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Keeping Open Source Open

rockylinux.org

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Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#151

Post by pipo234 »

bonzini wrote: post #142
pipo234 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, let's start with the software itself being free. That is, no-one pays for distribution or use, creation is sponsored voluntarily (contributions, donations) but this is not sustainable. Customers may want to pay for training and consultancy, managed hosting, hardware, feature development, hand holding, insurance, productizing, etc. This is the business that RedHat is in, but so are MontaVista, AWS, vmware, Googl…

So two free distros are not enough, got it.

Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre, while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer?

I for one am perfectly happy paying some. Appreciating that RedHat is not a charity, while also doing great work for the community I bought the distro and merchandise for years. Even when they changed course to target enterprises and I became less their target audience I kept supporting them for being a major contributor.

I feel bad that other distros try to profit from the free beer (and its implied enterprise quality), but restricting access to what is essentially a commons in order to force other through your front door takes away all of the goodwill.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#152

Post by geerlingguy »

happymellon wrote: post #143
worthless-trash wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, is the change you imagine GPLv4 would say "you cant prevent anyone, at any point from downloading the source code from a project you create" because that is super slippery slope? I'd also like to ask, what damage do you see this change in behavior doing to free software ecosystem ?

It seems pretty mad. Apparently Redhat doing all of their work as GPL'ed OpenSource and upstreaming everything so that everyone benefits, and anyone can take the software and build their own, sell it, etc, isn't good enough. Is literally the only thing that would make people happy is to give away RHEL for free for people to run their production servers on?

Part of the open source social contract is downstreaming too. You can't just take, promise to give back, and then hoard what you've built.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#153

Post by geerlingguy »

smarx007 wrote: post #140
geerlingguy wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote this a couple days ago, sums it up: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/gplv2-red-hat-and-you tl;dr - GPLv2 requires no restriction on free/paid recipients of binaries to also freely redistribute source code. Red Hat EULA says your subscription will be canceled if you redistribute the source code. Is that a restriction? A couple OSS laywers I spoke to said no. Common sense says it feels an awful lot like i…

But they do make all of that source code available under CentOS Stream. GPL does not require an SLA for providing source code of all bugfixes and security patches free of charge in under 24h. Just embargoing security patches for 1-2 weeks from Stream would be a good enough move for RH to signal to enterprise customers that Rocky/Alma are not a drop-in gratis replacement for RHEL in production systems.

The GPL requires all source code be available including the scripts and glue code required to build the binary alongside the source. You can't pull a Stream and offer "most" of the source, but not the source required to rebuild the latest stable release. That's counter to the spirit and the letter of GPLv2.

Legally speaking, the contract vs copyright issue is the only ground Red Hat has to stand on here.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#154

Post by pipo234 »

bonzini wrote: post #148
account42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to have been able to fund development before. So what changed? Just the new corporate overlord that wants a return on their investment?

Quoting Reddit: "The problem of rebuilders has been around forever. Things heated up a couple of months ago when we detected what we think was a continued bad-faith action from one of the rebuilders, not on the code/engineering side but on the commercial/money making side of their house. That's as far as I'll go publicly. After that it was just a matter of discussion on what to do about it, so we landed on the announ…

Curious to learn who the bad faith actor was. Oracle? Rocky Linux? Alma? VMware? All of the above?

And what avenues of negotiating a better outcome did they try before opting for the nuclear tactics?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#155

Post by happymellon »

geerlingguy wrote: post #152
happymellon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty mad. Apparently Redhat doing all of their work as GPL'ed OpenSource and upstreaming everything so that everyone benefits, and anyone can take the software and build their own, sell it, etc, isn't good enough. Is literally the only thing that would make people happy is to give away RHEL for free for people to run their production servers on?

Part of the open source social contract is downstreaming too. You can't just take, promise to give back, and then hoard what you've built.

There is no hording though.

What changes have they made to RHEL that isn't available?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#156

Post by gbraad »

lars_francke wrote: post #76
skipkey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly the UBI images seem like the best option. They publish those, they have to publish the source for them. Sure, they can make it more difficult by making them static, but it seems doable.

The UBI images only contain a small subset of all RHEL packages. The blog post is vague on this topic and I'm not sure if you can really get all sources that way. I have my doubts but I've never tried: https://access.redhat.com/articles/4238681

They are images tailored towards runtime use. They do not come with server components. For example, you can't get/download udhcpd in a UBI image.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#157

Post by bonzini »

pipo234 wrote: post #151
bonzini wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So two free distros are not enough, got it.

Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre , while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer ? I for one am perfectly happy paying some. Appreciating that RedHat is not a charity, while also doing great work for the community I bought the distro and merchandise for years. Even when they changed course to target enterprises and I became less their target audience I kept sup…

> Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre, while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer?

Now we're talking. :D

To me, the optimal outcome would have been a foundation overseeing the creation of a CentOS Stream derivative. Something that, in a unicorn-and-rainbows world, even Red Hat could join as mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Sharing the work and then competing on the services. However, based on this very blog post I have doubt that this is the idea of the money-making arm of the rebuilders.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#158

Post by bonzini »

pipo234 wrote: post #154
bonzini wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoting Reddit: "The problem of rebuilders has been around forever. Things heated up a couple of months ago when we detected what we think was a continued bad-faith action from one of the rebuilders, not on the code/engineering side but on the commercial/money making side of their house. That's as far as I'll go publicly. After that it was just a matter of discussion on what to do about it, so we landed on the announ…

Curious to learn who the bad faith actor was. Oracle? Rocky Linux? Alma? VMware? All of the above? And what avenues of negotiating a better outcome did they try before opting for the nuclear tactics?

I don't have a view in which rebuild they saw bad-faith action from; but I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#159

Post by geerlingguy »

bonzini wrote: post #103
geerlingguy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Heck, you personally benefit immensely from an acquisition they subsequently open sourced. lolwut?

Are you saying you don't have any material on AWX? https://www.youtube.com/live/iKmY4jEiy_A

That video has earned me a grand total of $500. And most of that earning happened a couple years ago. I have never run AWX for any of my own projects (or deployed it for any clients), so I have not materially benefitted from it in that way either.

I can guarantee you that video and my short chapter on AWX in my book have earned Red Hat many, many multiples of that through companies adopting an AAP subscription.

I also literally built the AWX Operator that Red Hat is still maintaining to this day: https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator/graphs/contributors

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#160

Post by asddubs »

pjmlp wrote: post #113
jillesvangurp wrote: post #92

The solution here is forking and accepting that IBM just doesn't want to share. The whole value of the Red Hat eco system is lots of people using the down stream variants. Actual direct licensees of Red Hat are not where most of the action is. The value creation is actually distributed across the ecosystem. People encounter issues, report them, and fixes are distributed. If you break that cycle and get IBM out of the…

Lets see how it goes, Red-Hat is a major contributor to anything GNOME, X Windows/Wayland, GCC, Linux kernel. clang dropped to third place after Apple and Google decided to refocus on other languages, it is yet to recover from it. FOSS is great as mantra, it turns out many people can only spend so many hours, if putting food on the table matters as existencial question.

>clang dropped to third place after Apple and Google decided to refocus on other languages, it is yet to recover from it.

what do you mean by this?

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