Looks like this will be the end of the road for RHEL based distros for me... I love using AlmaLinux, always super stable and everything just works (at least for what I use it). I guess the next best option will be SUSE?
Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
51–60 of 339 posts
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#52I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat. I was under the impression they were profitable prior to the acquisition so I’m not sure why they’re squeezing so hard and ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.
IBM is slowly ruining everything they produce. Their systems are incredibly secure because it's extremely difficult to even run them normally as an operator, much less hack in. The byzantine/circular documentation and downloads pages on their site are woefully inadequate in enabling developers. Web searches reveal little information if you have a problem, as not many people run these systems. You generally have to pa…
When I think of ibm, I think of how my wife had to attend special training on how to get paid at her government job due to how unreliable and chaotic the phoenix payroll system is. How it’s sometimes like a part time job sorting through it, and how they are all given time each month as needed to spend days on the phone trying to get somebody to manually fix issues that come up
> By July 2018, Phoenix has caused pay problems to close to 80 percent of the federal government's 290,000 public servants through underpayments, over-payments, and non-payments.
> Instead of saving $70 million a year as planned, the report said that the cost to taxpayers to fix Phoenix's problems could reach a total of $2.2 billion by 2023
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#53The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusi…
Yeah I really think people are way out over their skis if they think that Red Hat/IBM doesn't have at least a somewhat justifiable case to make here. You can still disagree, but at least you need to admit that you can understand why they would be pissed about something like Rocky. They do offer downloads of RHEL for free (or is that gone too?) for anybody not using it commercially, this isn't some poor student cloning RHEL because they couldn't afford it or anything like that.
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#54I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat. I was under the impression they were profitable prior to the acquisition so I’m not sure why they’re squeezing so hard and ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.
> I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat.
And this is yet another part of the reason why I don't understand the big push for RedHat specific tooling. Podman comes up a lot. But, just like with everything RHEL it seems as though RedHat / IBM wants to be the Apple of Linux. I'm not a fan of that. I also don't believe IBM is a good steward of OSS based on how I've seen them try to sell it in the enterprise.
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#55It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors.
>It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors. That is a violation of their terms of service and will result in a termination of your subscription unless I'm misreading it (section d): Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agr…
How does this not violate the GPL?
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#56I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope the Linux Foundation weighs in, but it seems to have been bought by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and many other large corps. All the drama in Linux with Wayland, RHEL sponsored init, snap/flatpak and now IBM/RHEL has been causing me to seriously evaluate the BSDs. I have been doing that for a couple of years. I would be fully on OpenBSD now, but the hardware I…
The BSD with the most support for Nvidia is the one you never tried. Arguably it's the only BSD that is best suited for a desktop user. Also has better wifi support as well.
We all want to love BSD, and it does get love in proprietary spaces like Netflix, Playstation and Apple, but those companies have the resources to actually create the pieces they need and do not have an obligation to share it. (E.g. MacOS is literally a certified UNIX, but the GUI layers are private.)
For non-corporate users, in some ways it is like what Debian faced when they realized they really did need to start including wifi firmware into the install media, because people were like, why doesn't this connect to the router? What's wrong with this? This is actually something that I've run into personally.
At the end of the day though, BSD isn't realistic as a desktop. OpenBSD disables stuff for security reasons which harms performance, so it wouldn't be first choice as a desktop. NetBSD is what Open forked off of many years ago and I recall NetBSD as one of those "let's try to make it install on anything" show and tell pieces, but not something you'd really be using for anything. FreeBSD was the only one that was reasonably usable. Dragonfly is another fork (this time off FreeBSD).
All of them have to port the Linux video drivers, Linux desktops, etc.
It's actually somewhat unusual that Linux is the one that won the battle for resources, because corporations hate sharing and being open.
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
IBM is slowly ruining everything they produce. Their systems are incredibly secure because it's extremely difficult to even run them normally as an operator, much less hack in. The byzantine/circular documentation and downloads pages on their site are woefully inadequate in enabling developers. Web searches reveal little information if you have a problem, as not many people run these systems. You generally have to pa…
I heard from a former employee at IBM that management has been offended the media used FAANG to describe big tech, because they are delusional and still think they are relevant enough to be big tech…
The slightly, but not too much, sad part is that if they had played their cards right, IBM could be a lot more relevant today than it is. Some aspects of their tech still are quite impressive and unmatched by offerings in the open systems space.
But the profit margins on their mainframe business are (last I heard anything about it) really juicy, and in today's business world, that appears to incentivize IBM management to go for the low hanging fruit of milking that while effectively cannibalizing their own market in the long run.
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#58NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech contracts
The US Government has been sour on large contractors for almost 10 years now, but the quandary is how to prevent the small contractors they support from becoming the dinosaurs they hate? For a while OSC O/ATK was a darling, but NG gobbled them up. Same thing with Millennial (now Boeing). Space-X is probably too big for acquisition now, so they are on course to become just another dinosaur.
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many startups can only dream of being as long and influential as IBM is. Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000, was one of the reasons it actually took off.
Many startups can only dream of being as long and influential as IBM was .
Champion in patents per year in tech, Red-Hat, 2nd major Java implementation, one of the few vendors in quantum computing.
That alone looks quite alright for a dying company.
Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
#60The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusi…
IIRC they even have a tool to "convert" a RHEL system into Oracle. And it's not just RHEL, they shamelessly distribute AWX (upstream for Ansible Tower, a product 100% made by RH from scratch) under a different name without contributing anything back. Oracle is truly a parasite of the open source ecosystem.
The only outcome I see for these "business models" at Oracle, Rocky, Alma, etc. is increasingly less availability of software for us regular users. Say what you might about RH but you can't argue that they put out massive amounts of open source code out there for all to use. Or they did anyway.