Some mix of wrong and right, the exact proportions of which I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.
There is a reason some of us chose to support Debian and its model of allowing downstream companies like Ubuntu (Canonical) to give back up to the open source father. And this is it. We dont need to compromise here. We already have a system that works perfectly and provides a choice for what suits you. If you are an enterprise then try Ubuntu instead of RHEL. If you are a home user you dont need enterprise support and can help us log bug reports and create the next version of Trixie. We need more testers and we have fought this long fight and proven we wont give up. What other proof do you need?
I got a feeling that the kind of people that use Rocky or Alma linux would have a heart attack dealing with snap on ubuntu. Maybe they’re better off switching to Debian LTS instead.
As an inexperienced user, I can tell you that Debian is way harder to use than most people think. Out of the box, the distro is pretty bare ones. I’m having a blast using an Arch based distro, but on Debian I had to do everything manually. Stable is freaking old and unstable has lots of limitations, Docker for example is a true pain.
Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin, POP OS, are way better than Debian for users like me.
Reading this, I wonder if we talk about the same Debian 😆
“I hate configuring Linux distros which is why I use arch btw”
Stable is freaking old
Red hat users would feel right at home, right?
Stable is freaking old and unstable.
I ll give you old but not at all unstable, wonder what instability have you found in LTS.
A lot of people (incorrectly) equate “stable” with “bug-free”. So conversely, having bugs would be “unstable”.
Pretty sure the whole statement is
Stable is freaking old, and unstable has lots of limitations I don’t think they’re saying Debian LTS is unstable.
Exactly what my bad wording meant to say. Thank you for your extraordinary reading comprehension.
I think he meant: Stable is freaking old. Unstable has a lot of limitations.
I’m having a blast using an Arch based distro, but on Debian I had to do everything manually
how???
RHEL costs $600 a year. Its users can cope with debian easily.
There is a reason some of us chose to support Debian
It’s amazing how some people have to learn the lesson that you can only trust non-profit foundations, not for-profit corporations, over and over again, and then even then it still somehow never seems to stick.
More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder.
Alright, well, there it is in plain English. They’re killing downstream clones like Rocky, Alma, etc.
I have to wonder how this is going to affect software which officially only supports (insert RHEL clone here). I use DaVinci Resolve for work every day, historically they’ve only supported CentOS, and just recently they started supporting Rocky as well. VFX isn’t my wheelhouse, but I know the situation is basically the same for those programs as well.
At least they aren’t pretending to be the good guys anymore.
I am actually wondering whether they’ll start considering a Flatpak version of Resolve. Seems like Blackmagic is reluctant to support anything other than RHEL and CentOS, and RedHat seems to be moving towards Flatpak anyways, given their recent move to stop shipping LibreOffice.
I’m just happy if it hurts Oracle. Because fuck Oracle.
Try kdenlive
Resolve Studio has worked well for me on Pop!_OS with NVIDIA GPU and many others have success with Ubuntu, Debian, etc. Only hiccups are related to decklink drivers and very recent kernels, but the BMD Linux forum typically has patches posted before I have problems.
They’re killing downstream clones like Rocky, Alma, etc
Luckily I found them all hard to use for the desktop anyway, usually way too outdated. Would be interesting to know if and how this will affect Fedora, which is the upstream distribution and much better suited for the desktop for now.
You aren’t the primary customer for RHEL, or user here they’re trying to get money from. Businesses run this primarily on servers and have used CentOS historically (now Rocky/Alma) to help expand beyond the RHEL they pay for, if they pay for it. They think businesses will pay up for RHEL now, rather than just move to Amazon Linux or another distro entirely like Debian.
Not sure how many desktop customers RHEL has to he honest. Don’t know of any businesses of scale that they would buy RHEL that use Linux on the desktop
Lots of words to say:
- We do what we are legally allowed to do.
- We don’t care for the spirit of open source (anymore).
- Pay up or fuck off!
IBM is working hard to kill RedHat. They are probably having a party at Canonical right now.
Canonical has their own problems right now… Not a lot of snap fans out there. Canonical seems determined to skate to somewhere their users don’t live and create a world they don’t want.
I’m supposed to complete a higher level Red Hat cert this year, but I think I’ll pass, despite it counting against my KPI. These exams are hard, expensive, take a lot of time to prepare for, and the ROI is increasingly questionable. I’ll rather do some vendor-agnostic k8s or Ansible cert instead. This RHEL decision definitely helped to make up my mind.
I also wonder what IBM will do to ceph. Not really buying their spiel.
I’m genuinely scared they’ll be coming for ansible next.
Nothing a fork or two won’t solve.
headline: IBM STILL DOESN’T UNDERSTAND ITS RESPONSIBILITY WITH OPEN SOURCE
Nothing much more to see here; just, the spots have finally come in on the leopard.
But, as IBM isn’t responsible for systemd, ansible and similar trumped-up barely-capable competitors, it’s not all IBM’s fault. Let it sell crutches as long as it can.
He’s taliking like RHEL is the product to be monetized. I always thought the model was: the software is free - pay us for professional, enterprise-level support.
that used to be the motto, but the business masters now demand profits from the puppets or they’re coming for their jobs.
The problem is: The larger the usage of RHEL inside a company the more likely they do not need the support anymore, because they can have your own department do it instead. So those companies don’t pay for bug fixes or general Linux development, which is a problem. If you want a healthy Linux ecosystem large companies need to pay the maintainers! I don’t care if they do it through Redhat or directly.
The new model is “fuck you, pay me”
Red Hat died the day IBM bought them. All that garbage about “leaving Red Hat alone” was of course total nonsense. IBM is doing what it does best – squeeze its existing customer base for short term gains. This won’t be the last thing Red Hat does that makes people annoyed.
Still not nearly as evil as Orkcackle tho.
Totally, but at least Oracle doesn’t pretend they are some kind of beacon of open source. Red Hat is trying to party like it’s 1999 while it’s just a boring division of IBM now.
Guess me as an end user for Fedora should stop contributing my time and energy to identify and fix bugs, or get Fedora’s name out there, because I FIND NO VALUE in giving Red Hat my FREE work.
One thing while I worked at Red Hat, they will under pay you, they will push you beyond the breaking point, they will under value you, because “we will change the world.” And apparently you change the world by all those things I just mentioned.
Friends don’t let friends use Red Shat.
Be nice if they at least gave Mike a picture for his blog posts.
There are a few completely fair points in there calling out what they are legally allowed to do (e.g. they are not directly violating GPL) and are doing (contributing changes back upstream, they claim “always”), that’s about the only “right” this reader found.
Have some quotes that demonstrate the “wrong”:
I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.
Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make.
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.
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 quote is particularly damning to me. It’s right in the preamble of the GPL “Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it.” Emphasis mine. It’s a legal right, that I can redistribute it, whether or not I modify it in anyway. Stomping on my legal rights is not a threat.
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 quote is particularly damning to me.
I agree that it’s particularly damning, but for a whole different reason. Anybody who considers “a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity” a “threat” to “open source” fundamentally no longer Gets It and is themselves an enemy of Free Software!
I actually agree with Red Hat’s decision to not make their sources publicly available to non-customers, and I think this is a good example to set for free software companies. However, this quote shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what free software is. It’s not a “threat to open source companies everywhere”; it’s a feature. It’s the horse you rode in on.
The SFC has suggested this, and Alma Linux wrote about their understanding of Red Hat’s terms, but it seems that Red Hat may terminate contracts with customers who redistribute their sources. I think that’s quite nasty and very much disagree with it. Grsecurity already does this, and my opinions about that company are the same. I thought it was interesting that Red Hat didn’t address this at all in their post…
There is a very big difference between RH and grsec here though, and I hate that people just brush over it. And that is that true, you might not be able build the exact compatible operating system with just names and logos exchanged easily anymore. But no part of their stack is closed source or only available to subscribers, is it? Who pays the pipewire dev and in which distribution did it appear in first? Who paid the systemd developer and is currently the main company behind it? What about NetworkManager? GNOME?
Whole-heartedly agree on the quote and it stuck out to me even before coming to the comments here. Redhat might not like that people are repacking “their” software, but the spirit of GPL software is that you can charge for it but folks can also go through the trouble of building it themselves should they not want to go that route and are able to support/debug/maintain the software themselves on their own hardware.
If they don’t think the clauses of GPL are fair, then they should probably stop distributing Linux entirely because their entire business model is founded off of profiting off the work of other open source contributions.
Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere.
One could argue Redhat already does this on packages they have not improved or submitted contributions for.
I understand “we do not find value in RHEL rebuild.” At least, I understand that it means “we do not find the value [to Red Hat] outweighs the cost [to Red Hat].” I don’t understand how “simply rebuilding code… represents a real threat to open source companies.” It makes it sound like the rebuilders are doing something wrong.
Sure, you can say that it hurts your profits if others are providing an equivalent to your service for free, but if that isn’t acceptable, why allow it? Moreso, why allow it for years and then suddenly claim the communities built around that decision are a “threat”?
Maybe I’m misreading, but I think I would respect this position a lot more if it was simply “we can no longer afford the competitive disadvantage,” rather than implying various open source communities are actually exploiting and damaging open source.
What does this mean for Fedora? Since RHEL wont be Open source anymore, how can Fedora continue. If they publish their code through Fedora everyone will get to see it.
This won’t affect fedora. Fedora is upstream just like centos stream, and nothing they’re currently doing changes those projects. Besides possibly making people more hesitant to bother with rpm packages on GitHub at least
I thought CentOS is actually downstream?
Classic CentOS (which no longer exists) was downstream of RHEL, CentOS Stream is downstream of fedora, but upstream of RHEL.
those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL
Standard RHEL server subscription costs 800$/year, a ridiculous price for an individual to pay (yeah I know it’s called Enterprise Linux, but still)
those who want to repackage it for their own profit
Funny considering that AlmaLinux OS Foundation is a non-profit
The developer subscription provides no-cost RHEL to developers and enables usage for up to 16 systems, again, at no-cost
Until RedHat decides to pull the rug, just like it already did with CentOS
Also:
The first thing to understand is that you cannot renew your no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for individuals after the first year. Unlike a paid subscription, the no-cost edition for developers is limited to one year.
So, what’s a developer to do? Fortunately, that’s easy: You can just register again. Yes, it’s that simple. Once your developer subscription expires, simply re-register and get a new, no-cost subscription. Note that you must wait until your current subscription expires before you can renew it.
From: https://developers.redhat.com/articles/renew-your-red-hat-developer-program-subscription
Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way
Yeah, I think setting up build and distribution infrastructure is not adding any value
Funny considering that AlmaLinux OS Foundation is a non-profit
He’s clearly talking about Oracle though? Like, that’s almost certainly why Red Hat is doing what they’re doing, rather than specifically targeting Alma/Rocky, because Oracle Linux is a paid competitor that does exactly what he describes
RH basically does not care, and i don’t think this is going to be financially significant for them for quite a while (iff they can legally get away with this). the people choosing to pay $600 a year per server do not care about open source, they care that they servers are running linux and have 7 days a week 4 hour support. the people that use RHEL daily and care about open source are not decision makers, and convincing higher-ups to stop paying for RHEL, migrate the entire tech stack to something else with support and pay that is a non-starter.
In a few years, the quality of the service will probably be significantly worse, and at that point servers currently on RHEL will have to be mostly replaced. at that point only will RH see a downside to doing this, and by that time the execs will have gotten their package for making Good Decisions and will have ran out of there, leaving the comunity to pick up the pieces.
From experience, renewing once the subscription has expired isn’t simple, mine never kicked back in properly. I also don’t have access to the KB that explain even simple bugs on install.
