Keeping Open Source Open
rockylinux.org
Keeping Open Source Open
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Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#2It sounds like they have two different mechanisms they can pull from currently, which will get them to parity with RHEL releases.
Red Hat would need to shift a few knobs and probably offend quite a few people running UBI images at least (including a zillion folks in the OpenShift community who rely on them) to cut off this current approach to getting the sources.
I wonder if Red Hat is willing to play this game of whack a mole? And IMO, was it worth it?
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#3Are the RHEL SRPMS watermarked for individual Customers in any way? It seems like Redhat has no mechanism to stop a torrent of the SRPMS showing-up. Attribution would be exceedingly difficult. Since distribution of FLOSS-licensed source isn’t copyright infringement it’s not like they could DMCA it away.
Arguably the specfiles are able to be copyrighted. I wonder what the license is like for those.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#4> One option is through the usage of UBI container images which are based on RHEL and available from multiple online sources (including Docker Hub). Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered. We have validated this through OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers and it works exactly as expected.
> Another method that we will leverage is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata. This is the easiest for us to scale as we can do all of this through CI pipelines, spinning up cloud images to obtain the sources via DNF, and post to our Git repositories automatically.
That's quite the workaround, the rocky team has proven it's willing to get hacky if needed.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#5I was poking around the Rocky Linux website, and wondering where to download the latest source code for Rocky 9.2? Let's say IBM decides not to burn up the ecosystem, will Oracle / Alma start using the source that Rocky exfiltrates?
Related question, as a Red Hat subscriber can I still distribute Red Hat ISO and source code? It seems like I should be able to distribute ISO images and source after obtaining them.. but not repackage it? I don't plan to impose any restrictions on the people I distribute to.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#6Are the RHEL SRPMS watermarked for individual Customers in any way? It seems like Redhat has no mechanism to stop a torrent of the SRPMS showing-up. Attribution would be exceedingly difficult. Since distribution of FLOSS-licensed source isn’t copyright infringement it’s not like they could DMCA it away. Arguably the specfiles are able to be copyrighted. I wonder what the license is like for those.
> Are the RHEL SRPMS watermarked for individual Customers in any way?
Highly unlikely. File hashing can be used to easily check for this.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#7It sounds like they have two different mechanisms they can pull from currently, which will get them to parity with RHEL releases. Red Hat would need to shift a few knobs and probably offend quite a few people running UBI images at least (including a zillion folks in the OpenShift community who rely on them) to cut off this current approach to getting the sources. I wonder if Red Hat is willing to play this game of wh…
> And IMO, was it worth it?
I suspect they're playing with unintended consequences now.
One of the nice "features" of buying CentOS, is that it meant CentOS was never going to compete - there was a clear line between community and professional, and CentOS were never going to sell you professional services.
Pushing everyone to non-RH builds has removed that line, and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling professional services, is going to have a higher opportunity-cost than publishing CentOS did.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#8> "Consequently, we now have to gather the source code from multiple sources, including CentOS Stream, pristine upstream packages, and RHEL SRPMs."
Oh no! How dare they make us do the work?
It feels tiring to hear these arguments that they must be provided with everything bundled neatly with no questions asked and no contributions to the actual upstreams.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#9It sounds like they have two different mechanisms they can pull from currently, which will get them to parity with RHEL releases. Red Hat would need to shift a few knobs and probably offend quite a few people running UBI images at least (including a zillion folks in the OpenShift community who rely on them) to cut off this current approach to getting the sources. I wonder if Red Hat is willing to play this game of wh…
> And IMO, was it worth it? I suspect they're playing with unintended consequences now. One of the nice "features" of buying CentOS, is that it meant CentOS was never going to compete - there was a clear line between community and professional, and CentOS were never going to sell you professional services. Pushing everyone to non-RH builds has removed that line, and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling…
That wasn't relevant in buying CentOS, plenty of people were selling personal services for CentOS. IBM itself was doing it, and perhaps Kyndryl is still doing the same for the newfangled RHEL rebuilds.
And even now, technically RESF is the one producing the distro and it's also not selling professional services. Who produces the distro has no effect on who sells the services.
Re: Keeping Open Source Open
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And IMO, was it worth it? I suspect they're playing with unintended consequences now. One of the nice "features" of buying CentOS, is that it meant CentOS was never going to compete - there was a clear line between community and professional, and CentOS were never going to sell you professional services. Pushing everyone to non-RH builds has removed that line, and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling…
That wasn't relevant in buying CentOS, plenty of people were selling personal services for CentOS. IBM itself was doing it, and perhaps Kyndryl is still doing the same for the newfangled RHEL rebuilds. And even now, technically RESF is the one producing the distro and it's also not selling professional services. Who produces the distro has no effect on who sells the services.
"technically" is a really thin veneer though. The founder of Rocky is also the CEO of CIQ. That's not exactly six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
(to be clear: I don't consider this a problem. But I do consider that for RH, this may be an unintended side-effect.)