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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

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Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#151

Post by fredski42 »

phpisthebest wrote: post #134
StillBored wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is an odd choice when comparing RH and Canonical. The former has been almost religious about living to the open source ideals, going so far as open sourcing products they purchase, and making sure new products they create have opensource upstreams. I don't think the same can be said of Canonical which seems at every turn to in need of $ so they try desperate ploys to monetize new projects they work on by develo…

>>The former has been almost religious about living to the open source ideals Pre-IBM sure... Post IBM hardly >>its hard to point to another company that does more across as much of the opensource ecosystem. Maybe google these days? Really, you think google is a good example of Open Source... wow how far we have come.. Google worse than Microsoft when it comes to the EEE model You are correct Canonical is not ideal,…

>> Post IBM hardly

Can you put some substance on that statement?

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#152

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…

> 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.

I guess it’s quite pragmatic from the short- and even medium-term perspective, although it likely may become well poisoning in the long term.

There used to be an understanding that since Red Hat is making a lot of buck on the shoulders of contributors making FOSS available, they have an obligation of giving a considerable amount of goodwill in return. It looks like they are now pulling a Reddit, but making it a long game.

I mean, right now it looks like they are protecting their business (you really want to get paid for having to backport fixes to some library which has been EOLed and forgotten by its upstream half a decade ago, and for all stability promises no vendor is giving!), but it’s opening a way to shittier practices, if you get my drift.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#153

Post by axus »

pavon wrote: post #15
chasil wrote: post #6

If Red Hat chooses not to perform their duties under the GPL, then any holder of copyright can require Red Hat to remove the owner's source packages from the commercial distribution. Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the source only to those who download the binary releases. As there are several avenues for free downloads (developer, 16 free licenses for small business, etc.), the source will be…

> Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the source only to those who download the binary releases. The article states clearly that they are doing this, no need to speculate.

Currently you need a Red Hat account to download an ISO image, but you don't need to be a customer. IBM/Red Hat's announcement says that you need to be a customer or partner to download the source, so one could be able to download binary but refused the source.

I also wonder how it will go if AWS provides RHEL for a server, and you ask them for the source.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#155

Post by jzb »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #112
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…

> 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…

CentOS was also huge towards allowing a lot of larger companies to just run CentOS in production instead of RHEL and avoid paying anything at all.

However you may feel about Red Hat's actions, I'd trust that folks at Red Hat have done enough legwork to figure out that "CentOS as a loss leader for RHEL" wasn't working out the way people like to imagine it would.

(Note: I am a former Red Hat employee, but I do not have and haven't had specific access to any data estimating what CentOS Linux was expected to add to or subtract from the bottom line. But I feel pretty sure that many deals won and lost have been examined, many customers spoken to, and numbers crunched to inform their actions.)

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#156

Post by wkat4242 »

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…

I don't really agree. RHEL is nothing special. Important for Enterprise and thus free availability is handy for people having an interest in becoming a sysadmin to learn it. Dogfooding work stuff is the only reason I'd consider using it or its derivatives at home. But I don't care even about that and my stuff all runs BSD :P

But other distros are much better IMO.

There's good reasons that a totally free distro like Debian is forked so much. It's just a really solid base. Software doesn't need to have a business model to be great.

I'd be a lot sadder to see Debian disappear than RHEL and its derivatives.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#157

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

chasil wrote: post #20
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt most RHEL packages use the GPL. They were publishing full source out of goodness of their hearts (or maybe to conquer more market share and then potentially convert some of that into sales if you're more cynical).

The kernel, the compiler, the C library, and the init system have more sway than various packages under BSD, MIT, or other licensing.

But then I’m laughing in OpenSSL.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#158

Post by 0x0000000 »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #30
Timon3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is stuck in a cycle of constant re-invention, because they somehow manage to always re-invent themselves in ways that are even worse and more complicated for customers, which they try to fix by re-inventing themselves again. Even if they initially planned on leaving Red Hat alone, every re-invention is a chance for some executive to make the decision to squeeze a little tighter on existing customers. So the quest…

I think you are being very pessimistic. All of their acquisitions are used to fund reinventions but due to their existing mainframe and other support contracts it makes a moat that people have a hard time crossing. I could see Oracle being merged or bought by IBM.

> I could see Oracle being merged or bought by IBM.

Their market caps are almost identical, and personally I'd say it'll be a cold day in hell before Oracle merges with, nevermind is acquired by, IBM.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#159

Post by dijit »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #146
dijit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can imagine people being fired for going with Oracle.

Fail to make your budget work 5 quarters in a row and see how long you last. ;)

Or wait for a legal case to come up: someones getting fired, wether its you or a scapegoat you sacrifice.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#160

Post by rout39574 »

reidrac wrote: post #143
phpisthebest wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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).

Yes, anything the FSF blesses also qualifies as open source. Can you articulate what point you're trying to make, that this supports?
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