Live data from Hacker News

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

lwn.net

111–120 of 339 posts

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#111
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. I avoid anything Oracle. Their licensing model is hell. Their products are usually terrible compared to competition. Cloud products are subpar. Products tend to require a support contract since it’s proprietary dogshit. Some tidbits of Oracle and Larry Ellison (founder, CEO): - in the early days of Oracle DB, it was benchmarked and compared against other RDBMS and Oracle DB…

SQL Server did something similar too. There’s a famous Reddit post that goes deep comparing it to PostgreSQL but can’t name it for takedown reasons.

Takedown reasons?

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#112

The 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…

> 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.

CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments, startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump on "real RH" when they got bigger. Alma Linux is the same. Rocky Linux does sell support, but even then it's still advertising RHEL.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#114
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

My Assumption would be Section 1.4 over rides in the case of Source Code which is governed by GPL and implicitly allows redistribution, that is the entire purpose of CopyLeft So the prohibition on "redistribution" in this context would be on the compiled binaries. i.e you could not pay for a subscription and then mirror the yum repos publicly.

Yep you can redistribute it. But they can terminate your subscription so they don't have to give you the next round of updates. Basically a new "customer" would have to pop up and leak the sources each time there is an update to a package for a bug-for-bug RHEL clone to exist

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of your views of cloning a commercial Linux distro like that, alling Rocky Linux and Alma Linux 'dirtbags' misses the point of the entire reason they exist in the first place, RedHat discontinuing CentOS (and drastically shortening the support window on CentOS 8).

who called them dirtbags? I've seen this mentioned a few times but I haven't seen any source for it

It's in one of the comments on the linked article, and was reposted in the top comment in the thread in which you're replying. It seems to be sourced originally from here:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3697733/chatgpt-s-parasiti...

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#116
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL Server did something similar too. There’s a famous Reddit post that goes deep comparing it to PostgreSQL but can’t name it for takedown reasons.

Takedown reasons?

Takedown == getting issued a scary cease-and-desist warning letter by high-paid lawyers.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#117

I've been using Red Hat and Fedora since the early RH4 days when the video driver only supported monochrome for my GPU. I'm now going to start switching to something not controlled by a corporation. Yes, I'm not happy about it but it's necessary. The days of being naive about Linux are over. I still consider Fedora one of the best distros out there (bleeding edge and polished as much as possible) and I prefer to use…

If you like the glacial pace of Redhat you'll probably be happy with Debian stable.

Until today I preferred to use Fedora on desktops and RHEL/Rocky/CentOS on servers, so I'm already used to different paces of development.

But it seems Debian unstable on desktops and Debian 12 stable on servers might work just fine. Truth be told, I only need a 5.x/6.x kernel with cgroups/namespaces/ebpf on my servers and flatpak on the desktops and I'm fine.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#119
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Red Hat didn't yet provide free download and free hobbyist licensing for their SO CentOS is what allowed me to learn the RHEL way and learn enough to pay 560 euro to get RHCSA certified. I can see their problem with Oracle, but Rocky linux is probably bringing them business. If my job wouldn't mandate a specific distro, I would use Rocky Linux where the management doesn't want to pay for support, and RHEL whenev…

Yeah... had it not been for CentOS, I would've never touched anything in the RHEL-side of things after I discovered Ubuntu in the 10/12 era. Because CentOS existed, I made sure most of my open source work would run just as well on all RHEL derivatives as it does on Debian. If Rocky didn't exist, I would quickly drop all my RHEL support because operating thousands of test machines and containers based on UBI and havin…

I'd have to check if it is still the case but RHEL has provided free developer licenses for RHEL for years (decades?).

EDIT: checked and it still exist and allow usage of up to 16 physical or virtual nodes for development " to develop software (including open source software), perform prototyping or quality assurance testing and/or for demonstration purposes.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#120
I wonder if you're RedHat Subscriber and Customer and have access to the source what is the license ?

In general though it is clear what RedHat does not seems to want to play Open Source game any more, at least when it comes to RHEL.

Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not.

Post reply on HN