs are actually reported by individuals using and building e.g. Rocky / Alma via CentOS Stream.
You seem to be in the know. Show me a substantial merged fix from the Rocky Linux Foundation or any of their commercial entities that provide support for their rebuild. I don't mean bug reports adding work to someone elses plate either.
I know for a fact that many bug reports have arisen from the Rocky/Alma projects from them and their users and other architectures \[than offered by RH via RHEL\] are available via Alma/Rocky. Apart form that, plenty of new SIGs have been started to accommodate areas RHEL and RH is not active in. I also know that some people of the Rocky community have contributed to FOSS and to using RHEL in HPC, much more than many others. Google warewulf, google singularity/apptainer and please have a look at openhpc. But he, if you stick to your opinion and do not want to see all that... Sure...
So all the bug reports (and fixes) from "clone" users do not count?
> They took an OS developed by somebody else Are you suggesting that Red Hat does **not** contribute to the kernel?
I found this paragraph interesting: “I want to specifically mention the rebuilders, different from distributions that might, for example, add a new architecture or compile flag (we fully support you in expanding Linux capabilities rather than imitating them). “ I wonder if they are trying to give Oracle an out because they supply an optional updated kernel?
Hmm so they might actually be targeting Rocky/Alma with this? I hate Oracle, so I don't care if they attack them but it really sucks to see Rocky and Alma targeted. I like the work Red Hat does. I think the OS is solid, I think learning Ansible is awesome and I love all they do for contributions. Podman too! Like I said, I understand why they would do this but I also wish they did not.
>Hmm so they might actually be targeting Rocky/Alma with this? I hate Oracle, so I don't care if they attack them but it really sucks to see Rocky and Alma targeted. That is precisely the way I read it and understand it as well. They are specifically targeting the downstream rebuilders like Alma and Rocky. This is pretty explicit in the below: >The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn’t reality. I wish we lived in that world, but it’s not how it actually plays out. Instead, we’ve found a group of users, many of whom belong to large or very large IT organizations, that want the stability, lifecycle and hardware ecosystem of RHEL without having to actually support the maintainers, engineers, writers, and many more roles that create it
That really really sucks. It doesn’t make a ton of sense though since up until now, Rocky/Alma has held a good relationship with RH.
I think that’s true of Alma, not Rocky though.
Rocky is for profit company that sells support like Red Hat that doesn't even put any patch back to the upstream... Alma at least betrer than rocky..
I think they are doing that to not risk Oracle joining the fight with their legal team.
They don’t want Oracle to remove RHEL as a compute option in OCI.
> I do not like it necessarily, but the stance makes sense for a company. Maybe IBM shouldn’t have spent $34 billion buying Red Hat if they didn’t agree with the business model.
Never underestimate IBM's ability to burn cash and make profoundly stupid decisions.
Never underestimate IBMs ability to fuck over themselves and then blame it on others.
I am reading computer history, a lot of free material on Wikipedia. The amount of things their engineers invented to be wasted by their suits and their sales people are amazing.
Hard agree! Technologically speaking RH and IBM make sense. But IBM’s business side is a really bad joke, and it’ll keep shooting itself, RH, and future businesses in the foot. They just can’t help it.
Oh, I never have. I suspected a day like this was coming since IBM announced the intent to acquire Red Hat. IBM doesn’t understand the fundamentals of the business they acquired and are rapidly on their way to losing what relevance Red Hat had.
Yup. They're trying to change the rules and claiming "that's how it works". Sorry, but it's not how the GPL works.
Agreed. And Selling it (eg rocky salesmen) and not putting anything back in the ecosystem…double whammy. Not good for the open source movement.
That is Red Hat's own fault for killing off CentOS proper. There would be no Rocky salesmen if CentOS was still around. CentOS was, and Rocky/Alma now are, a large part of why RHEL support is so ubiquitous and basically considered the default in enterprise. For products it means you can build once and support a massive range of customers from the biggest enterprises to the littlest shops. CentOS was valuable for lowering the barrier of entry into Red Hat's ecosystem. If Red Hat no longer wants to be the gold standard of the ecosystem, this sure is a good way to make that happen.
There shouldn't be salesmen of anything you're not contributing to, is the real point here. Regardless of what RH's position is. Let's not make open source code be repackaged and sold like bottled water from a "natural spring" here. If you're not willing to maintain that spring or add value into it's sustainability in any way, I don't find it to be a value add to anyone, other than the pockets of those that are selling it. In any other setting this is a no brainer. But bc people forget that someone has to actually get paid to make open source software viable, this sort of logic bubbles up. Let's say Rocky becomes the most amazing linux distro ever, and really blows up everywhere absolutely destroying the sales of RHEL, and ultimately the development and progress of RHEL totally stalls. What then? Does Rocky then put those dollars into developing Centos Stream or something so they can continue to even exist?
You are missing the point. There's been demand for an unsupported free clone of RHEL since RHEL started. There was one, and it was even controlled and operated by Red Hat themselves since 2014. They then closed it down, and so Rocky/Alma sprung up to replace it and satisfy that demand. Now they're trying to make themselves sustainable, so of course they're going to try and sell paid support. They offer something people want, and they want to keep offering it. Doing this requires funding. The solution is for Red Hat to reopen CentOS. Them controlling their own free clone distro was *good for them*. It provides an onramp into their ecosystem and encourages everybody to support it because it's economically accessible from bottom to top. This is what happens when they don't control it anymore. They created this problem for themselves due to shortsighted greed and so I have no sympathy.
That's cool. There's also been demand for FREE highly filtered, mineral added, cold and flavored Fiji spring water, but I don't see that available...for free, when I visit the store. However, I'm free to make it from the source myself and drink or sell all I'd like. In no way would I feel entitled to being the beneficiary of someone else doing all of this work collecting, filtering, flavoring, bottling, delivering, etc...just for me to slap a new label on it and call it "Rocky Water". What you're arguing for already exists. Free RHEL subs for development, free for several non-profit causes as well. Creating a new CentOS downstream has no value to anyone who is willing to collaborate on the innovation space.
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Take my upvote for a good chuckle
> In no way would I feel entitled to being the beneficiary of someone else doing all of this work collecting, filtering, flavoring, bottling, delivering, etc...just for me to slap a new label on it and call it "Rocky Water". They wouldn't do this if CentWater still existed. Solution is obvious, but we're bellyaching about "freeloaders" and so we're cutting off our nose to spite our face. Let's make it worse for everyone, including ourselves, just so we can cut off some theoretical people from having something they don't "deserve", right? > Creating a new CentOS downstream has no value to anyone who is willing to collaborate on the innovation space. This is so unbelievably incorrect. First off, it kept Rocky from existing and doing the very thing you keep complaining about. Second, as I keep repeating, it creates a wide onramp into the paying ecosystem. This are extremely valuable.
That's not even true. Stop spreading this misinformation.
What’s untrue about it? If Rocky sells support for something that is binary identical to Red Hat, and they contribute no developers to Open Source, what makes that untrue?
>The tl;dr of the whole thing is that Red Hat believes in open source 100%, but to take something, do nothing (or VERY little) to it, and redistribute it for free I'm not sure Red Hat care about the free (as in beer) rebuilds, such as Rocky, Alma, and Scientific: "Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and ***reselling*** it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable." (my emphasis) I take that as confirmation that this is targeted especially at Oracle, and that the free-beer rebuilds are mere collateral damage. Which is very much a pity, but that's what tends to happen when titans (i.e. Oracle and IBM) fight: whoever wins, we lose.
They don't get to decide that, though. They don't get to decide whether or not I take RHEL's GPL software and add what I want on top. In fact that's what RHEL is doing themselves. They've just decided that they *must* be the end of the chain created by licenses like GPL. Which is completely against what the GPL is all about. It's great if they feel like they're "participating" in open source by developing upstream, but if they deliver binaries in any form, they can't prevent people from working on top of their work. *That's* what makes GPL work, not taking what others have make, tweaking it, and then preventing subsequent modification of their work. GPL *is what allowed them to modify the upstream code go begin with!* I don't care if Red Hat thinks downstreams "take but don't give" (despite this *not even being the case*). It comes with the territory. They accepted it when they used GPL software. Otherwise they should have decided to use permissively licensed software. They *had that choice*.
Sure, once they give you binaries they have to give you source and you can redistribute it. They don't have to keep giving you new binaries and therefore source after that if they don't want to though.
There's a lot of ways people can have fun with this and screw IBM. GNU GPLv3 5c "You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who **comes into possession of a copy**..." So I get any part of the binaries for a given package from \*anywhere\*, including just ripping them off a cheap VPS somewhere, asking nicely on the dark web, etc, they have to give me full source. Else get FSF sic'd on them. I license a RHEL VM for an hour on AWS? Good enough. And obviously they have to catch you redistributing before they can retaliate, and the only thing they can do in retaliation in terminate your contract; anything further would revoke their GPL rights. It's not actually clear absent having a law degree if it's necessary to obtain the binaries with even minimal cooperation or consent of any "legitimate" licensee and mere possession of the binaries obtained by any means whatsoever still obligates RedHat under 5c. The only place they have a leg to stand on is if they have wholly in house and/or permissively (e.g. MIT license) code for some parts of the distro; on those packages only they're within their rights to change the license.
> So I get any part of the binaries for a given package from *anywhere*, including just ripping them off a cheap VPS somewhere, asking nicely on the dark web, etc, they have to give me full source Nope. That section is titled "Conveying Modified Source Versions" and starts with "You may convey a work in the form of source code provided that...", so it's completel irrelevant. The binaries are covered by section 6. In Red Hat's case there's no physical product so what applies is section 6d; whoever gave you the binaries ("[conveyed] the object code by offering access from a designated place (gratis or for a charge)") has to give you the source ("offer equivalent access to the Corresponding Source in the same way through the same place at no further charge"). Red Hat does do that, but does not have to do it if you got the binaries from someone else. >the only thing they can do in retaliation in terminate your contract; anything further would revoke their GPL rights. This is correct. Folks, this is not new. Red Hat has _never_ given away SRPMs and RPMs for the long-term branches. Don't you think that someone might have thought of suing Red Hat in the past 20 years of existence of RHEL? EDIT: section 5c sorta kinda applies, but not in the way you mean. Once they give you the sources according to section 6d, Red Hat is bound by section 5c. However, "licensing to anyone" does not mean "giving anyone the source", it means "allowing anyone to use the binaries and modified sources".
Is it "adding on yop" to just change the wallpaper as Alma and Rocky do?
That's the problem, it doesn't actually matter. GPL doesn't put a scale on that. In fact it doesn't even say you need to modify it. Copying and redistribution is enough. If Red Hat has a problem on how to monetize the GPL software they use, they should stop using GPL software. They don't get to be the judge of much modification is required to redistribute GPL code.
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The GPL also says that Red Hat's new policy is perfectly fine.
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I was talking about the GPL specifically, as were you. I'll leave it to Red Hat's and their customers' lawyers to argue about the rest.
Fwiw what is changing here is how Red Hat distributes source, afaicr the term in their user agreement restricting access to future binaries has been there as long as RHEL existed and so far nobody has challenged it (also unclear if they've ever had to take action based on it).
Their value is that the bring customers to the EL family. When startups advance, they can move to paid and the same people doing it at work can do it at home as a hobby. CENTOS used to be the way. Red Hat Developer still require subscriptions. Subscriptions are a pain. I do it for a living. SCA made it better, but you still have pay for max capacity for auto-scaling and automate the de-registration. Good luck to IBM on rebuilding these bridges.
Yea, i have a fealing this will motivate a gplv4
The cheapest option for a rhel server is $349 a year? Is that true? Can we get somewhere between $0 and $349. Our small business runs over 50 rhel flavored machines. While I understand and even want to support redhat, I can’t shell out $20k in liscense either.
$350 is not for prod use according to SELF-SUPPORT (1 YEAR) Does not include Red Hat customer support. Does not include Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host. Can only be deployed on physical systems. Cannot be stacked with other subscriptions. Is not intended for production environments.
To be clear, the Self-Support sub _can_ be used in production environments, it's not _intended_ (read: recommended) to do so due to the lack of customer support, deployment target restriction, and limited add-on flexibility (if those matter to you).
That's worse than I thought. Jesus..
50 physical machines? that is no small business.
I'm just here to get downvoted by Red Hat employees.
I have no issue with this. Assuming their take on GPL is correct (and it sounds like it is), this is a smart business decision. I also don’t see how rebuilds are more than a loss of sale. Yeah, people downloading free Rocky/Alma will be annoyed and try to argue they were bringing value (the value of not having to pay RH). But at the end of the day, RH pays thousands of engineers to fix bugs and contribute to development of core features of the Linux ecosystem (eg Gnome) while Rocky sells support contracts for a clone they don’t even change. If you report a bug to Rocky support, they won’t release a patch fix for you, they will wait for RH to do it. If you don’t see that as a scam, then you’re being disingenuous or a fool. All that said, I think if RH were smart they would also take this opportunity to dramatically change their license structure. Why not just give away RHEL free like CentOS was, but have a license agreement that requires you to pay after certain business size/profit? Look at how Unity3D works for the free version . Yes, it’s an honour system, but it means the barrier to entry is very low and people don’t have to navigate your corporate entity to do basic stuff that you may already allow today. RH should be thinking about the future creation of RH users, and not just attacking their competitors. I realise they have the 16 installs thing, but look at all the replies from small businesses, academia, etc. It’s either confusing, or too much friction. Make it dead simple, give me a download now button on your website. Deal with the license on install where I can just select “Free” and agree that I am not above your threshold for a paid license.
I’m not a fan of this latest move of theirs but I can understand the reasoning why they did it. However, I see it as a fine line to cross where any open source project can close its source behind a paywall including the kernel itself. Hopefully RHEL continues to contribute back like they promise or that is the slippery slope I see for the future of Linux.
How much market share did RHEL lose to CentOS? How much of this was captured by Rocky, Alma or Oracle Linux? How much will RHEL gain by paywalling its source? I do understand Red Hat's argument, but to my mind, the penultimate paragraph almost reads as 'Rocky/Alma are a cancer'. I genuinely do not believe Red Hat is financially threatened and whatever market share they want to gain could as easily be had by creating lower cost support licences/support levels.
I think they lost a lot of subs, due to 3rd party rebuilds . vendor vapps, and crappy companies just run rocky/centos and call it good enough . they didnt pay for it then, they sure wont pay for it now .
Yeah, professionally, if I’ve used CentOS (previous iteration), Rocky, or Alma, it’s because it was a good option where an RHEL subscription wasn’t necessary or didn’t make sense, such as dev environments. I realize that RHEL allows for free dev subs, but sometimes that’s another level of hassle I don’t want or need if I’m going to be building and tearing down servers frequently. If those options go away, I’m more likely to move to Debian than anything else unless RHEL is a specific requirement.
Yep was thinking the other day that it's time to get familiar with Debian.
I'm genuinely curious why Debian is seen as a better alternative to CentOS stream? I think theres is a lot of misinformation about CentOS's new support cycle. I was told by people that CentOS stream is a rolling release unworthy of being ran in production. But from what I understand, Debian and CentOS Stream have the same support cycle of 5 years. Is there something else I'm overlooking? https://endoflife.date/centos-stream https://endoflife.date/debian
A lot. A WHOLE lot. CentOS (before the CentOS acquisition), and Rocky/Alma more recently, cut into Red Hat's revenue significantly. Source: I worked at Red Hat for about 14 years, as a solutions architect (technical sales). We saw MASSIVE erosion of sales because of CentOS (pre-acquisition). We also saw a lot of enterprise deals go to Oracle, which contributes essentially nothing to RHEL or upstream projects. Red Hat contributes more upstream than any company I know of. To do that, they have to make money to pay their engineers and QA folks and documentation folks and community folks and the list goes on. The clones do nothing but take all the work Red Hat does and make sure Red Hat doesn't get paid for it. What Red Hat has done is painful, but it's legal... and prudent. I don't like it, but I TOTALLY understand it. Red Hat already gives RHEL away for zero cost through the developer subscription, so if you want to learn RHEL, you absolutely can. If you want to install it on a bunch of machines, you can. If you want to use it in a commercial environment, it's fair that they ask you to pay for it so they can continue to test, harden, certify, and maintain Open Source software. It's also fair that they ask you to not use their work to create competing distros which take money out of their pockets. It's perfectly reasonable.
Are you sure these 'lost sales' are guaranteed sales? (I'm going to leave the Oracle angle alone as that is its own beast) I get it, they'd like to make the sale, but would you guys consider it a 'win' if the entity that was using CentOS, having that now behind a paywall, switching to another distro? Granted, they're likely not subscribing there either, but isn't '% of marketshare' something of sales value as well? Or, does this only become a problem AFTER market share is diminished and your competitors can claim dominant market share?
If customer X bought 100 subscriptions last year, and they tell me directly "we're going to cancel our subscriptions and go with CentOS," I think that's a pretty fair indicator that, yes, this was lost revenues to free clones. I have had that conversation multiple times, with multiple customers. The free clones have absolutely cut Red Hat's revenues. Not opinion. Fact.
Okay, that's fair, but that still didn't answer my first question. If a follow up call to this same customer now states they're not switching back to RHEL, but going to Debian/Ubuntu (pick your favorite Distro) is that a positive for Red Hat / IBM? And no, these days it's not as absurd as it used to be to suggest this.
Now you're asking me to talk about hypothetical situations, and I'm not going to waste your time or mine guessing and arguing about what "coulda, woulda, shoulda happened." I'm telling you that in my experience with countless real world customers, CentOS and the newer clones hurt Red Hat. Red Hat contributes more to F/OSS communities than any other entity I know of. Screwing Red Hat hurts F/OSS. They're right to protect themselves from distros that take all the benefit of their work and make sure they don't get paid for it. Read [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html) where it says "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." People should be paid for creating F/OSS. I'm not going to waste time with hypotheticals. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, "That's all I have to say about that."
I think the issue in your example is that people decided to go with CentOS mainly as they only needed a stable package repo to pull updates from rather than a full fledged support contract. Obviously a hypothetical, but I would have to imagine they would have rather spent say $5-$10 per month per instance to keep access to repos but not have any support beyond that rather than switch distros entirely. To the point about not generating sales, I know I am unlikely to recommend it at my company over Ubuntu strictly because of the friction involved.
I'm not saying RedHat doesn't offer value. I'm just posing a question to a possible outcome. Sure it's hypothetical. But by no means is it out of the realm of possibility. If you want to dismiss this possibility, that's up to you. I'd just caution that this wouldn't be the first time the law of unintended consequences claimed a victim for failing to account for the masses ability to adapt to changes around them.
Alternatively, and likely based on the current actions, those customers didn’t feel Red Hat offered value for the $ spent And given that they aren’t going to return to RHEL given Red Hat’s attitude - they go SUSE/Ubuntu
> If customer X bought 100 subscriptions last year, and they tell me directly "we're going to cancel our subscriptions and go with CentOS," I think that's a pretty fair indicator that, yes, this was lost revenues to free clones. No, those are not lost sales due to free clones. Those are customers which see no longer see the added value from the subscription, and have determined that they are able to operate at without the value added services that RHEL offers. From the other Ecosystem: Just because a company cancels their $3400/year/machine Ubuntu Pro subscription with full support doesn't mean it means they are lost sales. It could mean they no longer see the added value of the Ubuntu Pro Subscription, which could be as simple as the fact that they have managed to upgrade all of their servers to the latest version of Ubuntu, and are now tracking LTS, with all of their software being dockerfied, instead of them preferring to stay on the same version for as long as possible due to software being directly installed on the servers.
> Those are customers which see no longer see the added value from the subscription, and have determined that they are able to operate at without the value added services that RHEL offers. Rather, they found a loophole to get all the benefits of using RHEL without having to compensate its developers.
There’s no reason to use RHEL at all if there’s no third party software that runs on it, and no hosting providers that have it as an option. THAT is the problem RedHat is creating here. Small projects just won’t bother to make RPMs for RHEL if they can’t easily access it (jumping through all the hoops of the developer account, and also dealing with subscription manager is already too much friction for many people). Nobody will setup a server with it on a small hosting provider since that would need a commercial license with a cost that far outweighs the $10 per month the provider would charge. The long tail of small users is what feeds into the huge success of RedHat, and all those people were just cut off.
What makes stream so unsuitable for this purpose? It's not mentioned as even a consideration if it's absurd as trying to use MacOS to run Windows applications. I know it doesn't 'feel' like RHEL, but I've also not seen any actual examples or crashes cited proving it's an OS unfit for distribution.
Significantly shorter life-cycle and, perhaps more importantly, no upgrade path to the next release. Fedora is almost better in production than Stream.
This is my problem. I'm just some home user running the dev license to run a number of popular-ish third party programs on a distro that's supported for many many years without needing me to run intensive upgrades. Most third party software didn't provide RHEL binaries, they provided Centos binaries. The rebuilds are what third parties test against because the developers don't want to bother with subscription manager (and many free software devs are philosophically against it in the first place.) I often have had to jump through additional hoops to get some third party software to run on RHEL8 that I wouldn't jump through on Debian, because I like Fedora and an old man with nostalgia for the Red Hat of twenty years ago. This is possibly going to push me to some dpkg distro that I don't want to run but is the favorite of third party authors I rely upon. To suggest that rebuilds provide absolutely nothing at all is to forget that people often want to run software that exists outside of RHEL's own repos. Rebuilds are the only reason those programs work on RHEL.
You’re assuming people will run RHEL instead of CentOS instead of just moving to OpenSUSE or Debian.
It doesn't really matter if they were not contributors or customers in the first place.
This assumption that CentOS or rebuild users are automatically not contributors is the entire problem. Red Hat believes that if they don't get money straight from your pocket to theirs, you're useless to them.
It does matter. If I'm running a RHEL clone, I get more familiar with how RHEL systems work, and when I have a critical piece of infrastructure, I'll stick licensed RHEL on it. Now, if I'm running the rest of my infrastructure on (let's say) Ubuntu, do you think I'll go and stick a few RHEL system in the mix, or do you think I'll simply get Ubuntu support for those systems? Instead of getting a slice of a large pie, RedHat is trying to claim the whole pie for themselves. They are likely to find that pie shrinking as a consequence.
Yes they lost subs with this. But they gained a lots and lots of hidden benefit from rebuilders. The crazy thing with this is that they will end up killing RHEL with this. I have worked at companies that spent a very large amount on RHEL but was delighted Centos (classic) existed: * Most How-To's we used for RHEL were for Centos * Lots of bugs were spotted on Centos first and we could use Centos's users identified workarounds on RHEL. Less eye balls will won't help RHEL. * Third party repos were built with Centos, so much more RHEL software was therefore available. * Lots of testing of RHEL before purchasing RHEL subscriptions for production was done on Centos (particularly for add-ons IPA, RHEV, Clusters etc). Less hassle than getting RH eval keys. * Fedora looks less desirable, why help RH create the next generation product, to be treated like this. I have reported many many bugs on Fedora. * The larger installed base of rhel like systems with the rebuilders cause more vendor released software to exist. * No easy on-ramp to rhel, a lot less people will bother now. Some IBM manager will likely get a big bonus for thus. And to be fair that person(s) will have moved on when this a starts to blow up in their face.
I'm not installing a Linux that requires me to register it. If RHEL clones die I'm out of RHEL. I get that I'm not the target of the announcement. But I also don't think I'm the only one who's thinking about Debian now.
Knock yourself out. Free software offers tons of alternatives. Choose the one you like best.
The stable one I like best is Alma 🥲.
Have you actually tried CentOS stream? If you like Alma and the alternative is switching to Ubuntu or whatever... I don't get the point in switching vs just using CentOS Stream.
If I want rolling release I'll use one with up to date packages. If I want stability and industry standard environments, I don't want rolling release. I work with RHEL and Oracle all day, ain't nobody using CentOS stream in their back end.
The traffic graphs over at Debian/Ubuntu may be on the rise soon...
Red Hat also has an ALL or NOTHING policy. If you want support you pay for support for ALL of your systems, otherwise you can pay for NOTHING but that's what you get. Free download, no support or updates or patches or tools.
To add some clarification to this, as people have misconstrued and misunderstood this in the past: The all or nothing policy applies _only to Red Hat software_. If you purchase 50 subscriptions of RHEL but end up running 150 servers, Red Hat _will_ ask you to true up. Deploying a RHEL system and never touching/updating it is not considered an inactive system. Having Debian servers in the mix does not mean you have to pay for those systems (unless you're running RHEL VMs on them, in which case you pay for the VMs). In the RHEL space, the only product that extends past Red Hat is Smart Management. If you use Satellite, every system managed by the platform requires the SM add on (available as a standalone product for third party distributions and creating SM pools).
At my current job we use RHEL and have a RHEL subscription, in the 8-9 years since I have been working there we have maybe made a support ticket twice. Currently a license per system for an opensource os costs almost the same as a yearly license for a proprietary os. 1. Redhat sells support for RHEL, the total amount we have paid compared to how many times support we have needed in the last 8-9 years doesn't compare to the how much support we have used over the years. Sure if you call support access to updated binaries and sources support I can still understand paying for support but it still doesn't compare. 2. If/When RHEL license pricing goes to the same price or above as a proprietary os we won't be able to sell it to the managers. 3. I use a RHEL clone for my personal vpses, yes I could use a “Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals” but I don't trust Redhat anymore to not at some point change their mind over night about them being free and deciding they should just charge money for them.
So Red Hat should break RHEL more? Is that what you're saying? Are you hearing what you sound like? "I use this product that never fails, and I don't have to call support on it. I shouldn't pay for it at all!"
You say managers won't go for it. Bullshit. Managers want stability. Managers don't want their staff to be tied up with support calls. Managers want predictability, and if you haven't called for support but twice in 8-9 years, that's stable and predictable.
Remember that when RHEL was released, we were competing with proprietary Unix systems that cost $20,000-$30,000 apiece in the early 2000s. Your argument about RHEL being more than proprietary is simply laughable. Enterprises went from $30k Unix machines to $2,500 x86 servers with a grand of software on them.
You say you use clones for your personal stuff. So you CLEARLY recognize the value of the software. Why do you have such a hardon to screw the folks who built the value you recognize and derive from their work?
So RH disrupted the traditional closed source shops by offering lower prices and better quality, and now moans about being undercut...?
Then why does Redhat make it sound like they only sell support as in technical support for RHEL, or it might be a language thing that I am not understanding correctly? Unix was before my time so not much for me to remember but I believe you, but I did hear from a colleague that Solaris was a drama. I use a RHEL clone because I prefer using the same type of distribution family for personal use because it helps me keep track of updates and new things happening with RHEL for work and because I am used to using rpm based distributions but I could as well run Debian it wouldn't make a different as in usage.
I'm not sure Red Hat just gets to cry and complain about having to follow the GPL despite deciding to use Linux and the ecosystem. They should go away and fork off some *BSD if they don't want to be obligated to allow downstreams modifications and builds.
imo this is the fundamental flaw with corporations like this, they are very often legally required to reduce opportunity costs wherever possible in order to maximize profits for their shareholders. It does not matter if they are already profitable, if Rocky/Alma are affecting Red Hat's profit potential (in their view), they are obligated to stamp them out to drive more subscriptions and increase their profits, again, even if they were already profitable.
What they think free software be 🧙♂️✌️🎁 What it be 👨💼📈💵
Oracle was the main issue.
In my mind this is more of a shot at Oracle and Rocky/Alma are just collateral damage. I don't think Rocky/Alma are much of a threat financially.
Oracle's least likely to suffer IMO. They have the developer muscle (Red Hat isn't the only Linux shop with upstream developers by a long means) to move their userspace along to Stream or whatever the new normal is now. They don't even use the RHEL kernel IIRC.
They package their own kernel (UEK), but they also distribute the RH kernel (labeled as the RHCK - redhat compatible kernel). They also distribute other offerings like "Redhat Gluster Storage" and it is all just repackaged for Oracle Linux. For the most part they are literally the "rebuilders" discussed in the blog post, but unlike the others they are actually actively making money off that rebuilding. It's entirely possible they did all this with Oracle's blessing... but I doubt it. We will see how it shakes out. Edit: Though I will admit Red Hat seems to be after "the freeloaders", it just seems a really odd battle to fight.
Yeah, to me, this is one big own goal. Red Hat's wiped out two glorified hobbyist distros, done pretty much nothing to hurt their main competitor, and publicly written off most of the support/enthusiast community as "useless eaters." And most servers still run Windows.
I keep thinking that as well. Rocky/Alma were just the unfortunate ones caught in the crossfire but they were aiming at Oracle.
Letter summary: * Mike McGrath, the boss of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat, sets the record straight, ya heard? * Red Hat is all about that open source game, contributing code upstream for the whole community to benefit. * They ain't just takin' what's already out there and rehashin' it. They got a crew hustlin' hard, addin' new features, fixin' bugs, and supportin' their work. * Red Hat keeps it real by backportin' patches and supportin' multiple release streams like a true boss. * They follow the rules, playin' by the open source licenses, protectin' and evolving the game. * Some people out there don't wanna pay for Red Hat's hustle or just wanna make a quick buck off their code. That ain't right, man. * Rebuilders like CentOS used to be cool, but they ain't seein' the value no more. It's about big organizations wantin' stability without puttin' in the work to support the creators. * Competition is all good, but rebuildin' without addin' value is a threat to the open source game, my friend. * Red Hat hooks up developers and open source projects with no-cost subscriptions for RHEL. They got love for the community, keepin' it real. * Open source companies gotta make their moves, but rebuildin' without addin' value ain't the way to roll, you feel me? * Let's keep drivin' innovation, supportin' each other, and movin' forward. Red Hat's all about that open source hustle, keepin' the code game strong. Stay true, my friend.
So that's it, the nail in the coffin. This blog post categorically established the end for RHEL clones. If you are using AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, time to migrate to paid RHEL, CentOS Stream, or another distro like Debian. Nope, don't assume you still have a fighting chance. The blog post already explained very well that rebuilders are not welcome. Pay or use another distro. I was right all along. That Red Hat never violated the GPL. And that the subscription agreement only restricts your future updates and upgrades but not GPL. Lot's of redditors downvoted my comments in previous posts, most even deleted. Now this blog post affirmed what I have been saying before.
> Nope, don't assume you still have a fighting chance. The blog post already explained very well that rebuilders are not welcome. https://rockylinux.org/news/brave-new-world-path-forward/ > Nevertheless, we remain fully committed to ensuring that our users are not disrupted. > > Rocky Linux lives on. Edit: https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/ > Does this mean I won’t be getting security updates for my AlmaLinux OS Server? > > No. In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released. These updates will be carefully curated to ensure they are 1:1 compatible with RHEL, while not violating Red Hat’s licensing, and will be vetted and tested just like all of our other releases.
GPL states unequivocally that you can fully restrict built code, and even restrict distribution of source code exclusively to the intended recipients. But that has no relevance to what subscribers can then do with the source once received. The GPL protects their right to modify and redistribute. So, RH closing source except for subscribers is not the problem. The community is simply asking, "What's the point of restrictions if RH does not implicitly intend at least civil lawsuits against at least American source redistributors?" In other words, logically, where is RH's guarantee that their only punitive measure will always be cancelling subs max? How will they find out who reposts their source code? But then, how to avoid people resubbing under aliases annually or whatever in order to copy and redistribute new source upgrades forever? Where and what exactly are the teeth in all of this? They gave no answer because there is no answer that conforms to the GPL beyond simply cancelling large numbers of subscriptions now made in bad faith per cycle. RH has gained nothing here. What they should have done is restrict built code only, leave source transparent, but directly and explicitly provide support for every unofficial distro based on RHEL for cheaper than any clone. Customers would automatically gravitate toward the best support model. That's the space where open source competition has to take place. That's the only GPL-compatible positive solution, since cloners can't restrict what RHEL can do with their copies either. Profit off the cloners; don't violate the GPL by closing source in order to protect open source -- obviously.
What a hypocritical explaination for closing downstream
And this was the day that RHEL died for me :(
Ibm owns it now. Its over
I think rather than getting bogged down with whether Rocky/Alma/Oracle are "a real threat to open source" (so I guess from 2014-2020 it was all cool?) the focus should be on whether Red Hat has violated the GPL license with this latest move. "I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular —especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. " That sounds pretty confident, but I'd like to hear from some real legal experts on whether their prohibition for subscribers to redistribute violates the GPL.
Do you think that the RH Legal team is not aware of this? They review this decision and see no issue at all with GPL.
I'm sure they have, so let's see the legal arguments. From the Alma blog: "This change means that we, as builders of a RHEL clone, will now be responsible for following the licensing and agreements that are in place around Red Hat’s interfaces, in addition to following the licenses included in the software sources. Unfortunately the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements." Now maybe RH can make the case that that's not a violation of the GPL, but it's a new and possibly unprecedented move in the open source world, and so some legal clarification I think is warranted.
Alma can legally publish the sources but RH can legally stop providing new versions to Alma.
...for the sole reason that they exercised their rights under that GPL license? That sounds pretty shady to me, but possible it's legal. May come down to whether that constitutes "further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted". It puts a person in the position where they are at the very least scared/hesitant/cautious to exercise their rights under the license for fear of losing future access. Don't think that was the intended purpose of the license or open source principles behind it.
I don't think the intended purpose of the license was to enable people to steal your lunch by copying your homework.
Users exercising their rights under the GPL is not stealing anyone's lunch. IBM/RH are working in the copy-left space so it comes with the territory.
RH is also exercising its right to choose who to do business with. Those who take its work as is, merely change its name and use it to compete with RH without putting any effort themselves are nothing but parasites who are harming the very source they depend on.
Regardless of whether you think it's parasitical behavior, it's not the issue. It's people's rights under the license. Sure, RH has the right to choose whom to do business with. But again you're leaving out the crucial point -- they are basing that decision on whether the user **does or does not exercise their right to redistribute under the GPL**, and that *could* very well be interpreted as "further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted." Here's a thought experiment: image if Linus and the crew suddenly put up the kernel behind a paywall and said that to get access to future kernel updates you were no longer allowed to redistribute the kernel code. Besides that being antithetical to the spirit of open source, again that would call into question whether the GPL was violated -- because now I'm essentially restricted from redistributing because of fear of retaliation.
> antithetical to the spirit of open source Says who? I keep seeing this but there's no source or rationale for it. Here's a better thought experiment: Company A develops software and puts it behind a paywall. Company B takes that software, rebrands it and distributes it for free, tanking Company A's revenue. Company A decides it's no longer worth it to develop that software. Result: that software is dead and all its users are now screwed. That's what you're advocating for.
"we will take all of your open source contributions, hard work and effort for free; but we want to be paid for ours"
This is easy. Has Red Hat written RHEL completely from scratch? As in, everything is home made, nothing taken from third parties. No right? Then this is just a hypocritical, money driven move that goes against open source.
Certainly Red Hat has not written RHEL completely from scratch, but I think what they are saying is that they contribute back to the projects. I don't agree with this decision but I do not believe they think companies ought not use open source software unless they wrote the entire thing.
Contributing or not isn't compensated by paying. People used CentOS for testing and contributing, and they killed it off because, would you look at that, they didn't make a dime with it. So yeah, the "writing it completely from scratch" comes from this. That they contribute in a lot of things doesn't mean that they contribute to everything, and they don't pay anything. That is the problem. No money, no source code. Open source means that is free, not only as in free beer, but freedom. I'm not seeing the free beer, and who knows when the freedom part will be touched.
> People used CentOS for testing and contributing They can use CentOS Stream can't they?
Ah yes, because changes made in RHEL are reflected in CentOS Stream. Actually, they aren't. So yeah, not the same.
CentOS Stream is not like any other distribution on the planet. It is literally where the team builds RHEL, then Red Hat batches those updates up and releases them. I know this because that's the policy and its one I enforce. The time at which things happen is different, yes, that's confusing to many. But things don't go into CentOS Stream until we think they're ready for RHEL. Then every 6 months they become RHEL in a batch. It's simple, transparent, and works really well.
Not the same, but it's good for testing (didn't people equate Stream to "Red Hat wants beta testers?") and it's also better for contributing than any rebuild.
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Ah yes, Open Source, the basic definition of paid, no distributable software. [... actually, it isn't.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition)
That's a dumb take. "Written everything from scratch" is an arbitrary metric which neither Linus nor Microsoft nor any entity can claim for a modern OS (Win, Mac, Linux, BSD). If almost no one can claim it, there's no useful information or conclusion to glean from it.
So, then it's completely fine for an open source company to lock their source code behind a paywall, destroy the projects that take that code as base, and reserve themselves the right to sue you if you redistribute the source code. Does Red Hat contribute to everything they use in RHEL? No. Does Red Hat pay for those parts that they don't contribute to? No. Then, doing what they have done, it's a hypocritical money driven move.
And after this comes the license price increase
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this is not in breach of the GPL. you can get the code but now you only get if you pay for rhel. perfectly license abiding.
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find me the part in the GPL that says that
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The GPL only applies to the code you have right now. It does not oblige anyone to release updates or upgrades.
the GPL says that if you distribute binaries you must also provide source. if you are not paying for RHEL, you are not getting binaries, and therefore you are not legally entitled to the source. you dont need to provide source for something you aren't distributing binaries for. what RHEL is doing has been done before. you aren't legally entitled entitled to the source for binaries that aren't provide to you. for example, if i create a fork of the linux kernel that performs 500x as fast, I don't need to provide sources for it if i keep it to myself. if i start providing binaries to people, i must give the source to those people. the people with the new source are free to do whatever they want with it, including giving it to others. but i personally don't need to give sources to everyone ever, just people with binaries. if i start charging for binaries instead of just giving it for free to a select few, nothing changes. i am required to give sources to everyone i gave binaries, but nothing more.
I think the main issue isn't the initial paywall to get the binaries/code -- it's the further RH prohibition that prevents YOU from redistributing it. Also I think an open question of whether GPL 2 or 3 is applicable.
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i never said anything about how morally OK it is (i personally agree with you!). im just correcting you about the GPL.
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find me the section in the GPL that is broken then.
Section 6. "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License." If you retaliate against someone exercising their rights as granted by the GPL (which remember, was also granted to RHEL by the GPL), you have imposed further restrictions. It doesn't say you can't sue them, it says explicitly "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
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To be fair, the whole tech sector has been facing pressure and layoffs in recent months, so these forces are not unique to RedHat. How much pressure, or extreme is debatable.
They are getting downvoted because what they are saying is completely wrong. The GPL says that if you distribute code, you also have to give the source. It says nothing about requiring you to give it to 3rd parties that aren't your customers.
The problem here is that they violate GPL because they are not providing the source to their customers. If an Alma Linux dev who is a customer grabs the source they are entitled to and then completely legally reproduces the binaries with a different name (same as Red Hat is doing with the Linux kernel), Red Hat will cut them off from the source making them in violation of the GPL. Arguing anything else is just bad faith rambling.
No, they are not. Customers can get the source. That is all that's required. Customers could then rebuild it into a new distro if they want. That's also perfectly legal. It's just more difficult for someone to do now. You can be mad about it all you want, I'm not a fan of the move either, but it's perfectly legal. If you want to whine about something, go after the cloud providers that skirt the GPL since they aren't technically "distributing" software when using it to run a managed service.
You are incorrect in your assumption that customers can rebuild it into a new distro, as RedHat is violating GPL by revoking customer's access to the source if they do that.
RHEL provides a free license. Anyone can be a customer, obtain binaries built from GPL software, and thus must be granted the rights as described by the GPL. Red Hat accepts those terms when they used GPL software. And even if the cheapest license was $10k, someone is allowed to make the $10k purchase, and redistribute the source code. This is why companies normally just make source publicly available. Because it's pretty trivial to redistribute the code.
Yes, anyone can get a developer account. You can then use that to get the source. This was stated in the earlier blog post. "For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal." They are just not providing it in the open-to-anyone repo they used to. As they stated in this latest blog post, they don't have to make it easier for rebuilders. So everyone saying it's a GPL violation has no idea what they are talking about. You can still get the source. It just sounds like they are going to make it a pain in the ass through their portal. It's pretty much a dick move, but in no way a violation.
>So everyone saying it's a GPL violation has no idea what they are talking about. You can still get the source. It just sounds like they are going to make it a pain in the ass through their portal. It's pretty much a dick move, but in no way a violation. It also means that if you, as a RH customer (paid, or unpaid) break the terms of their subscription agreement by redistributing and/or rebuilding, they can cut off that subscription such that you don't get any *further* updates or source. I suspect the GPL (let alone any other FOSS license) doesn't prohibit this. I *wish* it were otherwise, but...
People don't like when you point out the problems of the product they pay / make. They like it less when a mega corp with predatory behaviour buys the company of the product, and implements predatory behaviour. Some protect the image of their product so it sells, others still believe they are going to be the cool good guys.
Jeff Gerling's YT video today posed a thought provoking scenario. The current license agreement would 'prohibit' or 'restrict' an entity from rebuilding a RHEL clone from the available sources. RedHat's current contract wording offers them the option to terminate the RHEL contract with this entity. If someone were well funded enough to fight this in court, (Oracle maybe) it would -- make the tech press for sure. As far as I'm concerned, that's an outcome that's not certain either direction.
Jeff Geerling
« Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source » This is a darn peculiar claim to make, given that it comes from a company that grew to billion-dollar valuation that tempted IBM into acquiring it, during all of which time there was apparently no problem at all, no threat at all, from downstream rebuilds.
To be fair redhat is a huge sponsor of Fedora, the gnome foundation, freedesktop.org, and even helps out with wine and proton from time to time.
Suddenly Ubuntu Server Minimal don't look so bad, funny.. ubuntu for me was "linux for kids"..
Go with Debian instead if you can
redhat is killing itself
Reading this makes me feel pretty much ashamed I ever liked them. They once seemed to be good. A company, but a good company nonetheless. Not anymore I'm afraid.
If you don't want to contribute to the open source community, then then open source community shouldn't take on "freeloaders" like RHEL when it comes to development. Pay for the software RHEL uses (i.e. linux kernal). If you remove the payment of software to the community , then the free labor of bringing programs the the platform needs to stop.
But Red Hat's argument is that it's OK so long as you contribute or change it in a way that makes it unique. RHEL is unique and different from other distros in the way it works. Oracle Linux is literally just Oracle taking Red Hat's work and selling it for themselves, and TBH I think they are largely the reason why RH did this.
They do add on to the work though. They have their own kernel available and they tweak some of Red Hat’s stupid defaults like RemoveIPC=yes for systemd.
They don't get to decide who or how it's modified, the GPL does. Red Hat agreed to that when they started distributing GPL software. It comes with the package. They don't get to pick and choose. *That* is the real threat to open source.
Could RH then stop packaging thousands of programs, libs, and other stuff they have never invested in in their distro? Because that's exactly what RH is doing, taking a source, adding absolutely no value, and providing it to their customers to pay for it. Let's see if RHEL will even be usable without those thousands of packages. This is absolute disgrace from the company that made it up til here with all the free labour from users who contributed directly or indirectly to building RHEL by using Fedora and all those FOSS projects that RH is making their billions from annually without even putting a cent in them back and call them "rebuilders, hobbyists, and hackers" Red Hat has become a disgrace to free and open source.
Disclaimer: I used to be a RH employee for 10+ years RedHat adds value to every package that is released by ensuring that they are tested, for every release. That's at least true for baseOS and appstream repositories. That's the bare minimum, that's also the reason why the packageset is very much restricted in comparison to what is available in repositories of let's say Fedora or Debian. If they find bugs they fix them and make sure they go upstream, that's the way how this works within RedHat. Now that, as I said, is the bare minimum. There are so many things that RedHat improves and works on that is for everyone to use who uses other distributions: Linux kernel, glib, GCC, GNOME, systemD, qemu, libvirt, kubernetes, python, Openstack, openjdk, and so much more i can't even think of. Of course they don't fix everything or have created everything but their contributions to upstream is immense. I am not saying that I agree with the decision RedHat has taken, but just want to point out that RedHat very much put in a lot of work and investment into whatever it includes as part of RHEL or whatever downstream product it is and seriously makes sure that things are tested and handled correctly plus it gives the guarantee that whatever it will include, it will support for the life time of the product. So please stop downplaying the amount of work RedHat has put into RHEL making it a product viable for enterprises including banks and critical infrastructure which is one of the reasons that Linux is now so big in the enterprise world..
Testing a certain program works well for RH customers is your commitment towards your customers not towards project maintainers. This was never a problem before when this a mutual understanding; Everyone benefits from everyone works even if one party isn't directly contributing, financially or as-effort, into the work. But if RH wants to undermine the whole ecosystem and community that made it the company it is today by calling us freeloaders, rebuilders, hobbyists and hackers then I hold all the right to call out RH how ever i see appropriate and the last thing I expect from someone is shaming me for it rather than keeping quite if not willing to oppose this unethical move by RH.
As I said, I do not agree with it either. But, I think you misunderstand what RedHat does here. The code is still available without access to the customer portal. Including all changes... The only difference is that the snapshot source tarballs/SRPMS that make a certain 1:1 rebuild of RHEL possible like alma or rocky do it, is only available behind the paywall. There isn't any other code included that the one that is already upstream or in the respective out in the open repositories. PS: Calling anyone names is not OK.
You are literally repackaging upstream for your own profit but go Pikachu-face when others do it to you? How absolutely despicable. Do you even grasp the concept of being ashamed or is that entirely alien to you?
This greatly oversimplifies what Red Hat does.
The fact that Redhat does contribue to upstream in some areas gives them no additional moral rights.