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Keeping Open Source Open

rockylinux.org

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Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#121

Post by toyg »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #50
Arnavion wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, it's not yet known for certain if the chilling effect of a terminated contract violates the "no further restrictions" clause of the GPL or not. Evidently IBM's lawyers think it doesn't. But it would be good to test it in court first.

GRSecurity started down this road. IBM though has deeper pockets

More importantly, IBM has the best of the best in terms of lawyers. The likelihood of them ever losing a case is basically nil. They sustained and won a proxy war with Microsoft, when Microsoft was the richest company on the planet.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#122

Post by toyg »

mrweasel wrote: post #90

What exactly prevents Red Hat from adding one or more proprietary components, like a RHEL bootloader, or network manager and simply refusing to share the code for those components? If Red Hat doesn't back down, I don't see anyway around Rocky, Oracle and Alma doing a fork.

They can't easily do that without really risking to break the gpl. Btw, Rocky, Oracle and Alma cannot fork; their entire value proposition is being RH-compatible. What could happen is a new giant trying to displace RH as the reference Linux platform, poaching significant amounts of devs from RH. That would require years and billions of dollars though.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#123

Post by toyg »

bonzini wrote: post #15
cosmiccatnap wrote: post #12

It's sad to see a post like this get so much hate in the comments section. We all benefit greatly from an organization maintaining a stable Linux ecosystem and the idea that somehow redhat isn't entitled to give back to Linux as much as they have benefited from OSS goes to show just how much coolaid HN has been drinking as of late. These corporate concerns are not some law of nature and it's up to us to support peopl…

> somehow redhat isn't entitled to give back to Linux So it's not enough to employ more than 1000 people working on upstream/Fedora/CentOS Stream, have a strict upstream first policy for features that go into RHEL and their other products, donate to a bunch of foundations and sponsor conferences, maintain the main repository of firmware updates for Linux, be consistently in the top three contributors to Linux, open s…

They established all that when they had other priorities. Clearly they've changed their mind about a thing or two, so you can expect a lot of that to wash away, slowly.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#124

Post by toyg »

notacoward wrote: post #56
nhanlon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's not what any of us are saying. We already _do_ a lot of work. This is _more_ work.

So who should be doing that work? On whose payroll? Should Red Hat engineers be spending their time de-branding and wrapping things up neatly for rebuilders to use? Note that every minute they spend on that is a minute they're not spending on adding features, fixing bugs, or backporting fixes to the last ten years' worth of releases. You know, the things they're actually obligated to do by their contracts with custom…

Note that they're actually doing more work now (checking for contractual entitlements, playing whack-a-mole with rebuilders, trying to reassure ecosystem partners, etc etc) than they did before.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#125

Post by giamma »

worthless-trash wrote: post #107
giamma wrote: post #97

So long "Upstream First" principle https://github.com/RedHatOfficial/open-source-participation-...

This is not at all in conflict with the upstream first, if so please tell me how you see it being in conflict.

The blog post says:

"Previously, we obtained the source code for Rocky Linux exclusively from the CentOS Git repository as they recommended. However, this repository no longer hosts all of the versions corresponding to RHEL. Consequently, we now have to gather the source code from multiple sources, including CentOS Stream, pristine upstream packages, and RHEL SRPMs."

Why would you need RHEL SRPMS if the upstream packages contained all the patches and why refer to them as "pristine upstream packages" in the first place?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#126

Post by lars_francke »

> 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.

They have phrased this very carefully but there is a caveat here. UBI is using a small subset of RHEL packages. They say "possible to obtain Red Hat sources" and that's true, but you cannot - afaik - obtain all RHEL sources this way.

This is not too important as they are using a different way to obtain the RHEL sources now.

https://access.redhat.com/articles/4238681

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#127

Post by toyg »

gigatexal wrote: post #110

I originally had a strong anti-RedHat response to this change. When I thought about it and heard RH's response their sharp change makes sense. They sell RHEL. It's from what I gather their main source of income. Revenue from this funds things like SystemD, a lot of work in Gnome, many many things that RHEL customers and other users of Linux and desktop Linux benefit from. Of course many contributions to open source/G…

How did they survive and thrive for 25+ years then? Rebuilders have always existed.

They've just dialled the "greed" knob a bit higher, that's all.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#128

Post by voxadam »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #88

There’s one thing I don’t understand. They keep saying GPL this, GPL that. Meanwhile there has been this huge push to use permissive licenses for like two decades now, because GPL bad (you don’t have to go far, just look at any discussion around licensing here on HN). There’s nothing in .spec files that says they have the same license as the software they cover. Fedora contributions are required to come with a MIT-li…

Is an RPM spec file even copyrightable? It's pretty much the definition of tabular data akin to a simple recipe or a phonebook, neither of which are subject to copyright under US law as I understand things. I'm also not convinced that a spec file would satisfy the "threshold of originality" to make it copyrightable.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#129

Post by mrweasel »

toyg wrote: post #122
mrweasel wrote: post #90

What exactly prevents Red Hat from adding one or more proprietary components, like a RHEL bootloader, or network manager and simply refusing to share the code for those components? If Red Hat doesn't back down, I don't see anyway around Rocky, Oracle and Alma doing a fork.

They can't easily do that without really risking to break the gpl. Btw, Rocky, Oracle and Alma cannot fork; their entire value proposition is being RH-compatible. What could happen is a new giant trying to displace RH as the reference Linux platform, poaching significant amounts of devs from RH. That would require years and billions of dollars though.

> They can't easily do that without really risking to break the gpl.

Why wouldn't they be able to do that? Sure, they can't patch the kernel or any of the existing stuff, but what would prevent them from writing a Grub replacement or a Red Hat shell? It has to be free of GPL code, but the operating system as a whole isn't what's under the GPL, it's the individual components, some of which aren't GPL, but BSD, MIT, ISC or some other licens.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#130

Post by SSLy »

toyg wrote: post #122
mrweasel wrote: post #90

What exactly prevents Red Hat from adding one or more proprietary components, like a RHEL bootloader, or network manager and simply refusing to share the code for those components? If Red Hat doesn't back down, I don't see anyway around Rocky, Oracle and Alma doing a fork.

They can't easily do that without really risking to break the gpl. Btw, Rocky, Oracle and Alma cannot fork; their entire value proposition is being RH-compatible. What could happen is a new giant trying to displace RH as the reference Linux platform, poaching significant amounts of devs from RH. That would require years and billions of dollars though.

> What could happen is a new giant trying to displace RH as the reference Linux platform, poaching significant amounts of devs from RH. That would require years and billions of dollars though.

It's not working out that great for the old giants, right? I mean Canonical and SuSE.

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