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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

#81

Post by jmclnx »

housemusicfan wrote: post #74
jmclnx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pointing out what I see as a trend. Linux hardware seems to be on the way to a lockdown by companies. How many proprietary bolbs are now needed to run Linux on many Laptops. This is a failure of the Linux Foundation to push back on proprietary hardware vendors, one blaring example is Nvidia. Even Linus has commened on Nvidia. The Foundation should stop allowing proprietary hardware in Linux, instead these vendor…

> Another example is Secure Boot, some laptop manufactures are no longer allowing Legacy Boot. Were is the Foundation on this issue. Instead Microsoft donates large amounts and nothing is said about who signs the keys. It is just about impossible for many people to install Linux (or a BSD) on some new hardware without jumping through Secure Boot Loops. I think you're wrong on this one. You seem to be mixing up UEFI v…

I could be :)

I know if I need to get a new Laptop, I will need to either pay twice the average for an open system that meets my needs, or spend months looking for compatible hardware.

So far the ~8 years old Laptop I have is working fine with Linux.

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

#82

Post by jabl »

kryptiskt wrote: post #77
orf wrote: post #27

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 yo…

Why did Red Hat's previous model stop working now, after 25 years of success? I'm not angry about what Red Hat is doing. I'm just puzzled and I suspect that its a very stupid move. What Red Hat is doing now will probably increase their license sales in the short term. But they will do so by cannibalizing the entire Red Hat-compatible ecosystem. All the "freeloaders" provide RHEL with most of its share in the distro m…

For a somewhat simplistic explanation, RHEL became very successful as a tool to replace proprietary RISC Unix servers (often running Oracle DB) with x86(-64) and Linux, offering a traditional "enterprise" support model those proprietary UNIX customers were used to. So what has changed?

1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there.

2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue.

3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu.

While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.

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

#83

Post by fariszr »

> There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder.

> The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn’t reality. I wish we lived in that world, but it’s not how it actually plays out. Instead, we’ve found a group of users, many of whom belong to large or very large IT organizations, that want the stability, lifecycle and hardware ecosystem of RHEL without having to actually support the maintainers, engineers, writers, and many more roles that create it. These users also have decided not to use one of the many other Linux distributions.

This is a very important section a lot of the comments aren't mentioning.

It seems the potential loss of new user flow for them is worth it, as the majority are just using it as a way to avoid paying for RHEL, which was never a free product.

> The CentOS Stream gitlab source is where we build RHEL releases, in the open for all to see.

So there shouldn't be *any difference* between this repo and the final RHEL binaries right?, at least on tags/releases.

But what about unplanned security patches, are these also built in the CentOS stream repos?

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

#84

Post by rektide »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #45
orf wrote: post #27

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 yo…

It's interesting because if RHEL had no value add nobody would pay for it and nobody would be angry about this change. All of these angry posts are proof in a way that they are putting in valuable work.

RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them.

If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.

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

#85

Post by jake_morrison »

Many of the leading Linux users are never going to pay for RHEL.

That includes expert users who don't need enterprise support. If you make them use something else, then that will become the most battle-tested enterprise distribution.

It also includes developers. If they run on your platform, then it will get native support. If you make it easy for them to test on your platform, then it will get first-class support. If you make it difficult and they feel like second-class citizens, you will get no support.

Open source is about community, and RedHat has made it clear that the only community they care about is companies willing to pay for expensive per-server licenses.

With the rise of the cloud and containerized workloads, the business model of providing long-term support for on-prem servers is declining, and they are just milking the customers who remain.

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

#86

Post by jabl »

housemusicfan wrote: post #35
dsr_ wrote: post #11

It's nice that they are clear, now: No Red Hat unless you pay them for it. If you pay them for it, you can't redistribute it.

> If you pay them for it, you can't redistribute it. Citation please? I've sat in enough conference rooms full of lawyers to know the GPL explicitly forbids this, so it would be bordering on insane if this is what they're proposing.

RH doesn't prevent you from redistributing the sources of a GPL'ed RHEL binary. That is indeed explicitly allowed by the GPL, nothing they can do about it. What they can do, however, is cancel your RHEL subscription if they catch you doing it.

IANAL so I can't say whether this constitutes a "further restriction on redistribution" per the GPL, but evidently RH lawyers don't think so.

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

#87

Post by solacelost »

housemusicfan wrote: post #35
dsr_ wrote: post #11

It's nice that they are clear, now: No Red Hat unless you pay them for it. If you pay them for it, you can't redistribute it.

> If you pay them for it, you can't redistribute it. Citation please? I've sat in enough conference rooms full of lawyers to know the GPL explicitly forbids this, so it would be bordering on insane if this is what they're proposing.

If you take advantage of the GPL clause that allows you to redistribute the code that built the binaries that Red Hat provided you (which, according to the GPL, you're allowed to do), Red Hat is under no obligation to provide you with new binaries - and therefore no requirement to provide you updates to that code.

IANAL, but that doesn't break the GPL as far as I can tell.

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

#88

Post by meltedcapacitor »

pierat wrote: post #12

> I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those 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. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous. > .... > There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs ou…

the argument seems to be that redhat is/was playing fairly and then Oracle/AWS/Google/etc (which for legal reasons obviously cannot be named explicitly) came and started freeloading on redhat's work instead of "working together". bit of a tragedy of the commons/adverse selection issue within "capitalism" than a "capitalism vs community" thing.

maybe they should just grandfather RHEL (only support current releases for the 10 year period, no new LTS) and if clients want a security patched newer version of Linux, offer consultancy to help them switch to Oracle Linux. and then Larry will have to actually do the work lol.

maybe at a later point they can offer support for a bug-for-bug compatible rebuild of Oracle Linux :-)

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

#89

Post by geerlingguy »

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…

They're accidentally leaking their internal marketing texts in the blog post.

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

#90

Post by gnukid »

rektide wrote: post #84
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting because if RHEL had no value add nobody would pay for it and nobody would be angry about this change. All of these angry posts are proof in a way that they are putting in valuable work.

RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them. If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will c…

Can't everyday people use CentOS Stream?
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