I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by redundantly » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #89

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 sour…

> 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

One guy? The sentiment of CentOS users being freeloaders is shared by a lot of people, inside and outside of IBM.

I remember when the original announcement came out that CentOS was being killed in favour of CentOS Stream. Lots of IBM (Red Hat) employees were defending the change by painting CentOS users as getting a paid product for free. Lots of people here on Hacker News and Reddit and other places were defending it as well.

Don't try to rewrite history.

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

#202

Post by pak9rabid » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

barbariangrunge wrote: post #119

freedomben wrote: post #89

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 sour…

I'm personally impressed that Fedora is fully open source while being released by a for-profit company. I would have expected, when learning about this ecosystem, for Red Hat releases to be proprietary for 5 years, and then have those versions switch to a FOSS license, just as a way to ensure they can monetize their work. But Red Hat, at least in the past, sounds like they did something amazing, being able to go foss…

It's not too surprising when you realize that Fedora is really just a testbed for future RHEL iterations, once the packages involved have been field-tested and hardened. It's similar to how Debian branches progress (unstable -> test -> stable).

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

#203

Post by jrochkind1 » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

cryptonector wrote: post #141

jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

The Software Freedom Conservancy legal analysis of RHEL and GPL that OP links to is the most interesting part to me. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

Wishy-washy language there about skirting lines doesn't make that a very good analysis. You can use others' GPL code in your products and charge money for it. You have to "publish" the GPL'ed sources (and any sources of yours that derive from GPL'ed code) on demand -- publish as in: if someone asks, you have to give it to them, but there's no requirement that there be a public download page or anything like that, and…

The GPL does quite intentionally not require you to provide a public download page (or git access, etc), and this was more or less discussed and a conscious decision by those who came up with the GPL, agreed. Albeit in pre-widespread-internet days when a "public download page" wasn't a thing yet (and the equivalents were much more expensive, thus why they might not have wanted to require that burden). But still. I agree this is more or less intentional and explicit in the GPL.

But that the GPL lets you take GPL software, add your own features on top, sell it, and tell customers that if they redistribute it themselves (as the GPL explicitly allows), you will refuse to sell them software in the future ever again? Nope nope nope. I think it's not entirely clear if the GPL allows that or not, but if it does, it seems pretty clear to me that it's inadvertant, and not what the GPL was intended to do.

At any rate, this is a different thing, and to me another level of shadiness, than simply pointing out that the GPL does not require an entity to distribute the source via public download links -- this is about the entity trying to prohibit users from re-distributing the source themselves, and the GPL really was intentionally designed to try and avoid such prohibitions, that's kind of it's whole reason for existing.

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

#204

Post by pak9rabid » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #181

cturner wrote: post #161

RHEL has a major ecosystem advantage related to drivers that they may not be aware of. They risk ruining this, as I will try to explain. At the time industry started to take Linux seriously, RHEL was the dominant distro. As a result, and by accident, RHEL+derivs became the primary target for commercial hardware drivers. As an example - it's easier to get obscure low-latency network and packet-capture cards working on…

If you don't mind, what makes more niche hardware drivers work / build better against RHEL? I suppose RHEL uses basically the same kernel, with patches that don't alter its interface too substantially. So I presume that a driver in source form, or even partly in binary blob form, should build and work approximately equally well with any stock kernel. Beside the driver developers apparently using RHEL / CentOS (so on…

In my past experience as a sysadmin, some vendors will only release drivers (as binary blobs) for RHEL. EMC PowerPath comes to mind, granted that's kind of a moot point now that the FOSS kernel MPIO drivers are good enough, but I'm sure there's other such examples that exist to this day.

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

#205

Post by lproven » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #94

freedomben wrote: post #89

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 sour…

> 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. Yeah, Red Hat wasn't the one that called them "freeloaders", this was language The Register used in an article: >> Having given the move time to successfully eliminate most of the clones, Red Hat then killed off its own offic…

Hi there. I am the author of the Register article that you quote:

> this was language The Register used in an article

So, in response to that, I'd like to point out a few things.

1. This is, I feel, now widely and well-established language in this discussion. For example, note its use in the comments to this article about the discontinuation of CentOS Linux three years ago: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

2. Others are using it in the context of this story; for example, here: https://fosspost.org/red-hat-is-shooting-itself-in-the-foot-...

3. The direct personal reason that I used the phrase "a bunch of freeloaders" is that this is a Douglas Adams quotation, or rather, paraphrase. I am not an especially big name, but those who do know my name may recognise it: I was once the president of ZZ 9 Plural Z alpha, the official Douglas Adams appreciation society. I was interviewed quite widely in media around the world at the time that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film came out. I used the phrase in order to refer to the Douglas Adams line about "a taxi service for a bunch of degenerate freeloaders." For reasons which I trust are obvious I removed the adjective.

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

#206

Post by freedomben » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:26 PM UTC

jzb wrote: post #182

parasense wrote: post #169

To quote Jeff: > Here's how it used to work: > Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux > They would release a new version. > They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Ha…

Let me preface this by saying, Jeff owes Red Hat nothing and he's free to stop "supporting" RHEL for any or no reason at all. That said, "grab a copy of Linux" seriously, gloriously, hilariously handwaves away so many things that Red Hat does to create a RHEL release. Red Hat pulls together hundreds or thousands of upstreams to create RHEL, participates in many of them, tests all that together , helps partners certif…

I agree with most of what you said, but:

> If that angers you, I heartily encourage folks to build Debian up as the standard we all certify against. Or start your own business that overtakes Red Hat and earns the place RHEL has today.

This strikes me as a variation of the "if you don't like Apple or Google's rules, make your own phone" or "if you don't like Youtube's content policies, then start your own video company." It's not necessarily wrong, but it's wildly impractical. It certainly may come down to that, but it would be far better for everyone involved to reach some sort of happy medium point that doesn't result in mass duplication of effort and fragmentation. Before telling people to just fork the project if you don't like it, it would be great to address people's concerns as much as possible, and that can't happen unless people make their concerns known.

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

#207

Post by parasubvert » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

jzb wrote: post #199

Pet_Ant wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main thrust of all of this is to de-commodify Linux. To make RHEL really be in people's minds it's own operating system outside of Linux. It's hard to do when it's really just a ball of generic open source components. Hence, this hostile behaviour. They don't want to be Linux, they want to be RHEL and ask not about the man behind the curtain.

Just the opposite, I think. Red Hat is fighting the idea that the operating system is a commodity, and demonstrating that the RHEL subscription does have value. Red Hat's competitors have tried really really hard to undermine RHEL as something of value. The cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide their own base Linux distros to run workloads on. They'd love to cut Red Hat out of the picture. Oracle wants to convin…

Not the opposite. You're agreeing with the parent that Red Hat is viewing to de-commodify Linux. You just can't seem to see why this a bad thing.

Red Hat does not have the interests of the community in mind any longer, which was inevitable when IBM purchased them.

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

#208

Post by kazinator » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

What is the actual issue here? It's not explained well.

Is that the CentOS Stream is not a bona fide community distro, but simply a sneaky name for something that is actually "RHEL Beta"?

The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition.

Which makes it a dickhead move for it to be using the name.

Technically, it would way more sense for a bona fide community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn't it, so the point is moot.

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

#209

Post by freedomben » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

_cenw wrote: post #188

nolist_policy wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to analyze if this is illegal or not (I don't think it is). It has been discussed elsewhere already. But even if it where illegal, the only people in a position to sue would be the contributors of the upstream projects that get packaged into RHEL. And I don't see anyone having the appetite for that. I contribute a lot to QEMU and there I'm practically working side-by-side with redhat devs. They contribu…

Don't think of it as suing your coworkers, think of it as suing your coworkers corporporate overlords?

I think you're missing GP's point (or possibly I am but I don't think so). They aren't saying they are buddies and so they wouldn't want to sue. They are saying "Red Hat pays a lot of people to work on this, possibly to the point where the project would be dead without them. They're not just packaging up somebody else's code and shipping it"

I adamantly agree with GP. There are important projects that wouldn't exist without Red Hat, or if they did they would pale in comparison to the proprietary solutions and wouldn't be seriously used. Qemu/KVM is a big one. Without Red Hat's investment, it would all be VMware and anyone wanting to (seriously)_virtualize on Linux would be using VMware.

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

#210

Post by CrLf » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:31 PM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #180

parasense wrote: post #169

To quote Jeff: > Here's how it used to work: > Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux > They would release a new version. > They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Ha…

Two thoughts: > The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before. Doing so bug-for-bug requires more effort than it did a few weeks ago. And they're basically doing that work in parallel with Red Hat itself (duplication of effort). Also, making a change like this (forcing Rocky and AlmaLinux to change in the middle of the 9.x release cycle), when the previous change (killing CentOS) was _also_…

Why do bug-for-bug with RHEL at all? Why not turn Alma and Rocky into stable distributions in their own right?

If this pushes RHEL into oblivion, why should anyone care?

The Debian ecosystem isn't centered on Ubuntu, it's centered on Debian. Comparisons between the two ecosystems are invalid because of this simple fact.

It would be nice to see the "Red Hat" ecosystem recenter around something which isn't a direct source release of a commercial product. Alma and Rocky should rebase on CentOS Stream for starters, and then try to get closer to Fedora as an upstream.

(BTW, I speak as someone who did corporate systems administration for years and understands the use case of replacing RHEL licenses with free CentOS installs perfectly.)