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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)

#141

Post by cryptonector »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #15

The Software Freedom Conservancy legal analysis of RHEL and GPL that OP links to is the most interesting part to me. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

Wishy-washy language there about skirting lines doesn't make that a very good analysis.

You can use others' GPL code in your products and charge money for it. You have to "publish" the GPL'ed sources (and any sources of yours that derive from GPL'ed code) on demand -- publish as in: if someone asks, you have to give it to them, but there's no requirement that there be a public download page or anything like that, and you can send the sources out in DVDs or flash drives or whatever media you like, and you can charge nominal amounts for the media. I.e., you don't have to make it easy to get the sources. And you don't have to provide the built product for free.

You can do a lot within the boundaries of the GPL. If IBM/RH does that, so what?

One can even do this sort of thing w/o GPL. For example, SQLite3 is in the public domain, yet the SQLite Consortium exists and makes what I imagine is good money for D. R. Hipp and his employees with zero competition from forks precisely because SQLite3 is very difficult to credibly fork, and SQLite3 is difficult to fork because the better test suite for it is proprietary and secret.

To a business, open source is a tool. Even for individuals, open source is a tool. A young person just starting out and with few resources might make useful software open source so as to gain notoriety and better employment, or even to start a business.

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

#142

Post by booleandilemma »

otterley wrote: post #100
CAP_NET_ADMIN wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?

[flagged]

And you think these companies are outsourcing to these countries because they just love Colombians, Filipinos, and Indians, right?

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

#143

Post by ahtihn »

xt00 wrote: post #83
eastbound wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free has never meant monetarily free. Open-source means you can recompile, and thus maintain after the EOL of the provider, and code secrets aren’t secret. This is already a step above proprietary software. For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code. But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.

Yea selling an entire OS that consists of a ton of other peoples open source projects—often paid for by other companies to have somebody work on a thing — then when people say “hey we should get a copy of the small tweaks you did to all of those bits” and they say no, seems like a situation where changing the license on enough critical parts force the OS maker to not withhold the software. What would stop Redhat from…

> What would stop Redhat from saying "[...] and anybody distributing the source code owes us 50k..”

The GPL doesn't allow this.

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

#144

Post by christophilus »

freedomben wrote: post #113
kkielhofner wrote: post #85

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would wa…

So you tried to run your app on it and ran into trouble, and you conclude that Fedora is an unstable hunk of shit? Also, this attitude that Fedora is just a tester for a commercial product is absurd. I suppose this is the same logic that makes CentOS Stream just a "beta" of RHEL (but strangely, these same people don't consider RHEL a "beta" for old CentOS even though consistency would demand this). Anecdotally, I've…

I agree with this assessment. Happy Fedora user here, but I am a bit nervous about the I Mification of RedHat and the potential long term ramifications for Fedora.

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

#145

Post by WaitWaitWha »

I was quite upset with the abandonment of CentOS. Now RHEL is pushing even more. But, let's forget the ethical quandary they walked into.

As others pointed out, this is self-defeating business direction.

Vast majority of government Linux systems in several countries was CentOS and RHEL. Lot of the improvement can be directly traced to FOSS improvements, outside of RHEL. Majority of the recommendations to use Cent & RHEL in government systems came from the users and developers.

It is clear today that users & developers (aka customers or consumers) can make serious impact to a brand by simply refusing to do business with the organization that upset them.

Pivoting from CentOS/RHEL to another distro is significantly easier then pivoting from a tangible product or store.

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

#146

Post by fariszr »

dmix wrote: post #101
HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that this is a stupid decision. It will turn people off Red Hat, and at the same time it’s incredibly annoying and inconvenient for a large number of Rocky/Alma/etc users.

> It will turn people off Red Hat Will it turn paying customers off Red Hat? (Honest question)

Current customers? Probably not, but it will hamper the flow of future customers for sure.

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

#147

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

xt00 wrote: post #83
eastbound wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free has never meant monetarily free. Open-source means you can recompile, and thus maintain after the EOL of the provider, and code secrets aren’t secret. This is already a step above proprietary software. For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code. But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.

Yea selling an entire OS that consists of a ton of other peoples open source projects—often paid for by other companies to have somebody work on a thing — then when people say “hey we should get a copy of the small tweaks you did to all of those bits” and they say no, seems like a situation where changing the license on enough critical parts force the OS maker to not withhold the software. What would stop Redhat from…

When people buy RHEL what are they buying? I always thought that when buying RHEL you are buying their support, build infra, signatures, testing, etc. You're essentially buying the boring stuff- NOT the actual open source code which is available freely to anyone.

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

#148

Post by tm-guimaraes »

throwawayyy9237 wrote: post #128

I hope I'm not misunderstanding this, but isn't the current arrangement perfectly valid under GPL? GPL states: - If I provided _modified_ binaries - I also have to provide the sources That's what's happening now for people that can download the binaries. What happened before was: - _Anyone_ could download the sources (Not a GPL requirement). So, now, IIUC if you can download the binaries you can download the sources.…

GPL grants you the right to redistribute those binaries and sources. The contract is terminated if you exercise your GPL rights.

One of GPL clauses is that you can't add more restrictions. Terminating a contract seems like a restriction to me.

Also, terminating a contract is very different from not renewing one.

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

#149

Post by LexiMax »

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…

> As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine.

This cannot be stressed enough. If we are unhappy with this outcome, maybe we should be taking another look at the licenses we choose when we release our work to the world.

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

#150

Post by BirAdam »

throwawayyy9237 wrote: post #128

I hope I'm not misunderstanding this, but isn't the current arrangement perfectly valid under GPL? GPL states: - If I provided _modified_ binaries - I also have to provide the sources That's what's happening now for people that can download the binaries. What happened before was: - _Anyone_ could download the sources (Not a GPL requirement). So, now, IIUC if you can download the binaries you can download the sources.…

Nah. GPLv3:

> You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License.

Given that there are a mix of licenses in use on Red Hat's distribution, they could be in a world of hurt. There's GPL, GPLv3, LGPL, CDDL, Apache, and so on. These all have different terms. GPLv3 in particular is the one that I think gets legally interesting, and I think it would be a neat court case.

Courts have recently taken up issues like non-compete agreements, and of course the enforceability of various contracts and licenses has always been a topic for interesting court cases. This would be the same way. Is the GPLv3 actually enforceable? Can you legally have a license or contract forcing action on the recipient of a piece of IP?

To say that RH did nothing wrong might actually come down to the legal fund at IBM of course, since courts are neither fair nor free.

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