23 ms·

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

357 points by 0xdeafbeef 3y ago

maurice11 3y ago
good decision from red hat. oracle, alma and rocky cant just take other peoples work, profit (not just monetary) and give nothing back. thats not what community means.
HideousKojima 3y ago
It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  I suspect that they would not then be a customer for very long afterward.
- tw04 3y ago
  >It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors. That is a violation of their terms of service and will result in a termination of your subscription unless I'm misreading it (section d): Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units, (c) providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such instance (collectively, “Unauthorized Subscription Services Uses”). https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20230309.pdf https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...
  - Vogtinator 3y ago
    How does this not violate the GPL?
    - matthews2 3y ago
      The GPL says I must give you access to the source along with the binaries, but it doesn't say I need to give you updates indefinitely.
      - Vogtinator 3y ago
        I'm referring to the "You can redistribute the source, but then we'll cancel support" part which appears to be part of the terms and conditions.
    - mroche 3y ago
      It does not. As the other comment in this thread notes there are two agreements in play here: the open source license agreements and Red Hat's Enterprise Agreement. Under no circumstances can Red Hat prevent an entity from sharing their FOSS software, however they can absolutely view that action as a violation of the EA Contract, and terminate the subscription. This doesn't undo the action, but prevents further access to updates and sources.
    - vbezhenar 3y ago
      Why should it violate GPL? RHEL is obliged to provide source code for their GPL packages. You ask for source code, you'll get it. You distribute the source code, RH will terminate the contract with you because they don't want to see you as a customer anymore. They're free to do business with whoever they want, peeking people who will not distribute RH sources. Every party is in their right here. That's my understanding. Red Hat did that for many years. They maintain extended support branches for RHEL which provide fixes for very old software. Those fixes AFAIK were never "leaked" despite the fact that every customer could receive it. If it was as simple as crowd-funding single subscription and then publish all the sources, someone would do it and we would have CentOS Extended LTS.
a2tech 3y ago
I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat. I was under the impression they were profitable prior to the acquisition so I’m not sure why they’re squeezing so hard and ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.
- adql 3y ago
  The same game they play with their main customers, make sure they will have more and more problems leaving.
- Timon3 3y ago
  IBM is stuck in a cycle of constant re-invention, because they somehow manage to always re-invent themselves in ways that are even worse and more complicated for customers, which they try to fix by re-inventing themselves again. Even if they initially planned on leaving Red Hat alone, every re-invention is a chance for some executive to make the decision to squeeze a little tighter on existing customers. So the question shouldn't be "what game is IBM playing with Red Hat", but "how long until nothing usable is left". I'd say maybe 20 more re-inventions, or 1-2 years.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Yet they're still way older than most tech companies. I'd wager they will outlive 99.99% of those unicorn startups yet.
    - Fordec 3y ago
      The Lindy Effect.[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
    - taeric 3y ago
      How much of that is lingering brand value, though? That and simple ties into existing and old industries. You are also comparing to startups? Which... yes, most things die. Sometimes, it is the old things that die. Often taking a lot of other younger things with them.
BossingAround 3y ago
I don't get what's the big deal--essentially the only thing being lost is a pointer to commit that marks the difference between RHEL X.Y and X.Y+1..?
- marwatk 3y ago
  RedHat spends a lot of time back-porting security updates to older software (e.g. RHEL7). Stream is always only the latest RHEL version, I believe. The whole point of RHEL is the long term support (the back-porting), which is what they're going to stop publishing.
  - trufas 3y ago
    CentOS 7 is supported and will be EOL at the same time as RHEL 7. Stream does have major versions so you can continue to use CentOS Stream 8 and get backports. You only lose anything if you're tied to some minor version of EL for some reason.
- pavon 3y ago
  RHEL X.Y isn't a simple snapshot of CentOS Stream X at a specific point. It is a fork of CentOS Stream, with cherry-picks and so on. The specific details of what patches made it into RHEL and when and how to create reproducible builds are now only being provided to customers. In the past, customers have been able to redistribute the RHEL repos freely. I assume that will remain the case as long as CentOS Stream is open source. Edit: Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if IBM put some content in the RHEL repo that is under restrictive licenses that couldn't be redistributed just to complicate things, but all the important parts will remain open source, due to close ties to CentOS Stream and Fedora. Rocky/Alma already have to replace trademarks, and this wouldn't be much different, but they would have to obtain access to the repos as customers themselves, or have another customer strip the bad stuff out before throwing it over the fence. We'll have to see how hostile they want to be about it.
  - mroche 3y ago
    > In the past, customers have been able to redistribute the RHEL repos freely. I assume that will remain the case as long as CentOS Stream is open source. There's a duality here. Yes, by the nature of the distribution, GPL, and licensing general, Red Hat cannot stop or prevent a customer from distributing RHEL packages and software to third parties. However, Red Hat reserves the right to terminate any existing subscriptions a customer may have as a result of their package distributing. IIRC, the Enterprise Agreement makes it pretty clear the services and offerings provided by the subscription are for the customer and the customer only. Going outside of that violates the subscription's terms, not the softwares' licenses, therefore allowing Red Hat to end business with said customer. For those concerned about the final year of CentOS 7: it will not be touched. It will continue to see source exports to git.centos.org as there is no parallel CentOS Stream 7 platform. Also, git.centos.org is not EOL either because it is used by other groups than Red Hat, like CentOS Special Interest Groups.
adql 3y ago
And the IBMization of Red Hat continues
chasil 3y ago
If Red Hat chooses not to perform their duties under the GPL, then any holder of copyright can require Red Hat to remove the owner's source packages from the commercial distribution. Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the source only to those who download the binary releases. As there are several avenues for free downloads (developer, 16 free licenses for small business, etc.), the source will be available by that route.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  CentOS Stream source code is available.
  - chasil 3y ago
    CentOS stream is not RHEL, and that is what will be needed by Rocky, Alma, and Oracle. I don't think it will be much more difficult to obtain.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      IIUC (I work for Red Hat but not on how sources are distributed), there is absolutely no change in practice. CentOS Stream RPM sources are stored in GitLab therefore the whole history is available including past minor releases of RHEL. The only change is that the repositories will not be mirrored to git.centos.org.
      - mroche 3y ago
        Some clarification is needed here. git.centos.org (g.c.o) has been the historical canonical local for RHEL sources that have been exported out of Red Hat. On any given package you would see several branches, one for each major release and other organizational artifacts (e.g. c7, c8, c9, etc). Initially CentOS Stream 9 was exported to g.c.o as it wasn't a true upstream in the full sense of the word, but with CentOS Stream 9 that changed. c9s is developed in full on GitLab, and now c8s as well, while the final RHEL sources for those packages are still output to the c8 and c9 branches on g.c.o. What changes here is that Red Hat will no longer be exporting the c8 and c9 content to any git platform (c7 will continue as exists until its EOL). Customers can access sources as needed via the Customer Portal and CDN repositories, but sources in git form will not be publicly available for those artifacts. Moving forward, only c8s and c9s sources will be available, and g.c.o will not see any updates for EL8 and EL9. While most (I'd estimate at least 95%) of the platform will match in terms of NEVRA between versions available in CentOS Stream and their RHEL counterparts, there are some packages that will not due to the way they are developed.
louissan 3y ago
IBM not happy with NASA's decision?
MattSteelblade 3y ago
Will this prevent o̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ legal derivatives of RHEL?
- binary_ninja 3y ago
  I would assume the people that actually develop those either already are RHEL customers or they would just pay a single subscription so they can download the code and keep it in sync
- ghaff 3y ago
  There are no "official" derivatives of RHEL. (And that was true even after Red Hat acquired/acqui-hired CentOS).
  - MattSteelblade 3y ago
    I have edited my question from official to legal (at least from a US-perspective). Another commenter in this thread has stated that it would be against their TOS.
- bonzini 3y ago
  No, the whole history of RHEL development remains available on GitLab. The change only affects git.centos.org.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusion of these two RHEL clones’ success would be to eliminate their host, leading to their own demise, which is why one person in the Linux space called them the “dirtbags” of open source. > If there are any real parasites, it's Oracle Linux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux > Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006.[4] It is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle's. I had no idea that Oracle Linux was essentially RHEL with %s/Red\ Hat/Oracle/g and Oracle has a market cap of $330bn
- yrro 3y ago
  To be fair to Oracle I believe they have their own "unbreakable" kernel packages, though they do ship Red Hat's kernel as well.
- rconti 3y ago
  Paid for Oracle Linux, can confirm.
- chasil 3y ago
  It has a few add-ons. The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs, extensive device support (that is removed from the stock kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always more current. There are several scenarios where it is very attractive. Oracle bought K-Splice several years ago, which was the first rebootless patch solution for Linux. It's only available with a premium license; Kernelcare is a lot cheaper. Supported Oracle Linux versions are also available for WSL1 inside of Windows. C:\>wsl.exe -l -o The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed. The default distribution is denoted by '*'. Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'. NAME FRIENDLY NAME Ubuntu Ubuntu Debian Debian GNU/Linux kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling Ubuntu-18.04 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9 OracleLinux_8_7 Oracle Linux 8.7 OracleLinux_9_1 Oracle Linux 9.1 SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4 openSUSE-Leap-15.4 openSUSE Leap 15.4 openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed Oracle Linux came into existence shortly after Red Hat bought JBoss. As Oracle had also bought BEA Weblogic (IIRC), this was not taken well.
jmclnx 3y ago
I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope the Linux Foundation weighs in, but it seems to have been bought by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and many other large corps. All the drama in Linux with Wayland, RHEL sponsored init, snap/flatpak and now IBM/RHEL has been causing me to seriously evaluate the BSDs. I have been doing that for a couple of years. I would be fully on OpenBSD now, but the hardware I have is one of those with 2 videos, integrated and Nvidia. And that system does NOT allow me to disable the Nvidia Chip. When using Nvidia, that chip is correctly ignored by OpenBSD, but it gets so hot I can almost fry an egg on it. I have some mitigations in place, but it still gets rather hot, CPU and disk stays normal. The same is true with NetBSD, I have not tried FreeBSD yet. This RHEL thing may be the last straw, I may bite the bullet and see if the heat causes failures and if so evaluate this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292831 FWIW, I did add paste, a full cleaning. And this was purchased used rather cheaply 2 years ago. It is 9 years old now. Why am I bothered by this ? This seems to be a weak first step of companies making Linux go proprietary. Already we need many proprietary blobs. And funny, NASA just signed a contract with Rocky and CERN went with AlmaLinux, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968
- Sunspark 3y ago
  The BSD with the most support for Nvidia is the one you never tried. Arguably it's the only BSD that is best suited for a desktop user. Also has better wifi support as well. We all want to love BSD, and it does get love in proprietary spaces like Netflix, Playstation and Apple, but those companies have the resources to actually create the pieces they need and do not have an obligation to share it. (E.g. MacOS is literally a certified UNIX, but the GUI layers are private.) For non-corporate users, in some ways it is like what Debian faced when they realized they really did need to start including wifi firmware into the install media, because people were like, why doesn't this connect to the router? What's wrong with this? This is actually something that I've run into personally. At the end of the day though, BSD isn't realistic as a desktop. OpenBSD disables stuff for security reasons which harms performance, so it wouldn't be first choice as a desktop. NetBSD is what Open forked off of many years ago and I recall NetBSD as one of those "let's try to make it install on anything" show and tell pieces, but not something you'd really be using for anything. FreeBSD was the only one that was reasonably usable. Dragonfly is another fork (this time off FreeBSD). All of them have to port the Linux video drivers, Linux desktops, etc. It's actually somewhat unusual that Linux is the one that won the battle for resources, because corporations hate sharing and being open.
LordShredda 3y ago
NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech contracts
- anonymousiam 3y ago
  The US Government has been sour on large contractors for almost 10 years now, but the quandary is how to prevent the small contractors they support from becoming the dinosaurs they hate? For a while OSC O/ATK was a darling, but NG gobbled them up. Same thing with Millennial (now Boeing). Space-X is probably too big for acquisition now, so they are on course to become just another dinosaur.
- jaclaz 3y ago
  If the info in this thread is accurate, it is for 3 (three) workstations, I would call it a tiny deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 Shouldn't be of relevance.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Yeah this decision had to have been in discussion for 6 months or more, maybe even 2 years back to the CentOS Stream decision. It didn't happen because a few days ago NASA bought support for 3 Rocky licenses
- rovr138 3y ago
  https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view links to "SATPC0031698 Tab 04 SOW.pdf" which has 2 line items, - CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2023-May 31, 2024 - CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2024-May 31, 2025 Quantity of 3 for each of them.
- cmiles74 3y ago
  I believe NASA does use RHEL, I remember a story last year where they were moving some systems from SUSE to RHEL. My guess is that IBM was so difficult to deal with that they decided to move away from RHEL wherever they could. Perhaps getting the actual support they purchased was too much of a challenge. If IBM is pissed, they should take a good hard look in the mirror before they malign other distributions. https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-red-hat-enterprise-linux-from-suse-linux-enterprise-server-planned-for-fall-2021_606.html https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RedShift1 3y ago
Looks like this will be the end of the road for RHEL based distros for me... I love using AlmaLinux, always super stable and everything just works (at least for what I use it). I guess the next best option will be SUSE?
- voidz 3y ago
  NixOS.
  - t0astbread 3y ago
    Just as a word of warning (because I can't tell if this is satire): NixOS does not provide the same experience as a typical Red Hat or Debian-derived distro. It's a vastly different paradigm where your system (including its configuration, packages, etc.) consists (almost) entirely of the output of a program you write in a functional language. I think it's phenomenal and worth a try (or multiple; I didn't get it the first or second time but now I wouldn't want to go back to something else). But if you go in expecting a traditional Linux distro, you will be disappointed/confused.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  debian stable
  - RedShift1 3y ago
    I've used Debian before but always had a disdain for how their packaging works. Dpkg seems completely over engineered (why are there more package states than just installed/not installed?) and the way they package things is just annoying. At random times an install or upgrade asks you questions in a wizard style and they always mess around with the configuration files and directories to the point where I don't even know what's the right way to do it, forcing you to search for the Debian specific way of doing things (which usually ends up with a stackoverflow answer) instead of just being able to use the upstream docs.
    - 3y ago
LostLocalMan 3y ago
I wonder what the impact will be to amazon linux
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Amazon Linux 2023 is based on Fedora so they probably saw this coming. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/relationship-to-fedora.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/relationship-to-...
soraminazuki 3y ago
I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work. The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language for describing packages, is based on text substitution which makes it tricky to write. [1] RPM builds don't do build-time sandboxing, so a package won't build consistently across machines without extreme care taken in both the package descriptions and the build environment. Even if the package itself builds and runs on the same machine, it isn't guaranteed to run on other machines too because it lacks a way to ensure reproducibility. [1]: For example, commenting out a macro might not work as expected because the expanded text might include a newline.
- klooney 3y ago
  RHEL gives really good audit. They're very good with security updates, they support things for a very long time. And if you wander into Federal Government land, it's hard to use anything else.
- acatton 3y ago
  > I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly with SELinux enabled. Setting up SELinux in any other distro is, in my experience, an uphill battle. You need to become an SELinux expert to do so. > The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. Most people don't really create RPM packages, they just install them. And in this area dnf[1] is cutting edge: file-level dependency solver, delta-package downloading, parallel downloading, ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software)
  - dralley 3y ago
    > delta-package downloading RHEL has never used that, and Fedora has perennial discussions about killing it because the benefits rarely outweigh the costs anymore
awill 3y ago
It's pretty obvious that Red Hat wasn't happy with Rocky and Alma so successfully taking over from CentOS.
gtirloni 3y ago
I've been using Red Hat and Fedora since the early RH4 days when the video driver only supported monochrome for my GPU. I'm now going to start switching to something not controlled by a corporation. Yes, I'm not happy about it but it's necessary. The days of being naive about Linux are over. I still consider Fedora one of the best distros out there (bleeding edge and polished as much as possible) and I prefer to use the same-ish distro on my personal computers and on the servers but this is another nail in the RH-based distro coffin for me.
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  If you like the glacial pace of Redhat you'll probably be happy with Debian stable.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Until today I preferred to use Fedora on desktops and RHEL/Rocky/CentOS on servers, so I'm already used to different paces of development. But it seems Debian unstable on desktops and Debian 12 stable on servers might work just fine. Truth be told, I only need a 5.x/6.x kernel with cgroups/namespaces/ebpf on my servers and flatpak on the desktops and I'm fine.
- tristan957 3y ago
  Fedora is pretty independent of Red Hat, especially since Red Hat fired the Fedora project lead.
  - jzb 3y ago
    Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and many of its developers are employed by Red Hat. Much of the work in Fedora is done by Red Hat. Red Hat did not fire the FPL. They laid off the Fedora Program Manager, which is a different role entirely. I would still say that was a lousy decision, but the FPL is a very different role that goes back a very long time and AFAIK remains filled by Matthew Miller. I've seen the two roles conflated here and there so I figured it was worth correcting here so it doesn't continue to spread.
jsiepkes 3y ago
Here are the meeting notes from the RockyLinux people on this subject: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-git-c.o-changes https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-git-c.o-chan...
- sigg3 3y ago
  Now that is what I would call a shady meet. Parasites indeed and spirit too. I'm actively removing their stuff from wherever I can from now on.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    What's shady about it?
  - markhahn 3y ago
    very droll!
- BossingAround 3y ago
  Was it all in Polish when you posted this?
PeterZaitsev 3y ago
I wonder if you're RedHat Subscriber and Customer and have access to the source what is the license ? In general though it is clear what RedHat does not seems to want to play Open Source game any more, at least when it comes to RHEL. Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not.
- axus 3y ago
  I'm interested in how IBM will try to refuse selling to Alma/Rocky/Oracle. You'd think those guys would already have a paid Red Hat subscription. The lawsuits between Oracle and IBM will be epic.
  - fariszr 3y ago
    Most T&C have a clause allowing them to simply end any subscription without needing a clear reason. And I doubt rocky or almalinux want to start a cat and mouse game of opening accounts and these accounts getting banned by Red Hat.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  The specs themselves usually come from Fedora first, where they are MIT by default (per Contributor Agreement, at least). So RH can do anything they please as long as they acknowledge the authors (which is done trivially by not mucking with %changelog). Anything they please likely includes terminating your account if they sniff you using it to avoid the fees or enabling others to do so. If you are contemplating, say, using a Red Hat Individual Developer Access (or what they call it) to redistribute the sources, they have a provision in the terms you have to agree to just against such cases.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  > Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not. I guess it’s quite pragmatic from the short- and even medium-term perspective, although it likely may become well poisoning in the long term. There used to be an understanding that since Red Hat is making a lot of buck on the shoulders of contributors making FOSS available, they have an obligation of giving a considerable amount of goodwill in return. It looks like they are now pulling a Reddit, but making it a long game. I mean, right now it looks like they are protecting their business (you really want to get paid for having to backport fixes to some library which has been EOLed and forgotten by its upstream half a decade ago, and for all stability promises no vendor is giving!), but it’s opening a way to shittier practices, if you get my drift.
dzsekijo 3y ago
What stops then someone to buy a RHEL subscription for the purposes of setting up an unofficial RHEL source mirror?
- bubblethink 3y ago
  They will terminate your contract if they can trace it back to you. Their ToS prohibit this.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
nezirus 3y ago
I am so pissed by this move, it is totally against the spirit of free software and GPL. Using additional contracts to subvert the free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it further. RedHat would not be here if someone behaved like this 25+ years ago. I would prefer a variant of GPL which strictly forbids this (imo it should already be forbidden, these are clearly additional restrictions). Let's put "GPL v2 or later" to good use...
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  > Using additional contracts to subvert the free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it further. This wouldn't be the first time. The very origin of the DD-WRT router distro was a hard fork of SveaSoft's "if you share this, we cut off your access to updates" license. https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/the-dd-wrt-controversy/ https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/the-dd-wrt-controversy/
anyoneamous 3y ago
Amazon Linux 2023 (based on Fedora, rather than RH) suddenly doesn't look like such a stupid idea
- seepy 3y ago
  I wonder if this will be available to use on prem...
jake_morrison 3y ago
The problem is that RHEL is too expensive for people who don't need support. IBM is getting greedy and screwing up its pipeline. Our dedicated servers are about $100/month for pretty serious hardware (2 x 8-core CPUs, 64 GB RAM, 2 x 8TB HDD, 30TB transfer). Paying $349/year is a significant percentage of that. It is worse for smaller servers, and ludicrous for small virtual machines in the cloud. I would not mind throwing them a bone to have e.g. security updates at some reasonable cost. Their official repositories don't have enough packages, so I end up having to use 3rd-party repos for normal things, e.g. Postgres. Having a more full-featured repo of up-to-date software would be useful to me. I have been running CentOS 7, but when that is no longer supported, I will switch to something else like Ubuntu or Debian, whatever our hosting providers support. I am already using Debian or distroless for containers. And then RHEL will be completely irrelevant to me. Good job, IBM.
- bonzini 3y ago
  Red Hat's model is to only ship what they know they can support. For the rest there's EPEL which is community managed. Canonical's model is to ship the kitchen sink and wing it in case a customer wants support on something that is in a sorry state. Different customers, different requirements.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    Thats not true with Ubuntu Pro, which includes support for way more packages than RHEL, 10 thousand to be exact, and is much cheaper with more features like included kernel Livepatching.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      I was referring exactly to Ubuntu Pro. They can support more packages for cheaper exactly because Red Hat won't ever have the same YOLO approach to support that Canonical has.
      - jacooper 3y ago
anonym29 3y ago
Grass Green; Sky Blue; Corporate entity that subversively pushed systemd into as many Linux distros as possible still engaging in user-hostile, FLOSS-hostile activity
disordinary 3y ago
It's a challenging time for OpenSource at the moment.
fariszr 3y ago
Something worth mentioning, is that RHEL has a free Developer subscription, which includes 16 free dedicated devices. The only issue is that many cloud providers don't have RHEL as an OS option, so you can't use it on your average cheap VPS. That assumes you trust them not to do another rug pull (CentOS 8)
- yrro 3y ago
  You can always download the RHEL ISO and upload it to J. Random Cloud Provider. I do that with Hetzner for instance.
cbkeller 3y ago
This is pretty clearly against the spirit, albeit probably not the letter, of the GPL. Sad to see.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

357 points by 0xdeafbeef 3y ago

good decision from red hat. oracle, alma and rocky cant just take other peoples work, profit (not just monetary) and give nothing back. thats not what community means.

HideousKojima 3y ago

It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I suspect that they would not then be a customer for very long afterward.
tw04 3y ago
>It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors. That is a violation of their terms of service and will result in a termination of your subscription unless I'm misreading it (section d): Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units, (c) providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such instance (collectively, “Unauthorized Subscription Services Uses”). https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20230309.pdf https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...
- Vogtinator 3y ago
  How does this not violate the GPL?
  - matthews2 3y ago
    The GPL says I must give you access to the source along with the binaries, but it doesn't say I need to give you updates indefinitely.
    - Vogtinator 3y ago
      I'm referring to the "You can redistribute the source, but then we'll cancel support" part which appears to be part of the terms and conditions.
  - mroche 3y ago
    It does not. As the other comment in this thread notes there are two agreements in play here: the open source license agreements and Red Hat's Enterprise Agreement. Under no circumstances can Red Hat prevent an entity from sharing their FOSS software, however they can absolutely view that action as a violation of the EA Contract, and terminate the subscription. This doesn't undo the action, but prevents further access to updates and sources.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    Why should it violate GPL? RHEL is obliged to provide source code for their GPL packages. You ask for source code, you'll get it. You distribute the source code, RH will terminate the contract with you because they don't want to see you as a customer anymore. They're free to do business with whoever they want, peeking people who will not distribute RH sources. Every party is in their right here. That's my understanding. Red Hat did that for many years. They maintain extended support branches for RHEL which provide fixes for very old software. Those fixes AFAIK were never "leaked" despite the fact that every customer could receive it. If it was as simple as crowd-funding single subscription and then publish all the sources, someone would do it and we would have CentOS Extended LTS.

a2tech 3y ago

I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat. I was under the impression they were profitable prior to the acquisition so I’m not sure why they’re squeezing so hard and ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.

adql 3y ago
The same game they play with their main customers, make sure they will have more and more problems leaving.
Timon3 3y ago
IBM is stuck in a cycle of constant re-invention, because they somehow manage to always re-invent themselves in ways that are even worse and more complicated for customers, which they try to fix by re-inventing themselves again. Even if they initially planned on leaving Red Hat alone, every re-invention is a chance for some executive to make the decision to squeeze a little tighter on existing customers. So the question shouldn't be "what game is IBM playing with Red Hat", but "how long until nothing usable is left". I'd say maybe 20 more re-inventions, or 1-2 years.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Yet they're still way older than most tech companies. I'd wager they will outlive 99.99% of those unicorn startups yet.
  - Fordec 3y ago
    The Lindy Effect.[0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
  - taeric 3y ago
    How much of that is lingering brand value, though? That and simple ties into existing and old industries. You are also comparing to startups? Which... yes, most things die. Sometimes, it is the old things that die. Often taking a lot of other younger things with them.

BossingAround 3y ago

I don't get what's the big deal--essentially the only thing being lost is a pointer to commit that marks the difference between RHEL X.Y and X.Y+1..?

marwatk 3y ago
RedHat spends a lot of time back-porting security updates to older software (e.g. RHEL7). Stream is always only the latest RHEL version, I believe. The whole point of RHEL is the long term support (the back-porting), which is what they're going to stop publishing.
- trufas 3y ago
  CentOS 7 is supported and will be EOL at the same time as RHEL 7. Stream does have major versions so you can continue to use CentOS Stream 8 and get backports. You only lose anything if you're tied to some minor version of EL for some reason.
pavon 3y ago
RHEL X.Y isn't a simple snapshot of CentOS Stream X at a specific point. It is a fork of CentOS Stream, with cherry-picks and so on. The specific details of what patches made it into RHEL and when and how to create reproducible builds are now only being provided to customers. In the past, customers have been able to redistribute the RHEL repos freely. I assume that will remain the case as long as CentOS Stream is open source. Edit: Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if IBM put some content in the RHEL repo that is under restrictive licenses that couldn't be redistributed just to complicate things, but all the important parts will remain open source, due to close ties to CentOS Stream and Fedora. Rocky/Alma already have to replace trademarks, and this wouldn't be much different, but they would have to obtain access to the repos as customers themselves, or have another customer strip the bad stuff out before throwing it over the fence. We'll have to see how hostile they want to be about it.
- mroche 3y ago
  > In the past, customers have been able to redistribute the RHEL repos freely. I assume that will remain the case as long as CentOS Stream is open source. There's a duality here. Yes, by the nature of the distribution, GPL, and licensing general, Red Hat cannot stop or prevent a customer from distributing RHEL packages and software to third parties. However, Red Hat reserves the right to terminate any existing subscriptions a customer may have as a result of their package distributing. IIRC, the Enterprise Agreement makes it pretty clear the services and offerings provided by the subscription are for the customer and the customer only. Going outside of that violates the subscription's terms, not the softwares' licenses, therefore allowing Red Hat to end business with said customer. For those concerned about the final year of CentOS 7: it will not be touched. It will continue to see source exports to git.centos.org as there is no parallel CentOS Stream 7 platform. Also, git.centos.org is not EOL either because it is used by other groups than Red Hat, like CentOS Special Interest Groups.

adql 3y ago

And the IBMization of Red Hat continues

chasil 3y ago

If Red Hat chooses not to perform their duties under the GPL, then any holder of copyright can require Red Hat to remove the owner's source packages from the commercial distribution. Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the source only to those who download the binary releases. As there are several avenues for free downloads (developer, 16 free licenses for small business, etc.), the source will be available by that route.

BossingAround 3y ago
CentOS Stream source code is available.
- chasil 3y ago
  CentOS stream is not RHEL, and that is what will be needed by Rocky, Alma, and Oracle. I don't think it will be much more difficult to obtain.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    IIUC (I work for Red Hat but not on how sources are distributed), there is absolutely no change in practice. CentOS Stream RPM sources are stored in GitLab therefore the whole history is available including past minor releases of RHEL. The only change is that the repositories will not be mirrored to git.centos.org.
    - mroche 3y ago
      Some clarification is needed here. git.centos.org (g.c.o) has been the historical canonical local for RHEL sources that have been exported out of Red Hat. On any given package you would see several branches, one for each major release and other organizational artifacts (e.g. c7, c8, c9, etc). Initially CentOS Stream 9 was exported to g.c.o as it wasn't a true upstream in the full sense of the word, but with CentOS Stream 9 that changed. c9s is developed in full on GitLab, and now c8s as well, while the final RHEL sources for those packages are still output to the c8 and c9 branches on g.c.o. What changes here is that Red Hat will no longer be exporting the c8 and c9 content to any git platform (c7 will continue as exists until its EOL). Customers can access sources as needed via the Customer Portal and CDN repositories, but sources in git form will not be publicly available for those artifacts. Moving forward, only c8s and c9s sources will be available, and g.c.o will not see any updates for EL8 and EL9. While most (I'd estimate at least 95%) of the platform will match in terms of NEVRA between versions available in CentOS Stream and their RHEL counterparts, there are some packages that will not due to the way they are developed.

louissan 3y ago

IBM not happy with NASA's decision?

MattSteelblade 3y ago

Will this prevent o̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ legal derivatives of RHEL?

binary_ninja 3y ago
I would assume the people that actually develop those either already are RHEL customers or they would just pay a single subscription so they can download the code and keep it in sync
ghaff 3y ago
There are no "official" derivatives of RHEL. (And that was true even after Red Hat acquired/acqui-hired CentOS).
- MattSteelblade 3y ago
  I have edited my question from official to legal (at least from a US-perspective). Another commenter in this thread has stated that it would be against their TOS.
bonzini 3y ago
No, the whole history of RHEL development remains available on GitLab. The change only affects git.centos.org.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusion of these two RHEL clones’ success would be to eliminate their host, leading to their own demise, which is why one person in the Linux space called them the “dirtbags” of open source. > If there are any real parasites, it's Oracle Linux. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux > Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006.[4] It is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle's. I had no idea that Oracle Linux was essentially RHEL with %s/Red\ Hat/Oracle/g and Oracle has a market cap of $330bn

yrro 3y ago
To be fair to Oracle I believe they have their own "unbreakable" kernel packages, though they do ship Red Hat's kernel as well.
rconti 3y ago
Paid for Oracle Linux, can confirm.
chasil 3y ago
It has a few add-ons. The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs, extensive device support (that is removed from the stock kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always more current. There are several scenarios where it is very attractive. Oracle bought K-Splice several years ago, which was the first rebootless patch solution for Linux. It's only available with a premium license; Kernelcare is a lot cheaper. Supported Oracle Linux versions are also available for WSL1 inside of Windows. C:\>wsl.exe -l -o The following is a list of valid distributions that can be installed. The default distribution is denoted by '*'. Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'. NAME FRIENDLY NAME Ubuntu Ubuntu Debian Debian GNU/Linux kali-linux Kali Linux Rolling Ubuntu-18.04 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Ubuntu-20.04 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu-22.04 Ubuntu 22.04 LTS OracleLinux_7_9 Oracle Linux 7.9 OracleLinux_8_7 Oracle Linux 8.7 OracleLinux_9_1 Oracle Linux 9.1 SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4 openSUSE-Leap-15.4 openSUSE Leap 15.4 openSUSE-Tumbleweed openSUSE Tumbleweed Oracle Linux came into existence shortly after Red Hat bought JBoss. As Oracle had also bought BEA Weblogic (IIRC), this was not taken well.

jmclnx 3y ago

I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope the Linux Foundation weighs in, but it seems to have been bought by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and many other large corps. All the drama in Linux with Wayland, RHEL sponsored init, snap/flatpak and now IBM/RHEL has been causing me to seriously evaluate the BSDs. I have been doing that for a couple of years. I would be fully on OpenBSD now, but the hardware I have is one of those with 2 videos, integrated and Nvidia. And that system does NOT allow me to disable the Nvidia Chip. When using Nvidia, that chip is correctly ignored by OpenBSD, but it gets so hot I can almost fry an egg on it. I have some mitigations in place, but it still gets rather hot, CPU and disk stays normal. The same is true with NetBSD, I have not tried FreeBSD yet. This RHEL thing may be the last straw, I may bite the bullet and see if the heat causes failures and if so evaluate this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292831 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292831 FWIW, I did add paste, a full cleaning. And this was purchased used rather cheaply 2 years ago. It is 9 years old now. Why am I bothered by this ? This seems to be a weak first step of companies making Linux go proprietary. Already we need many proprietary blobs. And funny, NASA just signed a contract with Rocky and CERN went with AlmaLinux, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968

Sunspark 3y ago
The BSD with the most support for Nvidia is the one you never tried. Arguably it's the only BSD that is best suited for a desktop user. Also has better wifi support as well. We all want to love BSD, and it does get love in proprietary spaces like Netflix, Playstation and Apple, but those companies have the resources to actually create the pieces they need and do not have an obligation to share it. (E.g. MacOS is literally a certified UNIX, but the GUI layers are private.) For non-corporate users, in some ways it is like what Debian faced when they realized they really did need to start including wifi firmware into the install media, because people were like, why doesn't this connect to the router? What's wrong with this? This is actually something that I've run into personally. At the end of the day though, BSD isn't realistic as a desktop. OpenBSD disables stuff for security reasons which harms performance, so it wouldn't be first choice as a desktop. NetBSD is what Open forked off of many years ago and I recall NetBSD as one of those "let's try to make it install on anything" show and tell pieces, but not something you'd really be using for anything. FreeBSD was the only one that was reasonably usable. Dragonfly is another fork (this time off FreeBSD). All of them have to port the Linux video drivers, Linux desktops, etc. It's actually somewhat unusual that Linux is the one that won the battle for resources, because corporations hate sharing and being open.

LordShredda 3y ago

NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech contracts

anonymousiam 3y ago
The US Government has been sour on large contractors for almost 10 years now, but the quandary is how to prevent the small contractors they support from becoming the dinosaurs they hate? For a while OSC O/ATK was a darling, but NG gobbled them up. Same thing with Millennial (now Boeing). Space-X is probably too big for acquisition now, so they are on course to become just another dinosaur.
jaclaz 3y ago
If the info in this thread is accurate, it is for 3 (three) workstations, I would call it a tiny deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 Shouldn't be of relevance.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Yeah this decision had to have been in discussion for 6 months or more, maybe even 2 years back to the CentOS Stream decision. It didn't happen because a few days ago NASA bought support for 3 Rocky licenses
rovr138 3y ago
https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view links to "SATPC0031698 Tab 04 SOW.pdf" which has 2 line items, - CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2023-May 31, 2024 - CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2024-May 31, 2025 Quantity of 3 for each of them.
cmiles74 3y ago
I believe NASA does use RHEL, I remember a story last year where they were moving some systems from SUSE to RHEL. My guess is that IBM was so difficult to deal with that they decided to move away from RHEL wherever they could. Perhaps getting the actual support they purchased was too much of a challenge. If IBM is pissed, they should take a good hard look in the mirror before they malign other distributions. https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-red-hat-enterprise-linux-from-suse-linux-enterprise-server-planned-for-fall-2021_606.html https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

RedShift1 3y ago

Looks like this will be the end of the road for RHEL based distros for me... I love using AlmaLinux, always super stable and everything just works (at least for what I use it). I guess the next best option will be SUSE?

voidz 3y ago
NixOS.
- t0astbread 3y ago
  Just as a word of warning (because I can't tell if this is satire): NixOS does not provide the same experience as a typical Red Hat or Debian-derived distro. It's a vastly different paradigm where your system (including its configuration, packages, etc.) consists (almost) entirely of the output of a program you write in a functional language. I think it's phenomenal and worth a try (or multiple; I didn't get it the first or second time but now I wouldn't want to go back to something else). But if you go in expecting a traditional Linux distro, you will be disappointed/confused.
lost_tourist 3y ago
debian stable
- RedShift1 3y ago
  I've used Debian before but always had a disdain for how their packaging works. Dpkg seems completely over engineered (why are there more package states than just installed/not installed?) and the way they package things is just annoying. At random times an install or upgrade asks you questions in a wizard style and they always mess around with the configuration files and directories to the point where I don't even know what's the right way to do it, forcing you to search for the Debian specific way of doing things (which usually ends up with a stackoverflow answer) instead of just being able to use the upstream docs.
  - 3y ago

LostLocalMan 3y ago

I wonder what the impact will be to amazon linux

gtirloni 3y ago
Amazon Linux 2023 is based on Fedora so they probably saw this coming. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/relationship-to-fedora.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/relationship-to-...

soraminazuki 3y ago

I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work. The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language for describing packages, is based on text substitution which makes it tricky to write. [1] RPM builds don't do build-time sandboxing, so a package won't build consistently across machines without extreme care taken in both the package descriptions and the build environment. Even if the package itself builds and runs on the same machine, it isn't guaranteed to run on other machines too because it lacks a way to ensure reproducibility. [1]: For example, commenting out a macro might not work as expected because the expanded text might include a newline.

klooney 3y ago
RHEL gives really good audit. They're very good with security updates, they support things for a very long time. And if you wander into Federal Government land, it's hard to use anything else.
acatton 3y ago
> I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly with SELinux enabled. Setting up SELinux in any other distro is, in my experience, an uphill battle. You need to become an SELinux expert to do so. > The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. Most people don't really create RPM packages, they just install them. And in this area dnf[1] is cutting edge: file-level dependency solver, delta-package downloading, parallel downloading, ... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software)
- dralley 3y ago
  > delta-package downloading RHEL has never used that, and Fedora has perennial discussions about killing it because the benefits rarely outweigh the costs anymore

awill 3y ago

It's pretty obvious that Red Hat wasn't happy with Rocky and Alma so successfully taking over from CentOS.

gtirloni 3y ago

I've been using Red Hat and Fedora since the early RH4 days when the video driver only supported monochrome for my GPU. I'm now going to start switching to something not controlled by a corporation. Yes, I'm not happy about it but it's necessary. The days of being naive about Linux are over. I still consider Fedora one of the best distros out there (bleeding edge and polished as much as possible) and I prefer to use the same-ish distro on my personal computers and on the servers but this is another nail in the RH-based distro coffin for me.

lost_tourist 3y ago
If you like the glacial pace of Redhat you'll probably be happy with Debian stable.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Until today I preferred to use Fedora on desktops and RHEL/Rocky/CentOS on servers, so I'm already used to different paces of development. But it seems Debian unstable on desktops and Debian 12 stable on servers might work just fine. Truth be told, I only need a 5.x/6.x kernel with cgroups/namespaces/ebpf on my servers and flatpak on the desktops and I'm fine.
tristan957 3y ago
Fedora is pretty independent of Red Hat, especially since Red Hat fired the Fedora project lead.
- jzb 3y ago
  Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and many of its developers are employed by Red Hat. Much of the work in Fedora is done by Red Hat. Red Hat did not fire the FPL. They laid off the Fedora Program Manager, which is a different role entirely. I would still say that was a lousy decision, but the FPL is a very different role that goes back a very long time and AFAIK remains filled by Matthew Miller. I've seen the two roles conflated here and there so I figured it was worth correcting here so it doesn't continue to spread.

jsiepkes 3y ago

Here are the meeting notes from the RockyLinux people on this subject: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-git-c.o-changes https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-git-c.o-chan...

sigg3 3y ago
Now that is what I would call a shady meet. Parasites indeed and spirit too. I'm actively removing their stuff from wherever I can from now on.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  What's shady about it?
- markhahn 3y ago
  very droll!
BossingAround 3y ago
Was it all in Polish when you posted this?

PeterZaitsev 3y ago

I wonder if you're RedHat Subscriber and Customer and have access to the source what is the license ? In general though it is clear what RedHat does not seems to want to play Open Source game any more, at least when it comes to RHEL. Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not.

axus 3y ago
I'm interested in how IBM will try to refuse selling to Alma/Rocky/Oracle. You'd think those guys would already have a paid Red Hat subscription. The lawsuits between Oracle and IBM will be epic.
- fariszr 3y ago
  Most T&C have a clause allowing them to simply end any subscription without needing a clear reason. And I doubt rocky or almalinux want to start a cat and mouse game of opening accounts and these accounts getting banned by Red Hat.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
The specs themselves usually come from Fedora first, where they are MIT by default (per Contributor Agreement, at least). So RH can do anything they please as long as they acknowledge the authors (which is done trivially by not mucking with %changelog). Anything they please likely includes terminating your account if they sniff you using it to avoid the fees or enabling others to do so. If you are contemplating, say, using a Red Hat Individual Developer Access (or what they call it) to redistribute the sources, they have a provision in the terms you have to agree to just against such cases.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
> Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not. I guess it’s quite pragmatic from the short- and even medium-term perspective, although it likely may become well poisoning in the long term. There used to be an understanding that since Red Hat is making a lot of buck on the shoulders of contributors making FOSS available, they have an obligation of giving a considerable amount of goodwill in return. It looks like they are now pulling a Reddit, but making it a long game. I mean, right now it looks like they are protecting their business (you really want to get paid for having to backport fixes to some library which has been EOLed and forgotten by its upstream half a decade ago, and for all stability promises no vendor is giving!), but it’s opening a way to shittier practices, if you get my drift.

dzsekijo 3y ago

What stops then someone to buy a RHEL subscription for the purposes of setting up an unofficial RHEL source mirror?

bubblethink 3y ago
They will terminate your contract if they can trace it back to you. Their ToS prohibit this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

nezirus 3y ago

I am so pissed by this move, it is totally against the spirit of free software and GPL. Using additional contracts to subvert the free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it further. RedHat would not be here if someone behaved like this 25+ years ago. I would prefer a variant of GPL which strictly forbids this (imo it should already be forbidden, these are clearly additional restrictions). Let's put "GPL v2 or later" to good use...

flyinghamster 3y ago
> Using additional contracts to subvert the free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it further. This wouldn't be the first time. The very origin of the DD-WRT router distro was a hard fork of SveaSoft's "if you share this, we cut off your access to updates" license. https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/the-dd-wrt-controversy/ https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/the-dd-wrt-controversy/

anyoneamous 3y ago

Amazon Linux 2023 (based on Fedora, rather than RH) suddenly doesn't look like such a stupid idea

seepy 3y ago
I wonder if this will be available to use on prem...

jake_morrison 3y ago

The problem is that RHEL is too expensive for people who don't need support. IBM is getting greedy and screwing up its pipeline. Our dedicated servers are about $100/month for pretty serious hardware (2 x 8-core CPUs, 64 GB RAM, 2 x 8TB HDD, 30TB transfer). Paying $349/year is a significant percentage of that. It is worse for smaller servers, and ludicrous for small virtual machines in the cloud. I would not mind throwing them a bone to have e.g. security updates at some reasonable cost. Their official repositories don't have enough packages, so I end up having to use 3rd-party repos for normal things, e.g. Postgres. Having a more full-featured repo of up-to-date software would be useful to me. I have been running CentOS 7, but when that is no longer supported, I will switch to something else like Ubuntu or Debian, whatever our hosting providers support. I am already using Debian or distroless for containers. And then RHEL will be completely irrelevant to me. Good job, IBM.

bonzini 3y ago
Red Hat's model is to only ship what they know they can support. For the rest there's EPEL which is community managed. Canonical's model is to ship the kitchen sink and wing it in case a customer wants support on something that is in a sorry state. Different customers, different requirements.
- jacooper 3y ago
  Thats not true with Ubuntu Pro, which includes support for way more packages than RHEL, 10 thousand to be exact, and is much cheaper with more features like included kernel Livepatching.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    I was referring exactly to Ubuntu Pro. They can support more packages for cheaper exactly because Red Hat won't ever have the same YOLO approach to support that Canonical has.
    - jacooper 3y ago

anonym29 3y ago

Grass Green; Sky Blue; Corporate entity that subversively pushed systemd into as many Linux distros as possible still engaging in user-hostile, FLOSS-hostile activity

disordinary 3y ago

It's a challenging time for OpenSource at the moment.

fariszr 3y ago

Something worth mentioning, is that RHEL has a free Developer subscription, which includes 16 free dedicated devices. The only issue is that many cloud providers don't have RHEL as an OS option, so you can't use it on your average cheap VPS. That assumes you trust them not to do another rug pull (CentOS 8)

yrro 3y ago
You can always download the RHEL ISO and upload it to J. Random Cloud Provider. I do that with Hetzner for instance.

cbkeller 3y ago

This is pretty clearly against the spirit, albeit probably not the letter, of the GPL. Sad to see.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]