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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)

#251

Post by freedude »

re-thc wrote: post #8
hospitalJail wrote: post #4

Is this a clickbait title? Or do I misunderstand the word enterprise? They are not done with using Linux for "a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort." or "a business or company." They are no longer going to use a specific version of linux that was made by "a business or company." Do people really care that much about linux distros? Between 2 decades of personal use and a few year…

> Do people really care that much about linux distros? They sadly do. There's a whole wave of consultants and engineers tied to the RHEL ecosystem and wouldn't be able to install without typing "yum".

dnf, yum is slated to be deprecated.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...

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

#252

Post by jzb »

geerlingguy wrote: post #233
jzb wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also, as has been demonstrated, wildly impractical for Red Hat to continue exactly as before without others undermining its business. The thing is that everybody is only lobbying Red Hat to make concessions, but nobody's going after Oracle or Rocky or Alma or other clones to say "hey, cool it. Red Hat's trying to keep a business going here. You're undermining their business. If you keep this up, they're going to…

They could also shrink down to a more manageable business unit... except IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, and you can't ever decrease revenues or the axe drops :(

Well, remember too that IBM didn't pay $34b for just RHEL - a big part of the purchase was OpenShift which has been coming up in revenue and has RHEL as its underpinning. And I have a lot more to write and say about that in a series for my own blog, but certainly IBM isn't looking for RHEL revenue to go down...

And to be very fair to all involved, that's not even remotely unique to IBM. IBM is a public company and the expectation for public companies is that revenue always goes up. Always.

Red Hat had to live with that as an independent public company too. If IBM weren't in the picture and Red Hat were reporting poor subscriber numbers for RHEL, investors would be calling for heads because late stage capitalism. There's no more room for long-term thinking if that doesn't involve "numbers go up, every quarter."

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

#253

Post by evan1107 »

freedomben wrote: post #187
microtonal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors. However, a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community. Secondly, a substantial chunk of those users used CentOS because they wanted all the benefits of Red Hat EL without paying for it. That pr…

Don't underestimate the impact that even someone using CentOS and not contributing back can still have. It's still a person or group of people learning the Red Hat way. Lots of people (myself included) started on CentOS, and later bought RHEL when the need came up because I was already super familiar with RHEL because of my years on CentOS. Increasing proliferation of usage is a huge factor in driving growth.

Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?

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

#254

Post by ikiris »

microtonal wrote: post #140
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…

Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors. However, a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community. Secondly, a substantial chunk of those users used CentOS because they wanted all the benefits of Red Hat EL without paying for it. That pr…

How much is red hat paying kernel developers not directly on its payroll again?

They're the freeloaders.

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

#255

Post by error503 »

microtonal wrote: post #192
vbezhenar wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

License situation is still unclear to me. GPL explicitly does not allow to forbid further redistribution. RedHat does that. I'm not a lawyer, but from a layman PoV this seems sketchy.

IANAL, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat does have to give you the source code. They only have to provide the source code to customers to which they distribute the binaries. Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. AFAIK, the current kerfuffle is about providing RHEL source packages through git.centos.org. They currently only provide RHEL through a subscription and they fulfill th…

>Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code.

The fact that the subscription agreement does not allow this is exactly what we're discussing here.

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

#257

Post by pnutjam »

commandersaki wrote: post #70

Glad to see redhat go down the shitter. I was never a fan, but that's not the reason to hate on redhat. Everything is behind a paywall or a license. They just seemed like another Microsoft, especially when they started licensing Linux on at a per CPU core level. I think the only thing going for it is their support, but in my 20 years in the industry I've only ever used vendor support like once or twice, I've usually…

Vendor support is pretty crappy. By the time you're done gathering all the logs and running out the response time clock you've usually figured it out. Then at least half the time they do help, it's wrong because you're environment has some special requirement.

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

#259

Post by neverartful »

solamarpreet wrote: post #231
neverartful wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way is Red Hat not abiding by the license? My understanding is that Red Hat is making the source code available to their users via their customer portal. I don't think that they have an obligation to make their source code available to non-users.

They have an obligation under the GPL to allow end users to redistribute. Terminating the subscriber agreement for redistribution is punishing the user for exercising his right granted to him by the GPL.

I had missed this point earlier. Thanks for clarifying. This does indeed look like RH has put themselves into a quagmire.

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

#260

Post by pnutjam »

tomohawk wrote: post #235

Our team has seen 2 breaking changes in the past month from RH that caused problems in production. One in RHEL7 and one in RHEL8. It's definitely making us question the wisdom of the RHEL LTS approach. The LTS part is not what we're seeing.

Same, RHEL says you should be compatible against all minor versions and it doesn't matter if it's 8.5 or 8.6. Upgrades can happen without you noticing, but our software would only run on specific minor versions without investing time and development energy. Several installs I've worked on required an OS rebuild because the version crept into an unsupported minor version.
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