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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

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Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#251

Post by bonzini »

jacooper wrote: post #231
bonzini wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring exactly to Ubuntu Pro. They can support more packages for cheaper exactly because Red Hat won't ever have the same YOLO approach to support that Canonical has.

Did you try their support before coming to such opinions?

1) Canonical does not have enough testers. As a developer I have seen what kind of bugs are reported on Ubuntu, and some of them denote a serious lack of QA. There are packages in Ubuntu that are almost certainly shipped untested.

2) Canonical does not have enough developers, unless they found a magic recipe by which their relatively few employees know how to fix issues in all these packages while not contributing upstream and while also maintaining mir/upstart/snap whatever their latest fad is. So if you have say a performance regression or a kernel crash or a miscompilation they might just relay that to upstream developers and hope they fix it.

3) Regarding package count, PPAs are basically the same as EPEL or Copr, and are unsupported.

I'm not saying they are bad at support. I'm saying that they are betting on their customer not actually asking them to support some of the things they ship. Red Hat just says "no thanks, feel free to use EPEL or pip but we don't want to touch it".

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#252

Post by windexh8er »

anyoneamous wrote: post #179
windexh8er wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 enterp…

> I don't understand the big push for RedHat specific tooling I'd wager it is driven by RH simply being "least worst" of the options which can be relied on to stick around long enough for enterprise users. Canonical are doing their best to screw the pooch with snap and similar nonsense, leaving the only other option being cobbling together a collection of tools from fly-by-night small projects - which might go full u…

I guess I should have been more clear. What I meant was that there seem to be a lot of die hard RedHat fans that hock the RedHat ecosystem for no apparent gain. I failed to make my point clearly, however. Podman is one of those tools that seem to follow up that narrative. RedHat could invest in the container ecosystem to make things better. Instead they strive to compete and hang their hat on very specific arguments against products that were (and still are in many cases) more complete.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#253

Post by Phrodo_00 »

vamega wrote: post #215
Phrodo_00 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat cannot stop or prevent a customer from distributing RHEL packages and software to third parties. However, Red Hat reserves the right to terminate any existing subscriptions a customer may have as a result of their package distributing. IANAL, but not so sure about that. From GPLv3: > You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example…

I don't think it is a further restriction on the rights you have. Those rights extend to the code you have, they are only terminating the business relationship going forward. Not a lawyer, so maybe someone else more knowledgeable about the space will expand on this. I imagine that RH/IBM has had lawyers look into this before the policy was announced.

RH hasn't said that they're looking into stopping customers from redistributing free software.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#254

Post by totallywrong »

jmainguy wrote: post #249
totallywrong wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 availabilit…

Redhat bought ansible tower, they did not write it from scratch.

Thanks, I stand corrected. But to my point, they bought something and open sourced it, only to have it used against them.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#255

Post by schoen »

palata wrote: post #244
School-Cotton wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name an open source license that you don’t consider free software, then. Note that “source available” (Business Software License, etc.) is not the same thing as “open source”.

It's not about what you consider or not. The Free Software movement is very clear. It is about the freedom of the user: "I, the copyright owner of my own code, allow you to use my code as long as you let your users have (some kind of) access to my code in the product they buy". Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much…

It sounds like you're implying that permissive licenses don't count as free software licenses, but that has never been true. FSF has always said that permissive licenses are free software licenses and that permissively licensed software is free software. However, they advocate the position that this might not be the best way to protect all downstream users' freedom.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#256

Post by genmud »

bonzini wrote: post #193
jake_morrison wrote: post #187

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 thr…

Red Hat's model is to only ship what they know they can support. For the rest there's EPEL which is community managed. Canonical's model is to ship the kitchen sink and wing it in case a customer wants support on something that is in a sorry state. Different customers, different requirements.

RHELs model is to support such ancient versions of software that they don't have to support many pieces of software, because the features most people would rely on aren't in 3, 5 or 10 year old software. If it wasn't effectively required (until recently) for most US government use, I would imagine they would have a substantially smaller customer base.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#258

Post by palata »

School-Cotton wrote: post #246
palata wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about what you consider or not. The Free Software movement is very clear. It is about the freedom of the user: "I, the copyright owner of my own code, allow you to use my code as long as you let your users have (some kind of) access to my code in the product they buy". Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much…

Name a license that is open source but not free software.

MIT, BSD, Apache, anything that is open source but allows you to make the code proprietary.

> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#259

Post by palata »

schoen wrote: post #255
palata wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about what you consider or not. The Free Software movement is very clear. It is about the freedom of the user: "I, the copyright owner of my own code, allow you to use my code as long as you let your users have (some kind of) access to my code in the product they buy". Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't care, or you want as much…

It sounds like you're implying that permissive licenses don't count as free software licenses, but that has never been true. FSF has always said that permissive licenses are free software licenses and that permissively licensed software is free software. However, they advocate the position that this might not be the best way to protect all downstream users' freedom.

I do, and it has been true (I believe it still is, that's fundamental to the notion of freedom): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

> When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.”

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#260

Post by School-Cotton »

palata wrote: post #258
School-Cotton wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a license that is open source but not free software.

MIT, BSD, Apache, anything that is open source but allows you to make the code proprietary. > When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-poi…

You are wrong according to the FSF. They consider all the licenses you mentioned to be free software licenses.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#X11License

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#FreeBSD

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