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Keeping Open Source Open

rockylinux.org

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Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#181

Post by mst »

ss48 wrote: post #32
geerlingguy wrote: post #2

It 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…

Could they not just leave these alternate channels a few weeks or months behind the current release that only the subscribers have access to? That would keep them as the most current, up-to-date source over Rocky Linux.

"Approximately the same lag as you used to get with CentOS" would seem pretty fair to me - I'm aware people grumbled about it and understandably so, but it was still a relatively stable and relatively co-operative situation.

I feel like returning to that apparent Schelling Point could quite easily be an improvement over the Red Queen's Race that I worry is developing here.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#182

Post by mst »

mackca wrote: post #46
geerlingguy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mike McGrath has been very explicit about this in his comments on the Ask Noah Show podcast episode[1] and a number of responses in the r/Linux subreddit. [1] https://podcast.asknoahshow.com/343 about 20 min in

All I heard in that segment was Red Hat stopped taking extra steps to debrand and push packages from RHEL, and now clones will have to build their software from CentOS Stream. I did not hear anything about additional actions that Red Hat will take or plans to take. Did I miss something?

The users in question don't want a clone of CentOS Stream, though, they want a replacement for classic CentOS.

Just like users who're choose to run Debian Stable want Debian Stable, not the somewhat stabilised rebuild of a snapshot of Debian Testing that underlies Ubuntu.

(I'm not endorsing any specific set of preferences here and my own are sufficiently complicated they don't really fit in a comment about what sets of preferences -do- exist)

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#183

Post by mackca »

geerlingguy wrote: post #150
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 ?

The damage is corporations could now determine whether they classify downstream use of open source code as "valuable" or "not valuable", and determine (according to their own rubrics) whether to effectively end the open source gravy train in their own ecosystem, or be a member of the open source community and share alike. Despite every attempt by Red Hat employees to call out CentOS Stream as being "Red Hat sources",…

So Red Hat is saying that CentOS Stream is how RHEL is built, you are saying it is not. Can you show the difference in packages from CentOS Stream and RHEL? Rocky says they pull packages from CentOS Stream, and with their project goal remaining 1:1 binary compatibility then that must be the case.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#184

Post by raesene9 »

piaste wrote: post #178
raesene9 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm trusting Carl George's words here: https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/red_hats_co... Those Rocky Linux repos are either not code (website, wiki, etc.), and a few are tools for repackaging/rebranding an existing Linux distro's source code bug-for-bug - an activity which, by definition , does not and cannot offer anything more than the original code already did.

If I'm reading that reddit comment correctly it referred to contributions to RHEL not contributions to open source, which if I'm reading it correctly was what your original comment stated.

It seems that Rocky Linux have contributed code as open source, just not directly to RHEL.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#185

Post by coldtea »

happymellon wrote: post #134
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle So just like RedHat and IBM?

What are you talking about? What is Redhat demanding for free? They spend more than anyone else on developers for all of the Linux stack.

>What is Redhat demanding for free

Their whole business started and grew on FOSS stuff people wrote for free...

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#186

Post by coldtea »

gbraad wrote: post #93
coldtea wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used. They're paid to work on FOSS projects. Gnome isn't a RedHat project. Nor is the kernel. And they're IBM projects even less. And most of those projects started without RedHat and RedHat stepped on them to become what it is first. Plus, there are thousands of essential projects they don't ha…

You avoid answering: "What more should they (Red Hat) do?"

Don't be a dick to Centos - and anybody picking that torch.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#187

Post by mackca »

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.

downstreaming ? How is the open source social contract anymore than making source code available?

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#188

Post by cesarb »

veeti wrote: post #120
kazinator wrote: post #89

On another topic, we can finally see the motivation behind those SRPMs. The whole purpose of a SRPM is to take some upstream source code and repackage it into a different archive blob which has to be downloaded in its entirety and unpacked in order to determine whether any of the code is patched, or pure upstream. If, instead of a SRPM, you have some small, declarative text file which gives upstream URLs, SHA256 dige…

Or the SRPM was designed 30 years ago when people didn't have always online high speed connectivity.

> when people didn't have always online high speed connectivity

Or any connectivity at all! Back then, it was not unusual for Linux distributions (which came in CDs) to have both one or more "binaries" CDs and one or more "sources" CDs. One distribution which kept that tradition is Debian: you can download at https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/source/iso-dvd/ a complete set of 19 DVDs containing the source code for all packages, and at https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/jigdo-dvd... metadata to create a complete set of 21 DVDs containing all the binary packages for the x86-64 architecture.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#189

Post by kazinator »

veeti wrote: post #120
kazinator wrote: post #89

On another topic, we can finally see the motivation behind those SRPMs. The whole purpose of a SRPM is to take some upstream source code and repackage it into a different archive blob which has to be downloaded in its entirety and unpacked in order to determine whether any of the code is patched, or pure upstream. If, instead of a SRPM, you have some small, declarative text file which gives upstream URLs, SHA256 dige…

Or the SRPM was designed 30 years ago when people didn't have always online high speed connectivity.

And so, if all you did was put the original tarballs on a CD-ROM or floppies in a simple form, with your patches and build steps on the side, you'd just be a middle man helping some people make their own distro.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#190

Post by mst »

Jedd wrote: post #87

Free. That word does not appear at all in TFA. In the IBM/RH blog post it references[1] the word appears once, disparagingly, in the gratis sense. I appreciate the beer / speech distinction can get tiring to explain repeatedly, but it feels like the move to distance themselves from the deeper implications & obligations of free is, shall we say, very carefully calculated. [1] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-co…

Could equally be a move to minimise how much of the discussion that springs up around this blog post gets derailed and eaten alive by arguments and/or misunderstandings around said distinction.

Though I suspect we'll both end up less wrong by filing our theories under 'guesswork' and seeing what the actual state of play is six months from now.

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