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I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#81

Post by dmix »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #73
dmix wrote: post #44

I've heard people on HN say you can't build a huge business off open source. That Red Hat was a one-off. Maybe this supports the narrative? Assuming it goes poorly I mean.

Why? They did have a good thing going; that they then went and decided to shoot their own foot doesn't invalidate the earlier success.

I can't personally judge yet how much this will affect their business, bad for optics and community and all that sure. But regardless the narrative still implies they were already successful (aka "a one-off success"). Businesses rarely last forever. A decade plus of success is still a big success.

The point is more about the extreme difficulty of building for-profit businesses strictly off Linux-style OSS. Where people will pay for premium versions supported by paid dev teams. Otherwise it's just a glorified consulting business and not really an OSS software selling business.

I'd be interested to hear the motivations for doing so. Whether they strong downward financial pressure or were stable + merely wanted more growth.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#82

Post by edgyquant »

gtirloni wrote: post #12
poo-yie wrote: post #7

I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?

> Red Hat is a for-profit company ... built on top of software and labour contributed by others. What you're missing is how the open source ethos works.

Red Hat is a huge contributor to Linux. They also are responsible for making it a trusted OS for people coming off traditional Unix in the 90s. They aren’t doing anything on the backs of others.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#83

Post by xt00 »

eastbound wrote: post #49
xt00 wrote: post #40

Could somebody who maintains a particularly important open source software change the license to say basically “you must release your source code to anyone who requests it free of charge whether they are a customer or not”? Yes Redhat is a for profit company, but them deciding to make a business off of software that has licenses that might change to their detriment is their problem. Oh wait is that what they are doin…

Free has never meant monetarily free. Open-source means you can recompile, and thus maintain after the EOL of the provider, and code secrets aren’t secret. This is already a step above proprietary software. For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code. But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.

Yea selling an entire OS that consists of a ton of other peoples open source projects—often paid for by other companies to have somebody work on a thing — then when people say “hey we should get a copy of the small tweaks you did to all of those bits” and they say no, seems like a situation where changing the license on enough critical parts force the OS maker to not withhold the software.

What would stop Redhat from saying “we’ve decided the only customers we care about will pay us 50k to be a customer, therefore anybody who doesn’t pay 50k cannot get source from us.. and anybody distributing the source code owes us 50k..”

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#84

Post by LaSombra »

gtirloni wrote: post #12
poo-yie wrote: post #7

I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?

> Red Hat is a for-profit company ... built on top of software and labour contributed by others. What you're missing is how the open source ethos works.

You say that and it feels like Red Hat never contributed a single line of code to any FOSS projects or doesn't hire any developers to work on FOSS.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#85

Post by kkielhofner »

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war…

After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server.

After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported.

Why anyone would want to waste their time being a tester for a commercial product is very strange to me when there is Debian and even Arch which (for a rolling release) seems to be substantially more stable, better documented, etc.

I understand why it exists and it has its place but absent a few specific scenarios I have no idea why it would be a first choice for anyone.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#86

Post by burnished »

LaSombra wrote: post #80
woodruffw wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the author is expecting charitable behavior: it's more that Red Hat was deriving extraordinary amounts of value from his work, and was (partially) compensating for that by making his (and others') support for RHEL easier by providing them will access to RHEL. In other words: Red Hat's behavior here is almost certainly going to make end-level support for their OS worse, not better, all for a tiny slice o…

Red Hat offers free subscriptions to developers. How doesn't it help in this case?

Because its a pain in the ass and going along with it is essentially signing yourself up for the next time they want to try squeezing for money.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#87

Post by CAP_NET_ADMIN »

criddell wrote: post #39
pamhalpert wrote: post #9

Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the "freeloader" comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything. If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on t…

> RESELLING without contributing anything I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.

You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#88

Post by edgyquant »

gtirloni wrote: post #21
pamhalpert wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... built on top of software and labour contributed by others. the irony of Rocky, Oracle, and etc just flat out ripping off Red Hat.... which is the exact move that caused this change lol

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#89

Post by freedomben »

I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. I'm unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I'm re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don't believe that Red Hat's leadership cares a whole lot about open source anymore. If they do, they've demonstrated that they are willing to harm open source in order to (short-term at least) increase sales. (congrats salespeople, you finally won and killed CentOS. And congrats to all the people who used to tell the salesperson "I can run CentOS for free, why should I buy RHEL?")

But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion or the company's opinion. I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community. But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive. Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don't agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious.

What's the goal here? Is it to polarize into good and evil sides? Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the "other side" seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them?

I like a lot of OP's content, but I am a little worried that he's a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it's driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#90

Post by edgyquant »

donatj wrote: post #10
poo-yie wrote: post #7

I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?

You’re missing the fact that they are pedaling GPL software, and thus they are inclined to be offering it for free to the whole world, definitionally.

No they only have to offer source code to users of their software. In order to use their software you have to buy a license. They have been giving it away for years but are not obligated to. When GNU first came out they sold their source code for thousands of dollars and this is the format GPL was written to enforce.
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