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A response to the git.centos.org changes

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Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#21

Post by jeltz »

jmclnx wrote: post #14

>Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model Yes, I do not mean to sound harsh but I do not know how say this in a nice way. To me, this means we will still happily take work from our volunteers, but we will restrict other people from using this work so we can get more $. But thank you volunteers for keeping our payroll low and helping out our stockholders. I really think this is another small s…

What takeover? While I agree with you that Red hat are being scummy here there are plenty of non-corporate distros like Debian and Arch which are very healthy. I do not see any takeover, just the usual greedy corporations which have always existed.

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#22

Post by colechristensen »

leetrout wrote: post #2

> Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity. So... completely tone deaf.

“Tone deaf” is too charitable.

The whole, literally entire point of open source is copying and redistributing.

Open source is a threat to open source companies? Yeah kinda. Many of them make money selling things that are free and, as he says “not adding value”.

Ironically Red Hat does add a lot of value but now instead of trying to sell that value they’re trying to put walls around what is free.

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#23

Post by housemusicfan »

keikobadthebad wrote: post #3

Sounds like they think of Rocky as the enemy, 'under no obligation' to make it easier, 'rebuilding code' is a 'threat'... I have a project in RHEL that they 'rebuild' but I don't see that as a 'threat'. They want to be a little bit more careful with dogma that makes sense to their management, will get them patted on the head there, but is just nonsense seen from other perspectives - like my perspective contributing t…

> I have a project in RHEL that they 'rebuild' but I don't see that as a 'threat'.

They address that in the blog post:

"We don’t simply take upstream packages and rebuild them."

Rest assured they're adding good juju to your upstream code! This is 2000s-era Microsoft-level wordsmithing.

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#25

Post by cyberpunk »

I genuinely don't understand why anyone is using rhel or rhel-derived distros anymore.

'we' (and by 'we' -- I can only speak for the small slice of uk/eu companies I've worked at for the last ~18 or so years) were /forced/ to use redhat when running stuff like SAP, IBM WebSphere, Oracle, various terrible BI systems, ERP stuff, and so on for 'support'.

Then the cloud happened, and rhel/centos came along initally as we knew the tools, and we were running mostly the same stuff but on other peoples gear.

Slowly the application estate exploded and now I think it's fair to say we target k8s instead of 'rhel' as the place where our software is running, and rhel and it's brothers go absolutely nowhere near my k8s estate or any I've worked on (typically, ubuntu server nodes if I have to build my own, and alpine for contiainers).

So; people who are upset by the recent developments (and lets be honest, did you expect a thriving community around an IBM product?) -- why? What's rhel got that debian doesn't? Or ubuntu?

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#26

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

jmclnx wrote: post #14

>Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model Yes, I do not mean to sound harsh but I do not know how say this in a nice way. To me, this means we will still happily take work from our volunteers, but we will restrict other people from using this work so we can get more $. But thank you volunteers for keeping our payroll low and helping out our stockholders. I really think this is another small s…

>To me, this means we will still happily take work from our volunteers, but we will restrict other people from using this work so we can get more $.

That's just a willful misconstruction - they're absolutely contributing to upstream, as the post makes clear.

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#27

Post by orf »

A lot of comments on this topic seem at odds with reality.

If you accept that it takes a lot of effort to produce what Red Hat produces and you accept that you cannot buy food with a list of your open source contributions, then the people who work for Red Hat need to be compensated in some way.

If your answer to this is that there is a big, distributed pool of people willing to do this work instead of Red Hat then you don’t believe that Red Hat adds value. But the question remains: who compensates those people?

And this big distributed pool of people ready to do free work definitely doesn’t exist already. Well, it does, but it’s just Redhat. And they are rightfully changing that.

It could be the companies they work for (like is done with the Linux Kernel), but that doesn’t exist and starting it is a pretty big undertaking.

At the end of the day the comment in the post about the anger coming from people who “do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit” rings pretty true.

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#28

Post by sroussey »

c0l0 wrote: post #16
leetrout wrote: post #2

> Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity. So... completely tone deaf.

Yet still correct. I am not a Red Hat user or customer (I've been living on Debian and using it at work for nearly 15 years now), but I can perfectly understand their decision to not play along so nicely with EL rebuilders any more. Look at Amazon, who, until very recently at least, simply took what RHEL provided, used that to lure customers into their "RHEL-compatible" cloud platform, far away from any need to compe…

Their true targets are Amazon and Oracle (you forgot the latter).

That said, I think this is still insufficient to thwart them.

I predict RedHat will wither away and get shut down in 10 years. Neither Amazon nor Oracle will pick up the slack. I would not bet on any projects that they sponsor.

This is a death spasm. First of many.

Re: A response to the git.centos.org changes

#29

Post by nartz »

Whats said in this blogpost may be 100% true, and of course red hat does do a lot for the community, but unfortunately the damage is done. Its always going to feel like:

* Red Hat was a bastion of open source

* Red Hat sold out to IBM

* Red Hat stopped being Red Hat, and started being IBM by focusing on $$ over open source

* Red Hat reputation degrades as $$ are put first, killing off centos, now this, just downhill from here. >

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