AlmaLinux stays Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible without Red Hat code

Sheesh, Steven Vaughn-Nichols really hates Red Hat, doesn't he? There's no attempt to be objective, with article titles like "Red Hat's New Rule: Open Source Betrayal", and pumping up Alma Linux and talking of how they're bravely defending their distro against threats that even they don't think will happen (but he does). He's even decided that RHEL's licensing won't hold up in court (Rocky and Oracle and others can tell they're legal to stop looking, I guess).

I entirely get the disagreements with Red Hat's decision and direction, but his many articles on this topic are opinion pieces masquerading as journalism.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Red Hat, but in a completely different business unit from RHEL.

Buying subscription and using it to build a distro would be against Red Hat Subscription agreement. I guess you missed all the drama of the summer, when Red Hat made it so.

I think we, as free software consumers, have become spoiled by the sheer amount of quality software and distros available for no charge, with all the freedoms, over the past couple decades.

In my eyes this move is perfectly within the spirit of the GPL, which explicitly allows charging for the program. Crucially it makes no promise about future updates.

Red Hat can terminate a subscription for a variety of reasons, not limited to taking all their software to make a competing distribution. However even if they do cancel it, you are still entitled to get the source code of all (GPL) software you aquired up to that point.

It will be funny if RH in a further crackdown decides to not publish sources for non-GPL (MIT/Apache/etc) in the public channels that Rocky et.al. use. Would spark a new fire in the permissive vs copyleft debate.

I actually think this move is beneficial for the free software movement overall. Most/all the sources Red Hat use are still available in upstream repositories, and many other distros package it without Red Hats handcuffs.

It is not that straight-forward.

If I did not know any better, I would read in your answer that somehow Red Hat is trying to hoard access to all this software ill-begotten of all this free labour. That is nonsense. Red Hat provides not only entirely free access to all this software, to all this code, not only for the code written by the supposed “10,000s of unpaid volunteers” but also the absolutely massive amount of software that they themselves write and contribute to. They do this in multiple ways—most directly via CentOS Stream. If what you wanted access to was just that, where is the complaint?

What people want to get for free is the immense amount of work that Red Hat puts into curating, testing, and managing the very specific packages that make up RHEL. And what makes this most valuable is the distribution in it’s totalality—-the precise collection of packages and the relationships between them. First point is that a lot ( more than half? ) of the RHEL distribution not covered by the GPL. The second point that it, as an “aggregate” work, is explicitly excluded from the terms of the GPL by the GPL itself. Pull up the text of the GPL and search for “aggregate”.

It is not the code that people want access to and especially not the work of those “unpaid volunteers” as that is readily available. People demanding a “bug for bug” clone of RHEL are demanding to benefit from the immense investment and mountain of work that Red Hat does to produce this aggregate work that goes well beyond the code itself.

Ironically, it is always framed as something to do with “the values of the community” and “the spirit of Open Source” and the “greed” of “commercial interests”. All I see though are people trying to free-ride on the productization part of this Open Source product. It is the people that want “exactly RHEL” without paying for it that are being greedy. The loudest voices are people explicitly trying to commercialize it themselves.

Think about this. Rocky Linux cannot contribute anything to the code. They cannot even fix a bug. If they did, they would break their value proposition of being an “identical” RHEL clone. So, there is no Rocky “community” that is expressing “the values of Open Source”. Rocky is no RHEL fork. They are not even trying to be an equal ( or even junior ) partner in the evolution of the software. The “community” is just a set of Rocky Linux customers. Even if some of them do not pay, that is all they are—consumers ( not contributors ). There are many direct RHEL subscribers that do not pay either after all so not paying does not a community make.

When we describe what these “consumers” want and frame as being a group of contributors ( unpaid volunteers ), it is misleading in my view. It is not just Rocky. The same is true of Oracle and others.

I have a lot of respect for Alma. At least they are actually trying to become a real part of the process and to build an actual community around CentOS and thus RHEL. What they are doing is all they RHEL wanted. Pretending that RHEL is stopping anyone from being a part of an actual extended RHEL community is just wrong. Let’s stop describing it that way.