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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)

#301

Post by FireBeyond »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #213
FireBeyond wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It goes from "These businesses are abusing the GPL and software freedom!" to "Well, they are following the GPL but that doesn't result in what I want!" This is why we have GPL 2 and 3, for example. Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat, but nowhere near RHEL.

it's not just an issue of what "I" want, it's an issue of what the GPL is intended to do. If it doesn't result in the four freedoms, but the GPL allows it, then the GPL has failed to do what it was designed to do. From the text of the GPL itself: > Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive s…

> and try to prevent users from having the freedom to re-distribute the GPL software they received, with or without their own modifications.

> refuse to have you as a customer if you exersize them, that's all.

refuse to -continue- to have you as a customer, that is. you are still perfectly entitled to the source code of, and distribution thereof, what you purchased.

The GPL doesn't create an obligation that you get continued access to future updates.

I probably should leave the conversation at this point (not because I don't think there's merit in discussing it with you - just don't want to muddy the waters).

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

#302

Post by mattdm »

bvrmn wrote: post #99

Some reasons why Stream is not replacement for Centos alike (Alma, Rocky, ...). 1. Stream can't be used as base to build el-compatible packages. There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility. 2. Stream has no large (several years) support cycle and can't be used as a stable system. Yes, there is a big community who don't need a paid licensed support from a RH and ready to help with bug reports and…

> There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility.

This is incorrect. Or, sure, there are no _guarantees_, but any such break would also break a future RHEL release, and is therefore a bug.

2. Five years.

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

#303

Post by mattdm »

westurner wrote: post #3

Would it be feasible to sed-replace the RHEL and/or Fedora selinux and container-selinux rulesets for use with other Linux distros? AFAIU only SUSE can run both AppArmor and SELinux? And browsers are running as unconfined in selinux with like all major distros; even on ChromiumOS (which was based on Gentoo, Gnome, and Chrome) where WASM or a paid shell (or 15-30% cut from the Play Store only) is the only way for the…

I don't know about "sed-replace", but you can download the RHEL selinux-policy source package from https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/selinux-policy

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

#304

Post by attentive »

ndiddy wrote: post #264
jzb wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard" Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride. Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray…

A CentOS Stream release only gets updates as long as its equivalent RHEL release is in its "full support" period. In practice, this means that the support duration is cut from 10 years to 5 years. Additionally, CentOS Stream updates often lag behind RHEL updates. This is because Red Hat won't commit an embargoed security update to CentOS Stream until after it ships in RHEL, so the developers responsible for the updat…

That makes CentOS much less useful. Did they lie when they said it's upstream of RHEL?

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

#305

Post by freedomben »

mfuzzey wrote: post #285
jzb wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>There's no more room for long-term thinking if that doesn't involve "numbers go up, every quarter." That is obviously unsustainable. I get that they need to make a profit but there's no fundemental reason numbers have to keep going up and at some point they won't be able to go up anymore, even if the business remains profitable.

Yeah it is obviously unsustainable, but nobody knows how long it can last, and they don't really care. Whoever gets to helm the ship when the end starts will get fired by the board, and somebody new will come on board. When they eventually can't grow, they'll start acquiring other companies and using that as their growth. Repeat forever.

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

#306

Post by justinclift »

mattl wrote: post #278
justinclift wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm. "freely available to the whole world". Is that really the wording they use? Asking because their recent advertising added to the apt cli is promoting some kind of security packages. Seems like people need to pay for those?

I believe that was for Ubuntu Pro. Ubuntu Pro provides some extra support (five more years) for packages in Ubuntu's existing (gratis) Long Term Support (LTS) releases of Ubuntu.

Hmmm, not sure about that.

The wording was along the lines of "There are security updates for package XYZ. If you join (maybe its Ubuntu Pro like you mention?) you'd have access to them."

That's not really a message that should be showing up on a box running 20.04 LTS, which is years before its EOL date.

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

#307

Post by freedomben »

symlinkk wrote: post #275
freedomben wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes close, but doesn't fill the niche because according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream should not be used in production. People do and for the most part they have no issues, but as long as the maintainers themselves are telling people not to run it in production, I would never recommend somebody to use it for serious workloads. And if you can't use it for serious workloads, then you should invest your time into a dif…

If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it, so maybe you should send some of that money to RedHat for licenses?

> If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it

That is an extremely incorrect premise. There are tons of things in production that people don't make money on. Tons of new products don't make money for many years. And even if it is profitable, profit margins are often thin and RHEL is not cheap.

I have about 10 services in public-facing production right now (on Alma), and only one is profitable, and that runs in a container anyway (the host is not RHEL, just my container). I also have about a dozen or so personal/private services that I use for myself and my family. Those don't make any money either, I spend about $80 per month to run them. If I had to pay for a RHEL license for each of those, I'd just have to shut them down.

Which seems more reasonable to you: move my life to a different base that does support my niche, or shut everything down?

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

#308

Post by commandersaki »

synergy20 wrote: post #74

I'm done with everything related to Redhat after Redhat8(no it's not RHEL 8, it's their non-enterprise distro before it's ditched and Fedora was invented as far as I can recall), yes it's about two decades ago. I since switched to Debian ecosystem, and never looked back. I was pissed off enough to never use any rpm-based distro ever since.

Yep, don't understand why the hate now and not back then when Redhat commercialised the hell out of everything. Even RH7 was bad trying to push their Satellite crap. However I note back then there was no Ubuntu and Debian was always lagging far far behind.

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

#309

Post by neurostimulant »

CrLf wrote: post #224
neurostimulant wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many enterprise apps are distributed as binary release that compatible with RHEL, and people want to run them without using RHEL, especially in situations when it doesn't make sense to purchase RHEL licenses.

I understand that scenario, having lived in it for many years. However, in practice, that doesn't require bug-for-bug compatibility. The proof of this is that such software tends to run perfectly fine even across different RHEL major versions with just a few compatibility packages.

I don't use red hat based distro myself so I'm curious: if you want to run an old binary built for, say, RHEL from 5 years ago, can you run that binary on centos stream without dependency issue?

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

#310

Post by cryptonector »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #216
cryptonector wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Nope nope nope means this is a different quality of thing, the things you are trying to put in the same category are in different categories. the GPL, by it's own text explaining itself, is intended to ensure that users of GPL software always have the right to re-distribute it. It says that right in it. If your point is that IBM has enough lawyers and money to prevent users from redistributing GPL software, and they…

> If your point is that IBM has enough lawyers and money to prevent users from redistributing GPL software, and they may have figured out how to exersize a loophole that will be difficult to do anything about it, especially cause of all those lawyers and money... right, indeed, sure.

It's not. The that IBM has here is that they're doing is not lawyers and money, it's that their customers depend on them -- vendor lock-in if you wish.

> If you are suggesting that we should all consider this just fine, and you don't care what the GPL intended to do, and you don't think anyone else should either, and we should all aspire to make money by getting away with subverting the GPL... okay, thanks for sharing? But as for me: nope nope nope.

I'm suggesting something else entirely. First, that if IBM is legally right but you/we/they don't like it, there's voting with wallets, or sucking it up if you're stuck with IBM. Second, I'm suggesting that open source is a business tool for everyone from a poor individual to a multi-billion company -- a tool rather than an end in itself.

Now, I agree that open source as an end is fun ("look ma', what code I wrote!"), but people still need to put food on the table. Just like fine art, where artists want total freedom of expression, but often produce the kinds of art that will sell well because... it's nice to not be dependent on charity. Even back in the days when artists had patrons, they still had to appeal to the patrons' tastes, and if they wanted to revolutionize art they had to convince the patrons that that was a good thing.

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