It is also a problem for RedHat. It is difficult to overcome your past history of crowing about your support for the open source community (and the well-understood dependence on it) when the new business side executives are pushing you to find some way to lock-in the customer base with proprietary software.
Red Hat Takes Aim at Rocky Linux & AlmaLinux, Restricts RHEL Code Access
- Thread starter f33dm3bits
- Start date
OP
They seem to be trying though by upping the entitlements from 16 to 240 for the personal developer subscriptions.
This is from the Register:
Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams
From now on, only CentOS Stream's source code is available to allwww.theregister.com
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Deleted member 111282
Guest
Alma said in the FAQ of their statement that they've had a good relationship with Red Hat and will find a way to mitigate this in the long-term, so hopefully something good will happen for everyone involved. From what's being said, RH, and more specifically IBM, no longer wanted the distro to be open-source because they weren't being able to profit from code contributions, so maybe Alma and Rocky can meet with them and form an agreement where they have to pay a reasonable percentage of their funding to RH in order to have full access to the source code, but that's just wishful thinking on my part. If worse came to worse, Alma and Rocky would have to fork their own distros and base them on something like Debian, Arch, or Gentoo. The problem is people or companies who rely on Rocky or Alma for their servers are then forced to redesign their workflow, which can be expensive, time-consuming, and tedious, which will obviously piss those people off. I'd hate to see a situation where the derivatives are forced to shut down because IBM screwed them over.
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It's the difference between a company and a community which sheds a light on what has happened for me. In significant respects they have different priorities: commercial success versus non-commercial community objectives. On the one hand, a company needs to remain solvent and fulfil a number of corporate obligations, whereas a community structure of volunteers is much freer in what it needs to satisfy. Red Hat both provided benefits and derived benefits from linux communities, but as a company that became increasingly enmeshed with the "big-end-of-town" corporate sector over time, it's changed its priorities accordingly.
OP
I already post in this topic earlier but Rocky Linux seems to have found a way to get back to updating as normal, there hasn't been an update from Alma Linux since last week.
Brave New World: The Path Forward for Rocky Linux | Rocky Linux
Rocky Linux is an open enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux.
rockylinux.org
OP
Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes
More about Red Hat's decision to make CentOS Stream the primary repository for RHEL sources.
Well, I guess that sums it up nicely. They could have made that article so much shorter.
Just a quick thought (question, perhaps) about this...
These would be rhetorical questions, really:
How many bugs are found, reported, and even fixed by those RHEL rebuilds?
How much goodwill comes from them that effectively turns into money for them?
How much business has been generated by people using those rebuilds and then moving to RHEL?
I'm sure there's some value there. I'm sure those things happen on some level. I'd not speculate about the scale, because I have no realistic way to know the answers to those questions.
At the end of the day, it's their ball and they can take it home with them. So long as they meet their licensing requirements, adhering to the copy-left nature of them, we'll have to find other ways around it. It looks like that is already being done.
OP
I know of people on the Rocky Linux forums and other mailinglist that done bug reports for RHEL, but I don't know numbers. Also There are organizations that run RHEL clones for their testing/staging environment and have a RHEL subscription for their production environment, if you come across a bug you usually find it in testing first and then staging so I can imagine enough companies have done bug reports when coming across bugs in their testing/staging environment.
After reading the blog post by Mike McGrath of RedHat, I retract my comments about "anti-patterns" and self-immolating behavior regarding RedHat.
I think it is worth your time to read. This blog post explains the motivations behind RedHat's decision in a clear and simple way. I am not saying that I agree with the changes or whether they were the right thing to do for RedHat and other stakeholders.
What I learned is that I no longer have confidence in my statements above in this thread. I jumped to conclusions without a full understanding of the issues, which are more complex than I initially thought.
I think that's a fair assumption. It's interesting that they said they didn't find any value in the others. Maybe 'not enough value' would have been better.
wendy-lebaron
Active Member
I wonder if at least the Rocky Linux ISO would become much smaller. Otherwise I'm glad I found the live ISO for AlmaLinux GNOME and it's as far as I want to go with either of those two. I've also tried Eurolinux but went for the smaller ISO, but "installed" I couldn't get past a cold terminal because I was never familiar with RHEL family procedure. Never cared about the big ole corporation that decided to keep carrying OS/2 against Windows and lost badly, and are still trying to get their revenge out of it. This will not be the last outrageous thing they do.
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Deleted member 111282
Guest
I applaud how he handled this massive criticism like a true gentleman. So many uninformed people jumped to conclusions, threw a tantrum, and slandered him online, but he chose to inform rather than letting his stress get to him and cause him to argue back. Although I was uninformed myself, I didn't drink the Kool-aid (mainly because I have no understanding of RHEL), and therefore didn't feel any desire to get emotionally-invested in this.
I was pissed off in the beginning as well! Came out of nowhere, it is interesting that this is happening now and not before, but I guess the times are tougher today then they were years ago. If you look at RHELs financials, they are not doing that well it seems, maybe I misunderstood the information, but based on the earnings, they are not doing that great, so to an extent, I am not surprised, this just feels like they are trying to monetize more, which makes sense, if they have to have people supporting the distro internally, building new features, etc.. I think there should compensation, even if the open source world, we should contribute and support the folks putting in the effort.
I guess, it was all a matter of time...
I guess, it was all a matter of time...
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Deleted member 108694
Guest
RedHat does have a contract with the US Military, (Blue Force Tracking and FBCB2 systems run on RedHat) which I would imagine is very lucrative to their wallet, if the US decided to go with a free version (i.e Rocky)well that would be very bad for RedHat - follow the money as they say - probably getting close for contract renewal time
A second thread started up on the same topic yesterday. This one:
https://www.linux.org/threads/red-hat-blog-information-about-alma-linux-and-more.45700/
In it, @Alexzee posted several links. I found one of them to be a good counterbalance to the blog post by Mike McGrath of RedHat. You may want to think of it as representing the "other side" in the discussion. This link here:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
Again, I think that one is worth your time to read. Speaking for myself, I have backed away from any position on the subject. I have not reached any conclusions. The issues are complex and I want time to think about them.
https://www.linux.org/threads/red-hat-blog-information-about-alma-linux-and-more.45700/
In it, @Alexzee posted several links. I found one of them to be a good counterbalance to the blog post by Mike McGrath of RedHat. You may want to think of it as representing the "other side" in the discussion. This link here:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
Again, I think that one is worth your time to read. Speaking for myself, I have backed away from any position on the subject. I have not reached any conclusions. The issues are complex and I want time to think about them.
Jessie Smth has a good right up on the Redhat situation, in this weeks Distrowatch Questions & Answers section.
DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.
News and feature lists of Linux and BSD distributions.distrowatch.com
OP
I don't think Red Hat is done and that they won't stop until RHEL clones aren't possible anymore, something they will probably never publicly admit.
Though this is not realated to Redhat thought is was interesting that Conical is beginning to tighten up it container program as well
Given that OpenSuse has already said that it's doing away with it's leap branch after the next release. The big three in enterprise are all I think closing up their code.
Ubuntu Maker Canonical Pulls In Control Of LXD - Phoronix
www.phoronix.com
Given that OpenSuse has already said that it's doing away with it's leap branch after the next release. The big three in enterprise are all I think closing up their code.
