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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)

#391

Post by reaperman »

taylodl wrote: post #390
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…

> Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. For example, back in the day it may have to be mailed to you via floppy diskette or CD's so you would be charged for the media and for the time for someone to put that together. Waln…

>You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code.

You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license.

GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.

GPLv3: You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.

> GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop.

RedHat is getting around this by saying "If you ask for it, we'll give you the source code for a high fee. If the source code we give you gets released to others, that's totally fine! We'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever, if it does." GPLv3 has some language that very arguably might prevent this, but CentOS is licensed under GPLv2 and no one has found a clause which makes this behavior obviously improper, yet.

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

#392

Post by tremon »

reaperman wrote: post #391
taylodl wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. For example, back in the day it may have to be mailed to you via floppy diskette or CD's so you would be charged for the media and for the time for someone to put that together. Waln…

>You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license. GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. GPLv3: You may charge a…

From GPLv2, section 6:

> Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.

How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever" not sound like a retaliatory restriction on the recipients' exercise of their rights?

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

#393

Post by reaperman »

tremon wrote: post #392
reaperman wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license. GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. GPLv3: You may charge a…

From GPLv2, section 6: > Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealing…

It doesn’t impose a legal restriction on their right to do those things. It reserves the right to refuse service for Red Hat. Hopefully a lawyer can successfully argue your point of view and win in court but I don’t personally see it myself.

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

#394

Post by ElectricalUnion »

freedomben wrote: post #307
symlinkk wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it, so maybe you should send some of that money to RedHat for licenses?

> If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it That is an extremely incorrect premise. There are tons of things in production that people don't make money on. Tons of new products don't make money for many years. And even if it is profitable, profit margins are often thin and RHEL is not cheap. I have about 10 services in public-facing production right now (on Alma), and on…

> (the host is not RHEL, just my container).

Are you sure that is really a supported RHEL configuration?

As far as I know, to get support unless you have a pretty special (and more expansive and expensive) support contract you're supposed to run a RHEL host and a RHEL base layer for the container images.

Your configuration looks like running standard RHEL over something not-RHEL, but without anything besides binary compatibility; so why not run RHEL UBI?

RHEL UBI has a much more lax license that you can almost pretty much use and basically redistribute freely, and you can get support for the RHEL components on it.

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

#395

Post by ElectricalUnion »

tremon wrote: post #392
reaperman wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license. GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. GPLv3: You may charge a…

From GPLv2, section 6: > Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealing…

> How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever" not sound like a retaliatory restriction on the recipients' exercise of their rights?

A enterprise has the right to refuse customers if the reason isn't discrimination of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or nationality.

"I violated a contract I made with them" isn't one of those.

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

#396

Post by otterley »

isityouyesitsme wrote: post #135
otterley wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thinly-veiled racism? You are conflating geopolitics and economics that could concern someone who could end up being affected by such a trend (which the poster isn't, as they said later) with racism. Is someone in a given country supposed to be HAPPY that a company founded in their country is intentionally putting support engineers within their founding country out of work, while simultaneously making support a worse…

> Moving support into localities for better servicing the customer is fine. This isn't the trend.

You and others in this thread are concluding that the choices provided are bad ones based solely on the locations of those choices, despite there being no good reason why these people cannot provide the same level of service that could be provided elsewhere (communication issues are curable by hiring the right people, and are not an incurable problem related to the country the speaker is in). This is precisely why I called it thinly-veiled racism. I stand by my original statement for this reason, and it was improperly flagged.

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

#397

Post by peoplearepeople »

chudsandbedbugs wrote: post #256
peoplearepeople wrote: post #152

Redhat will simply find themselves not supported if none of the open source projects can run CI against their distro.

Open source projects can get RHEL for free. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-ent...

That seems like the same difficult process, just without paying. People need to be able to just get their docker image from dockerhub or similar

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

#398

Post by phendrenad2 »

asadotzler wrote: post #353
olddustytrail wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not really. Ubuntu and Debian are far more prevalent in the datacentre than Redhat. Linux became popular through grass roots deployments and then companies cashed in on that. There seems to be a new narrative that it was the companies that started the ball rolling but it's not so.

The companies absolutely got the ball rolling. Sure, the grass roots started the ball rolling, but that roll was not going to get Linux anywhere without the kinds of investment that Redhat and others brought in the second half of the 90s.

Depends on what you mean by "anywhere". If your only goal in life is to see Linux take over the datacenter, well you should be happy. But if Linux ok the desktop is more of your goal, then I think that the corporations have actually been a detriment because they prioritize changes that help the server ecosystem, even if it makes the desktop shittier.

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

#399

Post by apple4ever »

dralley wrote: post #379
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also, as has been demonstrated, wildly impractical for Red Hat to continue exactly as before without others undermining its business. How was that demonstrated? RH became, famously, a billion-dollar company under the old model; why would continuing that not work?

CentOS never offered paid support. Rocky and Alma are trying to clone the whole package. With that being said, I do think it falls into the category of "problems that probably wouldn't exist if CentOS was still around"

Yup, there is a market for cheaper support. The problem is RHEL licensing (price and hassle). If CentOS was around, RH could offer cheaper support for it. That was the solution to this problem, not kneecapping their platform.

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

#400

Post by isityouyesitsme »

otterley wrote: post #396
isityouyesitsme wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinly-veiled racism? You are conflating geopolitics and economics that could concern someone who could end up being affected by such a trend (which the poster isn't, as they said later) with racism. Is someone in a given country supposed to be HAPPY that a company founded in their country is intentionally putting support engineers within their founding country out of work, while simultaneously making support a worse…

> Moving support into localities for better servicing the customer is fine. This isn't the trend. You and others in this thread are concluding that the choices provided are bad ones based solely on the locations of those choices, despite there being no good reason why these people cannot provide the same level of service that could be provided elsewhere (communication issues are curable by hiring the right people, an…

I didn't flag it.

I'm not improperly judging anything. I have lived this for too long. "No good reason" is a fantasy.

There is "no good reason" other than the real world standing in the way, which is an economic motivation you keep neglecting, not a racial one.

You are either a racist, unintelligent, or else ignorant. You do not write as though you're unintelligent. I do not personally assume that people are racist because I disagree with them (though your writing makes me challenge that). I can therefore only conclude you're ignorant of what real people do at real jobs.

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