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Keeping Open Source Open

rockylinux.org

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Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#91

Post by coldtea »

gbraad wrote: post #80
coldtea wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM/RHEL doesn't make most of RHEL either. It's repackaged FOSS projects. Some they contribute to themselves as well, but most not.

You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used. What more should they do? Also note, Red Hat pays engineers for the extended support, the compliance https://access.redhat.com/articles/2918071 , etc that customers expect from RH. Engineers contribute both upstream (first) and backport those changes to older releases.

>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 have anything to do with, still in the distro.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#92

Post by jillesvangurp »

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 loop, the process just continues elsewhere. The vast majority of that ecosystem does not pay IBM a single dollar and probably never will.

IBM is a company that is in slow decline, so the remaining Red Hat employees are facing an extended period of that company just squeezing harder and harder until nothing remains. It's death by a thousand cuts. But the bottom line is that a lot of people doing the hard work of committing actual code on behalf of the ecosystem that are currently employed there will be facing endless rounds layoffs, reorganizations, restructurings, etc. If there isn't an employee exodus happening there already, that might soon start to happen. The only question is where those people will end up.

A well funded foundation maintaining the fork of the distribution formerly known as Red Hat could be a nice destination for such people. Between Amazon, Oracle, and the countless users of Rocky, Alma, Centos, Fedora, etc. there should be plenty of brain power, motivation, and money to make that happen. They need a stable foundation. They don't need IBM to be part of that.

Don't play IBM's game on their terms. Just cut them loose. They get to do whatever they want downstream, not upstream. And they get to contribute all their fixes under GPL. That's not optional. This foundation would be free to use these fixes as they need to. Comparability with IBM's downstream distribution should not be a goal for this foundation. And if IBM wants to pretend they can do it all by themselves, they are more than welcome to try.

My prediction is that if the big supporters of this ecosystem join forces and do this, IBM will grumble a bit and then ultimately join the foundation because their alternative will be just writing off the investment they made in Red Hat and watch from the sidelines how most of the ecosystem stops depending on IBM's Red Hat.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#93

Post by gbraad »

coldtea wrote: post #91
gbraad wrote: post #80

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. What more should they do? Also note, Red Hat pays engineers for the extended support, the compliance https://access.redhat.com/articles/2918071 , etc that customers expect from RH. Engineers contribute both upstream (first) and backport those changes to older releases.

> 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?"

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#94

Post by bonzini »

pravus wrote: post #67
bonzini wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> somehow redhat isn't entitled to give back to Linux So it's not enough to employ more than 1000 people working on upstream/Fedora/CentOS Stream, have a strict upstream first policy for features that go into RHEL and their other products, donate to a bunch of foundations and sponsor conferences, maintain the main repository of firmware updates for Linux, be consistently in the top three contributors to Linux, open s…

> 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.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#95

Post by snovv_crash »

davisr wrote: post #73
Brian_K_White wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They demand that Redhat pay for what they take in the only coin that the original producer ever asked for. Redhat are the parasites, not Centos. If Redhat don't agree to the deal that the gpl makes, they are free not to use any gpl code. Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft, and it's an incredible expression of the art, when something is free, and yet you still manage to steal it.

> Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft No, it's not, and I've seen your comments elsewhere. I don't think you even know what the "free" in "free software" means. You are COMPLETELY allowed to SELL free software. "Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html Red Hat is still distributing full correspon…

Yes, and anybody who buys RedHat product, even for a few minutes on a shared cloud provider, is entitled to the source code, and is also entitled to redistribute the source code as they see fit. Which is what Rocky is doing.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#96

Post by bonzini »

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…

What an idiocy.

SRPMs can be used offline. The GPL requires the complete corresponding sources so you have to include the upstream sources anyway together with the binary RPMs; might as well bundle them in one file so you can share the metadata format between sources and binaries built from them.

What you mention ("upstream URLs, SHA256 hashes" plus the content of the spec file) is exactly what you find on git.centos.org.

Besides the main design of RPMs dates back to 1990. I suspect there was no conspiracy to hide SRPMs from Rocky Linux back then.

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#99

Post by bonzini »

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…

> IBM will grumble a bit and then ultimately join the foundation because their alternative will be just writing off the investment they made in Red Hat and watch from the sidelines how most of the ecosystem stops depending on IBM's Red Hat.

You could have said that if they switched to using CentOS Stream, and that would even have been my favorite outcome as a Red Hat employee.

However, Rocky Linux is neither a sibling nor a fork of RHEL. It's a debranded clone that by definition cannot even have a single bugfix that isn't in RHEL. For Oracle it's okay because it's peanut money in order to annoy Red Hat, so they can afford this; for Amazon or Facebook it's no good and that's why they forked upstream at the Fedora or CentOS Stream level.

As long as Rocky Linux stays a RHEL rebuild built by a third party like the CentOS of 2010 (except backed by corporate money rather than a guy in Nebraska), Red Hat is already putting millions into "the foundation". That's what they pay for the thousand people that develop Rocky Linux, ahem RHEL. Without them, there can be no Rocky Linux at all. So, as long as Rocky's money making side keeps undermining Red Hat's money making side, game theory predicts no other outcome than death for both RHEL and Rocky.

_EDIT_: if you downvote, I'd be very glad to learn where I'm wrong

Re: Keeping Open Source Open

#100

Post by theolivenbaum »

snovv_crash wrote: post #95
davisr wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft No, it's not, and I've seen your comments elsewhere. I don't think you even know what the "free" in "free software" means. You are COMPLETELY allowed to SELL free software. "Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html Red Hat is still distributing full correspon…

Yes, and anybody who buys RedHat product, even for a few minutes on a shared cloud provider, is entitled to the source code, and is also entitled to redistribute the source code as they see fit. Which is what Rocky is doing.

Which is both brilliant and surprising that RH didn't see it coming
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