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Keeping Open Source Open

rockylinux.org

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Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#161

Post by gigatexal »

quags wrote: post #138
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…

They sell software though that is mostly licensed under the GPL which has certain requirements regardless of if you give it a way free , support down stream projects financially or make an entire public company around it. I’m not sure if red hat can really stop rebuilds beyond ensuring all their trademarks are removed any more than Debian could suddenly stop ubuntu from using that as their starting point OS. RHEL is…

Have any law suits from say the FSF or others been filed against Redhat for this action?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#162

Post by pravus »

bonzini wrote: post #94
pravus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's not enough ... Not when you stepped in the open source and GPL arena, no. There are some pretty heavy expectations considering most of us grew up in a world where every distro was freely available everywhere, including the original Red Hat before they went the RHEL route. That's the entire reason CentOS came to be. And here we are again. I say we... I use Arch Linux and gave up on this over a decade ago.

Give me a break. I have been in the "GPL arena" for almost 30 years (1996). When I started using free software I didn't even have Internet access at home and had to visit relatives one hour away to download it and send emails. I used SRPMs from a Red Hat Linux CD to study source code because it was not very handy to download it with a 33.6k modem.

So you should be well aware of community expectations. And so should Red Hat.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#163

Post by pipo234 »

bonzini wrote: post #158
pipo234 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disclaimer: I'm an ex-oracle employee.

Making millions on DB software only withhold RedHat the pocket change they absolutely deserve is absolutely pathetic. Even with the helpful support and hand holding of then co-workers, I found that Oracle's unbreakable linux is a close to useless rip off, littered with subtle gotchas, pitfalls and please-insert-yet-another-license-key-here.

Installing, tuning and maintaining an OS professionally on enterprise hardware to run enterprise software is the bread and butter of RedHat. I never understood why they insisted pushing their own mediocre engineers instead, and did not want to pony up the (relatively) modest cost of reselling the license.

> I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.

I guess so. It still mystifies me why they haven't gone out of business wearing the emperors cloths.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#164

Post by m4r71n »

nhanlon wrote: post #21
m4r71n wrote: post #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.

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

More work that has little effect on the actual upstream ecosystem beyond giving out something for free that 20k people at Red Hat are literally paid for. Ubuntu is not a clone of Debian, they extend it, tweak it, provide the code back to the community. What is the specific parts of the work that Rocky does that benefits the open-source community? What improvements has the community benefited from through your "work"?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#165

Post by nhanlon »

totallywrong wrote: post #77
pritambarhate wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was time today's big distros were small and they mostly took from community, packaged it and sold support for it. Rocky is small now so needs to take more from community. If it becomes big later it can also contribute back. That's one of the benefits of open source. It helps small guys to get started and make it big. Once they become big, they can contribute back.

But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.

Except, we are?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#166

Post by pjmlp »

asddubs wrote: post #160
pjmlp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support/20

Apple nowadays mainly focus on Swift, and C++ support only needs to be good enough for Metal Shading Language (a C++14 dialect), IO and DriverKit needs, and compiling LLVM (currently requires ISO C++17).

Likewise, on Google's side, those that went on to work on Carbon are no longer contributing to clang.

All the other compiler vendors that have clang forks, seem more interested into LLVM improvements than ISO C++ compliance, thus now clang lags behind GCC and VC++ in ISO C++ capabilities.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#167

Post by nhanlon »

piaste wrote: post #136
titannet wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a large part of the appeal. "Binary compatible with RHEL" sells Rocky, not "another Linux".

Regardless of the reasons, Rocky Linux does not contribute a single line of useful code to the world. Red Hat has benefited from previous contributors, but then added a ton of open source work of their own. RH are open source contributors; Rocky Linux are mere users.

TIL Nothing I write is useful.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#168

Post by michh »

mroche wrote: post #144
geerlingguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, instead of just upsetting the downstream 'rebuilders', you start upsetting enterprise customers too.

The use of UBI to gather sources is maddening to me. It actively inhibits opportunities we have to get the UBI package set expanded, something I'm working on for my industry. Their use of UBI for this purpose is getting in the way of enabling officially provided and unencumbered containerized RHEL for public consumption.

It sucks this hampers your goal of getting the UBI package set expanded but that's not because of the rebuilders using it as a loophole, it's because of the course IBM/RedHat set.

They decided their new course was 'compatible enough' with the GPL and this is one of those area where you start to feel the pain that's the difference between 'compatible enough' and actually compatible with the GPL and the ideas behind it.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#169

Post by raesene9 »

piaste wrote: post #136
titannet wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's a large part of the appeal. "Binary compatible with RHEL" sells Rocky, not "another Linux".

Regardless of the reasons, Rocky Linux does not contribute a single line of useful code to the world. Red Hat has benefited from previous contributors, but then added a ton of open source work of their own. RH are open source contributors; Rocky Linux are mere users.

Out of curiosity, what makes you say that Rocky Linux have never contributed a single line of code to the world?

Looking at their GH profile https://github.com/rocky-linux seems to show some public repos with code in them?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#170

Post by mst »

mroche wrote: post #144
geerlingguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, instead of just upsetting the downstream 'rebuilders', you start upsetting enterprise customers too.

The use of UBI to gather sources is maddening to me. It actively inhibits opportunities we have to get the UBI package set expanded, something I'm working on for my industry. Their use of UBI for this purpose is getting in the way of enabling officially provided and unencumbered containerized RHEL for public consumption.

The entire situation smells like an iterated prisoner's dilemma that's going to end up locked in an eternal defect/defect cycle with assorted odd and unintended collateral damage on the margins.

Hopefully in your case - given what was being said about the options - the rebuilders will end up settling on the public cloud instance approach. If that happens, with a bit of luck you can go back to your UBI related advocacy once the rubble stops bouncing.

Hopefully.

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