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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)

#381

Post by ptoal »

tremon wrote: post #367
type0 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the shareholders would have had much more influence than IBM is exercising right now. Well, you answered yourself why it went as it did. Don't you think answering to your shareholders is what keeps the company competitive and on the right course?

I don't see any link between shareholder demands and business viability, other than "keep the business profitable". What makes you think shareholders are more familiar with the market a company operates in than the company itself?

In fact, with tech companies, the shareholders don't usually demand "profitable", they usually demand double-digit revenue growth.

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

#382

Post by parasense »

jzb wrote: post #219
freedomben wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compan…

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…

> This isn't that. This largely seems to be people who are not paying for RHEL demanding Red Hat allow them to continue not paying for it but receive its value.

Well... I am not so sure about that. As I wrote above, it's actually easier to make a copy-cat of RHEL today by leveraging CentOS Stream than anytime before. So it's not about costs, but perhaps more about the inconvenience of switching off the old workflow for the new hotness.

Red Hat has no technical self interest in perpetuating an old legacy service considering that CentOS has itself migrated to CentOS Stream. Please remember that maintaining that CentOS git repo was really a self-serving activity, to help CentOS project rebuild RHEL packages using the clunky old workflow. In reality supporting the old workflow was never an act of charity, Red Hat did that for whatever business reasons following the CentOS take-over. Certainly the old workflow benefited other folks beyond CentOS community, namely the other copy-cat rebuild distributions.

And certainly, as you have argued, there is the side-effect of the old legacy service benefiting copy-cat distros, and by extension the cost-free user community. But as I argue, not necessarily opposing your view, but offering a counter point... it's more of an inconvenience that some folks seem to wilfully or genuinely misunderstand. The misunderstanding is that Red Hat is killing copy-cat distros, and they are not. Super smart & motivated people will still copy-cat Enterprise Linux, just like they always have. And certainly, Red Hat probably has near zero interest in helping any competitors rebuild packages, or compose the distro. But it's a stretch for folks to argue that ending one workflow in favor of another is slapping the faces of loyal free-loaders. The nexus of ideas/arguments from the one starting point to the wrong conclusion is just tenuous at best, so I'm not surprised some people would construct a straw man argument narrowly focused on short-term outcomes. Folks just need to get on-board with CentOS Stream, or setup some other way to rebuild EL packages. It's not that hard to reason about this topic.

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

#383

Post by FireBeyond »

raShMan777 wrote: post #378
FireBeyond wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

you've fallen for the arguments and ways of thinking of your employer which is not a good thing. > ... to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. when i'm not allowed to be y…

> you've fallen for the arguments and ways of thinking of your employer which is not a good thing.

I recognized that as a risk, hence the disengagement, for sure. I also know that not just in matters like this, I am overly prone to analyzing and lawyering things, perhaps to too great a degree.

> when i'm not allowed to be your customer anymore i don't have "the freedom to distribute copies". you're putting a limitation on me - that's not freedom. or specifically, regarding "that you receive source code or can get it if you want it": i can't get it if i want it when you're refusing me as a customer.

I will say I absolutely get this perspective here and how it applies to the "spirit" of the GPL, and the way you phrase it is good in recognizing things as disparate but also intrinsically intertwined.

I will also say (on a personal level, I of course don't speak for RH) I think any such things should be addressed at the root, i.e. in the GPL.

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

#384

Post by cryptonector »

raShMan777 wrote: post #378
FireBeyond wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

you've fallen for the arguments and ways of thinking of your employer which is not a good thing. > ... to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. when i'm not allowed to be y…

> or citing https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html: > If you commercially distribute binaries not accompanied with source code, the GPL says you must provide a written offer to distribute the source code later. When users non-commercially redistribute the binaries they received from you, they must pass along a copy of this written offer. This means that people who did not get the binaries directly from you can still receive copies of the source code, along with the written offer.

So this is very interesting. Say I want a copy of source code for X and you tell me you have it, but you're not an authoritative source of source code for X: how can I trust your copy, if I choose to get it from you?

Redistribution of sources is a nice right to have, but most people prefer to get them from authoritative sources as long as they're available. As long as IBM makes these sources available for a nominal fee, they're within the GPL, and people who want them should just go through that process.

> so: there is explicitly no limitation allowed on the receiving of the source code. Red Hat is putting a limitation on it.

IBM can't legally not provide a copy of the sources for a nominal fee. And they can't limit what you do with them as far as licensing goes, but it may well be that legally speaking they can terminate rights not under the GPL. Maybe this is just a loophole in the GPL. Maybe the courts will accept it, maybe not.

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

#385

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

pabs3 wrote: post #376
LaSombra wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. But don't you have to be an owner of their products to ask for the GPL'ed code?

No, anyone can definitely email them and ask for the code. If they refuse then thats a GPL violation and the copyright owner can sue them. The Software Freedom Conservancy are also working on a case using the legal theory that downstream recipients of GPLed code are third-party beneficiaries of the GPL agreement between the copyright holder and the redistributor, and as such, they are entitled to the source code and…

> No, anyone can definitely email them and ask for the code. If they refuse then thats a GPL violation and the copyright owner can sue them.

Curious; I was quite sure that only recipients of binaries (basically, users of the program) were entitled to get source code, but the relevant part of the GPLv2 (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html) at least looks like:

    3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

    a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, 
    b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or, 
    c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
which does indeed seem to suggest that if you're not preemptively shipping source to customers along with the binaries then "any third party" can ask for the code. Which is interesting context here; it would be interesting to hear an actual lawyer's reading of the situation, because that feels like such a big difference that it should have come up already.

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

#386

Post by cryptonector »

FireBeyond wrote: post #383
raShMan777 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you've fallen for the arguments and ways of thinking of your employer which is not a good thing. > ... to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. when i'm not allowed to be y…

> you've fallen for the arguments and ways of thinking of your employer which is not a good thing. I recognized that as a risk, hence the disengagement, for sure. I also know that not just in matters like this, I am overly prone to analyzing and lawyering things, perhaps to too great a degree. > when i'm not allowed to be your customer anymore i don't have "the freedom to distribute copies". you're putting a limitati…

> I will also say (on a personal level, I of course don't speak for RH) I think any such things should be addressed at the root, i.e. in the GPL.

Yes, but there's no time machines allowing time travel into the past.

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

#387

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

dralley wrote: post #379
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #266

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. How was that demonstrated? RH became, famously, a billion-dollar company under the old model; why would continuing that not work?

CentOS never offered paid support. Rocky and Alma are trying to clone the whole package. With that being said, I do think it falls into the category of "problems that probably wouldn't exist if CentOS was still around"

Rocky and Alma are new, but Oracle's been doing OEL for a long time. Although I'll grant that adding more players to the mix may have exacerbated things, or at least giving RH the impression that things were getting worse, which I agree is rather a self-inflicted problem since I suspect the logic was "RH killed CentOS, so we need to replace CentOS, which takes resources, so we'll sell optional support for our clones".

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

#388

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

iscream26 wrote: post #279
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their extended support model still allows for backporting fixes into jessie of all things, which released almost 8 years ago. So your evidence that they don't update things is that they backport new fixes to an EOL version? Even if that made sense, 8 years is 0.8 decades; I think a lot of the pushback is that you said "decades old versions", which is to say "versions of packages that are at least 20 years old", whi…

It's just rhetorical hyperbole, you're reading too much into it.

Rhetorical hyperbole that's inaccurate deserves to be called out; that's not really a defense.

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

#389

Post by freedomben »

hhhfgshanda828 wrote: post #325
tcmart14 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad part is the short nearsightedness. I know tons of RHEL engineers who only got into RHEL because they could essentially learn large parts of RHEL for free on CentOS and then go on to work professionally on RHEL. I also understand that a lot of courses to become official RHEL engineers/sysadmins use CentOS for the classes.

This is not true. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is currently available at no charge to students and non-commercial users for the use cases you mentioned. And it has always been available in that manner. It even comes with additional (paid if used commercially) red hat products on top of the OS itself. I have a tough time believing they didn't know that considering red hat basically advertises training on the free version…

The "free" RHEL licenses still require dicking around with subscription manager, and creating/maintaining a Red Hat account. It may not be much overhead if you already have paid RHEL instances, but for somebody who doesn't it's a stumbling block.

I think it's great that Red Hat offers free dev subs and I applaud that, but I think they underestimate the friction that creates.

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

#390

Post by taylodl »

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…

> Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code

GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. For example, back in the day it may have to be mailed to you via floppy diskette or CD's so you would be charged for the media and for the time for someone to put that together. Walnut Creek used to sell CD bundles of all source code for something like $20 back in the day and you'd get several CD's of source and all the make files needed to build it.

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