I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by balozi » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:12 PM UTC

jlbooker wrote: post #78

The IBM MBAs have finally taken over Redhat. Anything to squeeze another dollar out, even if it's counterproductive in the long term. We knew it would happen. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long.

Said MBAs are in it for their annual bonuses. You'll see this in many companies today: go-nowhere/soon-to-be-canceled projects are launched -> bonuses are awarded -> people move on -> rinse and repeat. Only fools stick around for long-term gains. On the other hand - maybe the workers have finally cracked the corporate secret.

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

#192

Post by microtonal » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:13 PM UTC

vbezhenar wrote: post #155

microtonal wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

License situation is still unclear to me. GPL explicitly does not allow to forbid further redistribution. RedHat does that. I'm not a lawyer, but from a layman PoV this seems sketchy.

IANAL, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat does have to give you the source code. They only have to provide the source code to customers to which they distribute the binaries. Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code.

AFAIK, the current kerfuffle is about providing RHEL source packages through git.centos.org. They currently only provide RHEL through a subscription and they fulfill the GPL if they offer their RHEL subscribers the source code.

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

#193

Post by redundantly » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

parasense wrote: post #169

To quote Jeff: > Here's how it used to work: > Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux > They would release a new version. > They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Ha…

> What this comes down to is wilfully ignoring CentOS stream. All the clones of RHEL can simply track CentOS stream

You are willfully ignoring that CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL. CentOS was downstream of RHEL.

Oracle Linux, Alma Linux, and Rocky Linux are all downstream of RHEL.

Feel free to argue all day about how similar CentOS Stream is to RHEL. Go ahead and argue how much it doesn't matter to you that it's now upstream.

The fact of the matter is whether it's upstream or downstream does matter to a lot of users and companies.

It does matter that IBM is trying to block access to open source code and is trying to restrict its subscribers from redistributing that same open sourced code.

IBM is causing extreme harm to the open source ecosystem that they profit from.

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

#194

Post by onedognight » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

barbariangrunge wrote: post #119

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…

I'm personally impressed that Fedora is fully open source while being released by a for-profit company. I would have expected, when learning about this ecosystem, for Red Hat releases to be proprietary for 5 years, and then have those versions switch to a FOSS license, just as a way to ensure they can monetize their work. But Red Hat, at least in the past, sounds like they did something amazing, being able to go foss…

> I'm personally impressed that Fedora is fully open source while being released by a for-profit company

You shouldn’t be. Fedora is a community project. RedHat, while a huge contributor, does not maintain all the packages therein.

In the end, RHEL is a fork of Fedora so it’s reasonable for the contributors to Fedora to annoyed by this change in the ability to make OS rebuilds of RHEL.

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

#195

Post by diffeomorphism » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:14 PM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #108

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…

Fedoras big strength is the update speed. The problem with distros is that you're always picking an update cycle tradeoff. Debian has decades old versions of packages that they'll backport security fixes into till pretty much the end of time (RHEL also does this but is well, commercially backed while Debian is entirely volunteer driven, which has opened up Debian to maintainer shenanigans a couple of times). Ubuntu i…

Just a quick note: debian stable has a new release every two years. So in the very worst case "decades" means like three years. The horror, the humanity, just remembering how software used to be three whole years ago causes me to shudder.

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

#196

Post by freedomben » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #168

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…

> I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive I do. A basic pedagogic principle is that conditioning works better the closer the consequence is to the action. They should be afraid of backlash at every turn. People must be ready to actually walk away, otherwise you get into a Reddit-type situation in which everything ends up just like before.

> A basic pedagogic principle is that conditioning works better the closer the consequence is to the action.

> They should be afraid of backlash at every turn.

> People must be ready to actually walk away, otherwise you get into a Reddit-type situation in which everything ends up just like before

I actually agree with all of that, but I don't think the hot take gets us there. You can have backlash and people walking away, while staying fact-based and even tempered. In fact I think that's far more effective because then (Red Hat in this case) will see the logical connection. If it's just emotional stuff then it's easy to dismiss the quitters as irrational fringe people that aren't reasonable anyway (and I don't think that's far off from the reality).

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

#197

Post by pferde » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

noirscape wrote: post #108

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…

Fedoras big strength is the update speed. The problem with distros is that you're always picking an update cycle tradeoff. Debian has decades old versions of packages that they'll backport security fixes into till pretty much the end of time (RHEL also does this but is well, commercially backed while Debian is entirely volunteer driven, which has opened up Debian to maintainer shenanigans a couple of times). Ubuntu i…

> Debian has decades old versions of packages that they'll backport security fixes into till pretty much the end of time

I don't know what filthy corner of the internet you get this misinformation from, but it is completely wrong. Please stop.

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

#198

Post by Pet_Ant » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

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…

> That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me.

I'll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL's value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform's dominance is contributing value.

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

#199

Post by jzb » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

Pet_Ant wrote: post #186

jzb wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me preface this by saying, Jeff owes Red Hat nothing and he's free to stop "supporting" RHEL for any or no reason at all. That said, "grab a copy of Linux" seriously, gloriously, hilariously handwaves away so many things that Red Hat does to create a RHEL release. Red Hat pulls together hundreds or thousands of upstreams to create RHEL, participates in many of them, tests all that together , helps partners certif…

I think the main thrust of all of this is to de-commodify Linux. To make RHEL really be in people's minds it's own operating system outside of Linux. It's hard to do when it's really just a ball of generic open source components. Hence, this hostile behaviour. They don't want to be Linux, they want to be RHEL and ask not about the man behind the curtain.

Just the opposite, I think. Red Hat is fighting the idea that the operating system is a commodity, and demonstrating that the RHEL subscription does have value.

Red Hat's competitors have tried really really hard to undermine RHEL as something of value. The cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide their own base Linux distros to run workloads on. They'd love to cut Red Hat out of the picture. Oracle wants to convince customers to give it all their money to run workloads, hence Oracle Linux -- that's based on RHEL.

If RHEL were, as you say, "a ball of generic open source components" then you wouldn't see all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about making it harder for Alma and Rocky to claim "bug for bug" compatibility with RHEL. Nobody would care.

Note that this has been going on for more than 20 years, and this isn't the first time. I've been writing about this on my blog, but we've seen this story before and the only thing that has changed are the names of the vendors / projects and the version numbers. (See: https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clon...)

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

#200

Post by jwitthuhn » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

parasense wrote: post #169

To quote Jeff: > Here's how it used to work: > Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux > They would release a new version. > They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Ha…

> The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before.

I would argue that it was easier a few weeks ago when they made source rpms available publicly.