Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 339 posts

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#141

Post by olavgg »

brightball wrote: post #91
xyst wrote: 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.

The switch -> https://web.archive.org/web/20170808183612/http://imgur.com/...

The full article: https://web.archive.org/web/20190919121901/https://www.reddi...

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#142

Post by fredski42 »

zaphar wrote: post #89
m463 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't redhat profiting from all the software upstream to themselves? I'm reminded of the definition of a linux distribution: a package manager and a source repository. (that said, unbreakable linux, yeah)

Redhat contributes back to upstream in a lot of cases. I don't know if Rocky and co do or not but Redhat definitely does.

RedHat actually helps Rocky and co by basing RHEL on Centos Stream. Rocky and co can now file bugs on Centos Stream and have it fixed faster for their distribution. Before they could not do that. They had to report further upstream and had to wait until that landed in RHEL. Also RedHat is helped by these fixes. Only winners here.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#143

Post by reidrac »

phpisthebest wrote: post #136
reidrac wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean anti-copyleft. Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, despite the philosophical differences. The issue here is against the copyleft (GPL and AGPL).

>>Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, No ... no they are not >>despite the philosophical differences. And those differences are HUGE and make them incompatible

Well, go and check: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html

Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences (thus open source).

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#144

Post by cookiengineer »

xyst wrote: post #80
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #34

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…

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…

Also in terms of security, Oracle's "forks" are decades behind. They managed to make RedHat unsecure with their own dogshit changes.

There are so many CVEs for Oracle specifically that are just bad default usernames and passwords, where they still dispute the CVE reports because it is "intended behaviour".

So ridiculous...

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#145

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

PeterZaitsev wrote: post #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 doe…

The specs themselves usually come from Fedora first, where they are MIT by default (per Contributor Agreement, at least). So RH can do anything they please as long as they acknowledge the authors (which is done trivially by not mucking with %changelog).

Anything they please likely includes terminating your account if they sniff you using it to avoid the fees or enabling others to do so. If you are contemplating, say, using a Red Hat Individual Developer Access (or what they call it) to redistribute the sources, they have a provision in the terms you have to agree to just against such cases.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#146

Post by yoyohello13 »

dijit wrote: post #93
xyst wrote: 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…

Yet people are really happy to buy into Oracle because they have a free tier[0] (which, you probably should avoid anyway[1]) Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is totally fine for production, despite decades the company who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over minutia. It boggles my mind. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2…

It reminds me of the old saying.

> Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM

Nobody ever got fired for buying, Oracle or Microsoft or any big incumbent. The same could definitely not be said for choosing any free software.

Ironically RHEL is IBM now.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#147

Post by soraminazuki »

acatton wrote: post #102
soraminazuki wrote: post #75

I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work. The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language for describing packages, is…

> I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly with SELinux enabled. Setting up SELinux in any other distro is, in my experience, an uphill battle. You need to become an SELinux expert to do so. > The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools us…

I was specifically talking about people using RHEL when they need latest versions of software. For that use case, RHEL is a poor choice. You absolutely need to create custom packages, because there are no preexisting packages.

To reiterate:

> There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work.

DNF doesn't solve this specific problem.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#148

Post by jzb »

phpisthebest wrote: post #62
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #34

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…

This is only true it RHEL was self contained OS Project with no Upstream sources itself... That is not the case, RHEL is not possible with out the wider ecosystem, and to say Rocky Linux is a "dirtbag" for repacking RHEL, would be like saying RedHat is a "dirtbag" for packaging any number of free software projects they consume into their product. It completely antithetical the free software movement for which Linux i…

I'm not going to call Rocky or Alma "dirtbags" (does anybody use that phrase these days?) but comparing what Red Hat does to Rocky is misleading.

RHEL Clones: Take finished source code, rebuild, test, release.

RHEL: Work upstream to develop features / submit features upstream before inclusion in RHEL, maintain specific versions of upstream, test hundreds of upstreams together to make sure they can be shipped together as an operating system, develop "glue" software like Anaconda to install + manage the whole thing, take source, build, test, release, accept bugs, start over again for next minor release or major release as needed.

And, of course, this elides all the certification work that makes RHEL an attractive enough project to rebuild in the first place because people want very specifically a RHEL compatible distribution to run an application or applications on top of.

What people get pissed at Red Hat about isn't that they don't get to access the source. They're pissed they don't get the convenience. Largely speaking, the people who get pissed aren't concerned about Free Software, either - they just want easy to run binaries. As I understand it "get binaries for free" is not mandated by the four freedoms. The source code is still out there for people to study, change, use, and redistribute. That seems entirely compatible with the free software ethos - but incompatible with the freeloader ethos.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#149

Post by danjoredd »

soraminazuki wrote: post #75

I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work. The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language for describing packages, is…

I just use Fedora. When I used Red Hat briefly, I didn't notice any major differences between the two except one is the "base" of Red Hat. I can get pretty much whatever I need through dnf or flatpak. I get that Red Hat has support, but otherwise for regular consumers like me I am not sure why I would go for a Red Hat clone when Fedora exists.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#150

Post by Cu3PO42 »

RedShift1 wrote: post #51

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?

I suppose SUSE makes a lot of sense. Until some time ago SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE were related, but not exactly the same. That changed with Leap 15.3, since which openSUSE is now based on the same packages as SLE.

I've been personally using Tumbleweed on my personal devices and it's been great. I've not had a single issue with stability and almost always gotten extremely recent versions of software.

Post reply on HN