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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

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Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#181

Post by flyinghamster »

nezirus wrote: post #172

I am so pissed by this move, it is totally against the spirit of free software and GPL. Using additional contracts to subvert the free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it further. RedHat would not be here if someone behaved like this 25+ years ago. I would prefer a variant of GPL which strictly forbids this (imo it should already be forbidden, these are clearly additional restrictio…

> Using additional contracts to subvert the free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it further.

This wouldn't be the first time. The very origin of the DD-WRT router distro was a hard fork of SveaSoft's "if you share this, we cut off your access to updates" license.

https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/the-dd-wrt-controversy/

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#182

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

sigg3 wrote: post #127
jsiepkes wrote: post #118

Here are the meeting notes from the RockyLinux people on this subject: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-git-c.o-chan...

Now that is what I would call a shady meet. Parasites indeed and spirit too. I'm actively removing their stuff from wherever I can from now on.

What's shady about it?

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#183

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

cookiengineer wrote: post #144
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…

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...

Pretty sure oracle have made a habit of going after security researchers who use responsible disclosure pathways also.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#184

Post by KAMSPioneer »

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…

This (SELinux) is why I started using RH-family OSs more and more, and one of a few reasons why I stick with it, even though Debian's minimalism is incredibly nice. I have a book (as yet unopened) on my desk about SELinux administration, but it's huge and CentOS, Fedora, RHEL, et al. Just Work (okay, with the occasional small tweak to policies or booleans).

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#185

Post by NegativeK »

jzb wrote: post #148
phpisthebest wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Rocky and Alma are doing exactly what CentOS pre-Stream did for _six_ years. Now they're frustrated that their decision to kill the CentOS idea didn't stick?

Red Hat might have the legal right to gate their product, but it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative.

I don't really like reductionist blaming, but I feel basically forced to wonder what Red Hat would be doing if IBM wasn't involved.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#187

Post by jake_morrison »

The problem is that RHEL is too expensive for people who don't need support. IBM is getting greedy and screwing up its pipeline.

Our dedicated servers are about $100/month for pretty serious hardware (2 x 8-core CPUs, 64 GB RAM, 2 x 8TB HDD, 30TB transfer). Paying $349/year is a significant percentage of that. It is worse for smaller servers, and ludicrous for small virtual machines in the cloud.

I would not mind throwing them a bone to have e.g. security updates at some reasonable cost. Their official repositories don't have enough packages, so I end up having to use 3rd-party repos for normal things, e.g. Postgres. Having a more full-featured repo of up-to-date software would be useful to me.

I have been running CentOS 7, but when that is no longer supported, I will switch to something else like Ubuntu or Debian, whatever our hosting providers support. I am already using Debian or distroless for containers.

And then RHEL will be completely irrelevant to me. Good job, IBM.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#188

Post by mananaysiempre »

a_subsystem wrote: post #28
a2tech wrote: post #3

I 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…

IBM has known how to play vendor lock-in and death by a thousand related products since before computers could fetch instructions from memory, when most of the world still thought just shipping what their customers need was where it’s at. (Evidently—if unfortunately for my worldview—that doesn’t contradict there being a lot of very good engineers there.) They may be dying a slow death, I don’t know for sure but I can imagine that, but just making their stuff worse for business reasons is not by itself a symptom of that—it’s simply part of their normal lifecycle.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#189

Post by deceptionatd »

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #150
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.

I've also had great experiences with Tumbleweed for the most part, but be careful using ZFS, as it frequently breaks with updates. Probably not something most people use, but it does force me to run Leap on my home server.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#190

Post by NotYourLawyer »

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).

Free implies open source. Open source does not imply free.
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