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It looks like Amin is confusing "open source" with "free" (as in free beer). He seems to be pissed off that Red Hat discontinued the free CentOS distribution.

by GuB-42 4y ago

It looks like Amin is confusing "open source" with "free" (as in free beer). He seems to be pissed off that Red Hat discontinued the free CentOS distribution. And instead of paying for Red Hat, it goes to Rocky Linux, a free fork of Red Hat, just like CentOS. It is fine (at least legally), but the paid Red Hat distribution is no less open-source than Rocky Linux, in fact, the latter exists because Red Hat is open-source. That's why I think this article particularly ironic, it says that Red Hat is not "true" open-source and then made a move that is only possible because Red Hat is open-source. It didn't even go to something like Debian, which is the most "free/libre/open-source" of the major distros, it went to the clone of the distro they criticize.

bubblethink 4y ago
>it says that Red Hat is not "true" open-source This is true though as RH will terminate your contract if you redistribute their binaries. So they use a contractual backdoor to undermine GPL. And before people talk about how GPL covers source but not binaries, it covers binaries. In fact, all of CentOS, Rocky, Alma, etc. is a massive waste of everyone's time, energy, land, and electricity. Something akin to crypto mining. Everyone could have used RHEL, but we need this complicated indirection for no reason.
- type0 4y ago
  It covers binaries all right, the way I understand this RH is very aggressively pursues this as a trademark violation (which it shouldn't be unless it's deployed to third party that can give the blame to RH).
izacus 4y ago
When people say they want "true opensource", they usually mean they want to be the bosses and dictate how the product is being developed to the people who are actually doing all the work and giving all the funding.
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
He is not a stupid person, he knows what he's talking about. Of course he doesn't wan to pay for RHEL licenses, and he explains why the licensing model used by RH now is a bad choice for a business with a high number of nodes.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Which is why proper open source should be GPL, with a commercial license, so that the likes of him pay for the work of others that make his business possible to start with.
  - fazfq 4y ago
    Proper open source uses whatever licence the author wants.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      If the authors want to get paid, they need to choose a license wisely.
      - j33zusjuice 4y ago
        That more or less rules out GPL.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        Tell that to the MySQL folks. They sold it to Sun for a billion dollars, then made Larry Ellison pay for its development when he finally realised buying it with Sun wouldn’t allow him to kill it.
        poulpy123 4y ago
        How ?
        pjmlp 4y ago
        That is the whole point of having GPL with an additional comercial license.
ilyt 4y ago
As someone that uses RHEL coz of some of our customers need it, I can get their point. RHEL might be open source but it is structured (obviously) to sell the support license. You can't "just" install DRBD like on every other distro, you need to get the storage whatever the fuck pack, or get the packages from EPEL. In Debian DRBD module just comes with kernel, need to install it on RHEL etc. It's annoying to manage even as paid customer and wholly worse experience than just installing Debian.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  > It's annoying to manage even as paid customer and wholly worse experience than just installing Debian. All that is mostly solved with CentOS. I really don't get the people so upset about it.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    For some of us, using an older but way more tested and more stable version is equally important. CentOS stream moves the release point to (RHEL+1), which sometimes break things in unexpected ways. This is why we also migrating to Rocky on such systems.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      You can always pin your package versions (or image hash) to whatever is in RHEL. So far, all my CentOS stream boxes have been remarkably stable. And that's for my pets. The cattle is blissfully unaware of anything different.
      - bayindirh 4y ago
        Looks like our environments are different. The environment we use is a descendant of Scientific Linux, so we always worked in (RHEL-1) environments. So pinning to RHEL is not helping us, again.
        rbanffy 4y ago
flanked-evergl 4y ago
> He seems to be pissed off that Red Hat discontinued the free CentOS distribution. Just to clarify, CentOS is not discontinued. Basically all that is discontinued is CentOS "point" releases. There is CentOS stream 9, it gets updates, there will be CentOS stream 10, it will get updates, there will be overlap between CentOS stream 9 and 10 being supported. Sure the CentOS stream won't be exactly equivalent to RHEL point releases, CentOS stream 9 won't be RHEL 9.1 - but RHEL 9.1 will be cut from CentOS stream 9 AFAIU.
- sekh60 4y ago
  And to further add, a lot of the major Red Hat backed projects switched to using Centos steam as the officially supported redhat lineage. Ceph and OpenStack Kolla are both good, major examples.
  - treffer 4y ago
    Which are in large parts RH/IBM open source projects, too
    - KingOfCoders 4y ago
      "lot of the major Red Hat backed projects switched to using Centos" "Which are in large parts RH/IBM open source projects, too" ?
  - infinet 4y ago
    CERN was a big user of CentOS. After redhat changed CentOS8 EOL, CERN was allowed to use RHEL. Last time I checked, they suggested others in high energy physics community to use Rocky or Alma if RHEL is not an option.
    - dralley 4y ago
      CERN is backing CentOS Stream https://mobile.twitter.com/passthejoe/status/1446931447118372867 https://mobile.twitter.com/passthejoe/status/144693144711837...
samwillis 4y ago
My reading of this is that Rakuten used to use a combination of RHEL and CentOS. Now that CentOS as a "down stream" equivalent of RHEL is dead (its selling point), they have reassessed their platform and gone with Rocky. Rocky is "down stream" of RHEL, CentOS 8+ is "up stream" of RHEL (since 2020, and what Fedora has always been). CIQ sell support contracts for Rocky linux, so rather than having a combination of RHEL (with support) and CentOS. They now just have Rocky with an optional support contract. Linux is open source, they are aloud to do this, thats the point. They are not leaching. Red Hat, by ending CentOS as a "down stream" equivalent, have brought this on themselves. There will be a lot of other users of RHEL and CentOS who are going through the same process right now as CentOS 7 support ends next year. We will see more companies making the same choice.
- jamespo 4y ago
  I wonder how many RHEL licenses they actually had, a minimal amount to make support requests I'd guess.
  - j33zusjuice 4y ago
    I’d bet that’s accurate. The CEO very clearly did not understand the licensing models because you don’t pay per core for RHEL licenses; this isn’t Oracle. VDC licenses are cheap: MSRP is $4k USD per hypervisor with premium support, and I’m sure you can negotiate a discount at a certain size. You can probably game VDC licensing if you really wanted (I’m not endorsing the idea of stealing from Red Hat, and to be clear, my company isn’t interested in getting sued to save what amounts to pocket change for them). Or you could switch to OpenShift for virtualization (because who isn’t at least _considering_ dumping VMWare now that Broadcom owns them?) and container management, and run all the RHEL VMs and UBIs your heart desires.
febrianrendak 4y ago
Did you read the article? Let me quote the article: “I called him and… said ‘listen, I want to give you a shot and I'm willing to work with you’. So we worked with him for 13 months to build our real-time kernel to meet complex workloads with one condition: It has to be open source and it has to derive its characteristics from a large community,” Rakuten worked with the founder of Rocky Linux for 13 months to develop real-time kernel. I don't know what kind of deal Rakuten promised to Rocky Linux (founder) and its community, but Rakuten contribute by open-sourced the work to community. That's enough for me. That's the spirit of open source.
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  Is rocky Linux kernel-rt is rhel kernel-rt ? If so i wonder how much work went into the kernel-rt.
  - j33zusjuice 4y ago
    It reads to me as though they outsourced their performance tuning. There are tons of tweaks you make to it for specific environments. I’m not sure what they would have done that any experienced engineer could not have done.
api 4y ago
The fact is that most users of open source care more about not paying than freedom or openness. The same factor is why people go for “free” surveillanceware or fishing-hook-ware. The people who actually understand and care about freedom is a small niche.
PedroBatista 4y ago
I would agree 100%, but this is not 90s Red Hat, it's IBM now. It seems like the classical "Here's our new pricing and for being a long time customer we throw in a bottle of vaseline too". Which technically has nothing to do with open source but Red Hat ( like every company in this space ) created an "ecosystem" and uses the word "open source" VERY liberally when selling you stuff. Some of their opensource software need some paid service or "maintenance" contract to work or have any value. I'm sure Red Hat/IBM is ( mostly ) covered on the legal side, but the sausage is made in a very different way.
- j33zusjuice 4y ago
  Like what? You’re paying for engineering, which provides stability, and support. There’s nothing from Red Hat that isn’t upstream for free. They even open source companies that they purchase (like 3scale). The base OS has multiple clones (Alma, Rocky, etc.), Satellite comes from Foreman, AAP2 comes from Ansible and AWX, IdM from FreeIPA, OpenShift from OKD, and the list goes on. The only thing I can think of that doesn’t have an upstream equivalent Insights, but that’s because it uses RedHat’s ML systems, and connecting your systems to theirs costs money. Insights-core is open source, but may not provide much value since you can’t connect to RH’s backend.
- axiolite 4y ago
  > uses the word "open source" VERY liberally when selling you stuff. RedHat has consistently been the most aggressive supporter of Open Source out of any for-profit companies. Not only do they contribute to open source projects, they consistently release their own code/projects as open source early on, which could easily be kept proprietary (if they chose) and used as a competitive advantage over others.

by GuB-42 4y ago

bubblethink 4y ago

>it says that Red Hat is not "true" open-source This is true though as RH will terminate your contract if you redistribute their binaries. So they use a contractual backdoor to undermine GPL. And before people talk about how GPL covers source but not binaries, it covers binaries. In fact, all of CentOS, Rocky, Alma, etc. is a massive waste of everyone's time, energy, land, and electricity. Something akin to crypto mining. Everyone could have used RHEL, but we need this complicated indirection for no reason.

type0 4y ago
It covers binaries all right, the way I understand this RH is very aggressively pursues this as a trademark violation (which it shouldn't be unless it's deployed to third party that can give the blame to RH).

izacus 4y ago

When people say they want "true opensource", they usually mean they want to be the bosses and dictate how the product is being developed to the people who are actually doing all the work and giving all the funding.

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

He is not a stupid person, he knows what he's talking about. Of course he doesn't wan to pay for RHEL licenses, and he explains why the licensing model used by RH now is a bad choice for a business with a high number of nodes.

pjmlp 4y ago
Which is why proper open source should be GPL, with a commercial license, so that the likes of him pay for the work of others that make his business possible to start with.
- fazfq 4y ago
  Proper open source uses whatever licence the author wants.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    If the authors want to get paid, they need to choose a license wisely.
    - j33zusjuice 4y ago
      That more or less rules out GPL.
      - rbanffy 4y ago
        Tell that to the MySQL folks. They sold it to Sun for a billion dollars, then made Larry Ellison pay for its development when he finally realised buying it with Sun wouldn’t allow him to kill it.
      - poulpy123 4y ago
        How ?
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        That is the whole point of having GPL with an additional comercial license.

ilyt 4y ago

As someone that uses RHEL coz of some of our customers need it, I can get their point. RHEL might be open source but it is structured (obviously) to sell the support license. You can't "just" install DRBD like on every other distro, you need to get the storage whatever the fuck pack, or get the packages from EPEL. In Debian DRBD module just comes with kernel, need to install it on RHEL etc. It's annoying to manage even as paid customer and wholly worse experience than just installing Debian.

rbanffy 4y ago
> It's annoying to manage even as paid customer and wholly worse experience than just installing Debian. All that is mostly solved with CentOS. I really don't get the people so upset about it.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  For some of us, using an older but way more tested and more stable version is equally important. CentOS stream moves the release point to (RHEL+1), which sometimes break things in unexpected ways. This is why we also migrating to Rocky on such systems.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    You can always pin your package versions (or image hash) to whatever is in RHEL. So far, all my CentOS stream boxes have been remarkably stable. And that's for my pets. The cattle is blissfully unaware of anything different.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      Looks like our environments are different. The environment we use is a descendant of Scientific Linux, so we always worked in (RHEL-1) environments. So pinning to RHEL is not helping us, again.
      - rbanffy 4y ago

flanked-evergl 4y ago

> He seems to be pissed off that Red Hat discontinued the free CentOS distribution. Just to clarify, CentOS is not discontinued. Basically all that is discontinued is CentOS "point" releases. There is CentOS stream 9, it gets updates, there will be CentOS stream 10, it will get updates, there will be overlap between CentOS stream 9 and 10 being supported. Sure the CentOS stream won't be exactly equivalent to RHEL point releases, CentOS stream 9 won't be RHEL 9.1 - but RHEL 9.1 will be cut from CentOS stream 9 AFAIU.

sekh60 4y ago
And to further add, a lot of the major Red Hat backed projects switched to using Centos steam as the officially supported redhat lineage. Ceph and OpenStack Kolla are both good, major examples.
- treffer 4y ago
  Which are in large parts RH/IBM open source projects, too
  - KingOfCoders 4y ago
    "lot of the major Red Hat backed projects switched to using Centos" "Which are in large parts RH/IBM open source projects, too" ?
- infinet 4y ago
  CERN was a big user of CentOS. After redhat changed CentOS8 EOL, CERN was allowed to use RHEL. Last time I checked, they suggested others in high energy physics community to use Rocky or Alma if RHEL is not an option.
  - dralley 4y ago
    CERN is backing CentOS Stream https://mobile.twitter.com/passthejoe/status/1446931447118372867 https://mobile.twitter.com/passthejoe/status/144693144711837...

samwillis 4y ago

My reading of this is that Rakuten used to use a combination of RHEL and CentOS. Now that CentOS as a "down stream" equivalent of RHEL is dead (its selling point), they have reassessed their platform and gone with Rocky. Rocky is "down stream" of RHEL, CentOS 8+ is "up stream" of RHEL (since 2020, and what Fedora has always been). CIQ sell support contracts for Rocky linux, so rather than having a combination of RHEL (with support) and CentOS. They now just have Rocky with an optional support contract. Linux is open source, they are aloud to do this, thats the point. They are not leaching. Red Hat, by ending CentOS as a "down stream" equivalent, have brought this on themselves. There will be a lot of other users of RHEL and CentOS who are going through the same process right now as CentOS 7 support ends next year. We will see more companies making the same choice.

jamespo 4y ago
I wonder how many RHEL licenses they actually had, a minimal amount to make support requests I'd guess.
- j33zusjuice 4y ago
  I’d bet that’s accurate. The CEO very clearly did not understand the licensing models because you don’t pay per core for RHEL licenses; this isn’t Oracle. VDC licenses are cheap: MSRP is $4k USD per hypervisor with premium support, and I’m sure you can negotiate a discount at a certain size. You can probably game VDC licensing if you really wanted (I’m not endorsing the idea of stealing from Red Hat, and to be clear, my company isn’t interested in getting sued to save what amounts to pocket change for them). Or you could switch to OpenShift for virtualization (because who isn’t at least _considering_ dumping VMWare now that Broadcom owns them?) and container management, and run all the RHEL VMs and UBIs your heart desires.

febrianrendak 4y ago

Did you read the article? Let me quote the article: “I called him and… said ‘listen, I want to give you a shot and I'm willing to work with you’. So we worked with him for 13 months to build our real-time kernel to meet complex workloads with one condition: It has to be open source and it has to derive its characteristics from a large community,” Rakuten worked with the founder of Rocky Linux for 13 months to develop real-time kernel. I don't know what kind of deal Rakuten promised to Rocky Linux (founder) and its community, but Rakuten contribute by open-sourced the work to community. That's enough for me. That's the spirit of open source.

ungamedplayer 4y ago
Is rocky Linux kernel-rt is rhel kernel-rt ? If so i wonder how much work went into the kernel-rt.
- j33zusjuice 4y ago
  It reads to me as though they outsourced their performance tuning. There are tons of tweaks you make to it for specific environments. I’m not sure what they would have done that any experienced engineer could not have done.

api 4y ago

The fact is that most users of open source care more about not paying than freedom or openness. The same factor is why people go for “free” surveillanceware or fishing-hook-ware. The people who actually understand and care about freedom is a small niche.

PedroBatista 4y ago

I would agree 100%, but this is not 90s Red Hat, it's IBM now. It seems like the classical "Here's our new pricing and for being a long time customer we throw in a bottle of vaseline too". Which technically has nothing to do with open source but Red Hat ( like every company in this space ) created an "ecosystem" and uses the word "open source" VERY liberally when selling you stuff. Some of their opensource software need some paid service or "maintenance" contract to work or have any value. I'm sure Red Hat/IBM is ( mostly ) covered on the legal side, but the sausage is made in a very different way.

j33zusjuice 4y ago
Like what? You’re paying for engineering, which provides stability, and support. There’s nothing from Red Hat that isn’t upstream for free. They even open source companies that they purchase (like 3scale). The base OS has multiple clones (Alma, Rocky, etc.), Satellite comes from Foreman, AAP2 comes from Ansible and AWX, IdM from FreeIPA, OpenShift from OKD, and the list goes on. The only thing I can think of that doesn’t have an upstream equivalent Insights, but that’s because it uses RedHat’s ML systems, and connecting your systems to theirs costs money. Insights-core is open source, but may not provide much value since you can’t connect to RH’s backend.
axiolite 4y ago
> uses the word "open source" VERY liberally when selling you stuff. RedHat has consistently been the most aggressive supporter of Open Source out of any for-profit companies. Not only do they contribute to open source projects, they consistently release their own code/projects as open source early on, which could easily be kept proprietary (if they chose) and used as a competitive advantage over others.