29 ms·

Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?

702 points by thepbone 3y ago

nickdothutton 3y ago
Red Hat is IBM now. That might not be clear today, but give it 5 or 10 years and it will be.
- kjs3 3y ago
  IBM bought them in 2019. Do you need another 5 or 10 years to figure it out?
  - nickdothutton 3y ago
    I don’t, no. I knew the future before the deal was closed. So did most of my friends and former colleagues (who quit at the first sign on the dead hand reaching out into their business units).
jpswade 3y ago
This isn’t a RedHat problem, it’s an IBM problem.
deleted 3y ago
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zb3 3y ago
Why should Red Hat provide its main product (stability, compatibility, support) for free? Why are enterprise users so entitled? Why should Red Hat care about them at all?
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  While I agree with that partially, unfortunately I don't agree that it's a wise move for IBM. There is indeed a weird dynamic where IBM is basically funding third party companies to make a profit reselling what is advertised as a bug for bug compatible version of their own software while struggling to sell the original. So, I can see the logic of IBM wanting to end that. Of course the flip side is that that might prompt those third party companies to cut loose and join forces on creating a proper alternative that is effectively an independent fork that replaces Red Hat as an upstream. Amazon would be well familiar with that playbook of course. And they already have Amazon Linux as their in house preferred Red Hat derivative. And I seriously doubt Amazon cares a lot about bug for bug compatibility. In fact the whole point for them is probably not having most of those bugs to begin with. They just want a stable upstream that they can pull changes from. That's what makes this such a dumb move. IBM/Red Hat might get a few users to jump ship to the paid Red Hat. But most simply won't. And the further which ever fork emerges as the alternative diverges the less likely it becomes that users will still want to consider switching. Users want a stable upstream but it's not a given that IBM is the ideal steward of that upstream. And with Amazon, Oracle, Rocky, Alma, etc. all needing the same thing, the logical alternative for them would be to unite and form a foundation that takes that role.
mcdermott 3y ago
Glad that we dumped CentOS/RHEL in favor of Ubuntu LTS years ago.
kristianpaul 3y ago
"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
- BirAdam 3y ago
  I believe that it would stand to reason that if IBM/RH is not permitting redistribution of sources made available in their customer portal, this would constitute a violation of the GPL for any GPL package. I would assume that IBM/RH will then need to take the Apple approach and quickly start working to replace GCC with LLVM and next rid itself of all GPL software and stick with MIT/BSD/OSC...
  - pabs3 3y ago
    They do not restrict redistribution of what you already have access to, but they don't give access to future updates if you do redistribute. The GPL doesn't require them to give access to future updates either.
    - BirAdam 3y ago
      That is an excellent point I hadn’t thought of.
ddtaylor 3y ago
As it stands I really like Fedora and I'm inclined to continue to give it a shot. I hope I don't have to eat my words on that. I believe that the Fedora Project is somewhat independent of RedHat, although they have a sponsorship arrangement.
- fariszr 3y ago
  Its relatively independent, but I don't see how fedora can be a RHEL replacement.
  - GlacierFox 3y ago
    It can if you like upgrading your entire operating system every 6 months.
deleted 3y ago
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120photo 3y ago
How about everyone chip in so that Rocky/Alma can get a subscription to RHEL and get the source that way? The GPL does not say they have to publish the code in the wild just that they have to provide it when they distribute. There are many companies that use OSS, make modifications, and since they never distribute are not required to make that source available.
- 9659 3y ago
  We could make a big list of people that are ready to buy a subscription. Everytime RHEL has an update: * A subscription is purchased * Download all the source rpm's. * Put them on the internet * RH terminates the license and the purchaser is put on a list * goto next person on list and repeat. A few thousand people would keep this going.
mathattack 3y ago
This is a natural outgrowth of being owned by IBM. They are in the business of harvesting revenue from existing customers until they revolt. They don’t care about open source or smaller customers. They care about squeezing and auditing the enterprise. This is bad for RedHat because there are other options.
sumanthvepa 3y ago
I for one would be okay with a distro like AlmaLinux migrating away from being an exact RHEL downstream clone to being an independent stable RPM based distribution. Stability and RPM ecosystem compatibility is what people are really looking for when they use a distribution like RHEL. So any reasonable distribution that provides those two will be sufficient to migrate away from Fedora/Redhat entirely.
- kjs3 3y ago
  I wouldn't, and neither would a lot of other shops I'm familiar with. Being able to run binary compatible distro in dev/test/QA and pretty seamlessly migrate to supported RHEL in prod is an important cost and risk containment measure. Now it's either 1) deal with 'is this bug our issue or because of something in the close-but-not-exact distro', 2) Dump our current supported distro for another; RH support has been in my experience very, very good, and no I don't think Rocky or the rest will come close any time soon, or 3) take a pretty big financial hit licensing RHEL everywhere. May be time to look at SuSE again.
javitury 3y ago
RHEL market share won't last forever, so they have decided to milk the Red Hat cow as fast as they can. Long term, people will switch to containers and cloud apps (Kubernetes, AWS). In this new environment, operating systems are commoditized and RHEL's moat will slowly shrink. Instead, developers will focus on alpine, debian or similar.
- creatonez 3y ago
  Red Hat has significant involvement in container platforms right now.
  - javitury 3y ago
    Those are different Red Hat products and belong to different layers of the cloud stack. Previously third party developers targeted RHEL directly, enhancing the RHEL ecosystem. Red Hat could play long term by (indirectly) giving away the base product to the community, and profit from the increase in support subscriptions. New projects don't target RHEL as often as their primary platform, they prefer containers now. There is less ecosystem enhancement and it's more profitable to milk existing RHEL users. Centos Stream makes it possible to smooth the transition to the new paradigm. Openshift, Coreos, etc have different purposes and follow different market dynamics. Mainstream developers don't target them directly.
- time0ut 3y ago
  My company is steadily moving from being a heavy RH shop (RHEL and OpenShift) to Amazon (Amazon Linux 2 and EKS) as we migrate from our colos to AWS. RH has been a good vendor and I have no complaints, but it makes little sense in the long run. I am sure they are feeling it.
mynonameaccount 3y ago
I disagree. RedHat can do whatever they want just like you can do whatever you want. Don't like what RedHat is doing, then change your distro.
dang 3y ago
Recent and related: Impact of RHEL Changes to AlmaLinux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 - June 2023 (43 comments) Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 - June 2023 (299 comments) Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 - June 2023 (27 comments)
anyoneamous 3y ago
Quick tip for any AWS users (or users of any cloud provider, really): if this affects you, let your account manager know, along with your thoughts on how you anticipate responding. That feedback is invaluable for service teams who are trying to figure out what OS support to prioritize for the tools they might be building.
soulbadguy 3y ago
I can't help that think this kind of move should be expected once IBM bought red hat. The core of the issue is an trying to extract more value from a well run/well optimize business which usually happens after such large acquisition. There is a fundamental limit to the kind of return on investment that a OSS first/sell support model can provide. In the short term, it's probably more profitable to pivot to more close model, and try to extract even more value from captive audience... But only time will tell how that pans out in the long term.
sparc24 3y ago
Just use AL2023 aka Fedora LTS. 2 years of updates and 5 years of maintenance. That is exactly what everyone wants. Long term support and more frequent updates.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
Can someone explain how it is allowed to prohibit republishing gpl sources? I tho7ght the gpl expressly forbade this behavior?
TZubiri 3y ago
If you want to target their OS just contact them and ask for a license. Stop with demonizing source code privacy or monetizing our craft.
- __d 3y ago
  I did this. I was told to use CentOS or pay for the developer license thing at USD100/year. Which I did. It's not a lot of money, and it gets me access to support, more docs, etc. I don't really begrudge them that fee, given all the FOSS work they support.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Redhat has some packaging scripts that detect rpath and refuse to install binaries that set it. This has caused me a good couple of days of grief and lead directly to shipping a worse product. Specifically, clang -fopenmp a.cpp -o a.out used to give you a binary that would run with ./a.out, but now it'll give you something that complains that it can't find the openmp runtime library. Unless you happen to have llvm installed globally, like redhat presumably does. I now cheerfully try to talk people into dropping IBM Linux support whenever it comes up in discussion. Haven't succeeded yet but will keep trying. I want it out of the requirements graph. I liked rpath and will not forget the unjustified line of reasoning behind disabling it.
pabs3 3y ago
I'm reminded of Drew Devault's 2021 blog post " Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation": https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
ZeroSolstice 3y ago
As I'm reading the comments I'm a bit curious what services people are running, or dependent on CentOS for, that FreeBSD or Debian can not provide? In the past I could see buying into an eco-system of tooling that helped you manage fleets of servers but with Ansible, Docker, etc wouldn't the tooling be agnostic to the OS? What exactly is it that you are running in your infrastructure that doesn't have a stable alternative? - DNS - DHCP - Webservers - Database servers - Firewalls - IDS - VPN - Auth services You can PXE boot, use tools like foreman, upload images to VPS provider(s). At least speaking for FreeBSD you have regular release cycles, security advisories, etc. I'm probably old but this scenario has played out plenty of times and the comments are the same that were on mailing lists when RedHat Linux was moved to Fedora. I remember when the CentOS maintainer(s?) disappeared and delays between CentOS 5/6 and RHEL6. People talked about how their business were so dependent on this OS how could a maintainer just abandon it..etc. Now resources and efforts are split between Alma and Rocky linux at what point do you evaluate what you "really" need from your systems and if the constant wait-and-see, buy-out, merge, fork process just becomes noise. Has it never come up in any risk assessment for large companies to have a contingency if the OS is no longer available or the licensing changes?
- CoolCold 3y ago
  > Docker FreeBSD is lacking support of Docker - they prefer to think they can ingest system management knowledge into Frontend Developers and suggest to use Jails (with ZFS/Nullfs/VNET/other horrible words for Joe The Svelte Dev ) > upload images to VPS Some still have things running on premises > dependent on CentOS for, that FreeBSD or Debian can not provide Good luck running SAP products on this > FreeBSD you have regular release cycles, security advisories FreeBSD lacks the idea of LTS. At most you (to my knowledge) you may have updates to a) the very minimal set of things aka base system b) it ends in ~ 5 years, not even 7 or 10 c) someone will need to the the job to keep security support for ports tree for 5 years to ensure versions are kept the same. Or in other words - requires more human power on your side comparing to offloading that to the vendor. For some FreeBSD guys example may be needed. Imagine you installed latest Ubuntu LTS (22.04) which has Nginx (as part of the whole distribution provided, not "base"/"ports" separated) and it's version is 1.18 and for next 5+ years it will keep the same version. No surprises. You even run auto-upgrade everynight and reboot server ~ once a month for kernel updates. Then repeat the same on FreeBSD - the ports tree will get updated with newer Nginx ( I've checked https://ports.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=nginx&stype=all https://ports.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=nginx&stype=al... here, it's 1.24.0 and no older versions available) and when 1.25.1 will be become new mainline (probably in 1.26?) your configuration will stop working as they have deprecated "ssl on;" construct. Or, other sample - let's say I'm developing Nginx module and selling it in binary form. I realize that my auditory is Centos/Ubuntu users. I know in advance in that case, which compatibility I need to support in terms of ABI, features, support articles and training. It helps me [as vendor of 3rd party software] with planning and keeping lower costs.
johnea 3y ago
It's not because they're not dumb, it's because they're IBM...
dizhn 3y ago
Anectodal data point to provide some perspective to the IBM acquisition. My friend worked Redhat sales towards the end of 2000s. As we all know Redhat makes money from support. Everywhere they went IBM was eating their lunch with their Redhat support sales.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
RHE going enshittification?
cowmix 3y ago
"yes" That's today's episode of EZ answers to EZ questions.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  What a great episode, see you on the next!
ape4 3y ago
IBM, are you d*mb?
- mcguire 3y ago
  Yes.
formerly_proven 3y ago
> When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but free", users like me were justifiably angered. Funny sentence there.
- bodeadly 3y ago
  Yeah, I don't get it either. On a related note, folks who are thinking we'll just use Debian or SUSE or whatever other distro, don't understand what RH does. RH is one of the principal contributors to core Linux components used by all distros. Who makes some 10GbE driver work really well? RedHat. And that driver makes it's way back into the kernel sources used by all distros. So I think there's a lack of understanding of the dynamic here. The allure of RHEL clones is that it's all been checked over by organized engineers who's job security depends on the quality of their work. I would much prefer not to rely on a couple of free-timers producing a result equivalent to what RH does. And yet there is a huge demand from folks that simply cannot pay what RH wants. So my guess is that something new is going to come out of all of this ....
wronglebowski 3y ago
Given my experience, RHEL is a favorite among enterprise environments. As such IBM will continue to pursue a strategy that forces people into that business funnel. They do not care who falls out of it, the ecosystem will only become more closed. I think we need to be more realistic about where things are headed. SUSE? Market cap of 2.2 Billion, IBM paid 34 for RH. Ubuntu? Still not profitable. As we continue to see the tech sector cool and become more mature belts will tighten and things will consolidate.
- jzb 3y ago
  SUSE is tenacious AF, you have to give 'em that. This could be an opportunity for them to grab some market share. I'd love to see it. I don't wish ill on Red Hat, either, but I'd love to see SUSE grow and be a stronger player here. It'd be good for the larger ecosystem.
- aeyes 3y ago
  About 15 years ago the (German) company I worked at had a lot of their customers from different industries run on SLES. But over time many customers just weren't willing to sign up for OS support contracts anymore (and also switched from Oracle to MySQL). SLES/openSUSE never managed to get the same support from third parties and communities as CentOS/Fedora. With RHEL 6 we migrated all customers from SLES to CentOS/RHEL. This allowed to have a homogenous environment with and without enterprise support contracts. We'll have to see where this is going. Certain enterprise software (like Oracle) requires the use of certified operating systems or you lose support. Oracle Linux looks like the more natural choice.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative? If anything, this makes me feel like they're undervalued, especially now that they're the only company shipping an enterprise linux with an open source and privacy respecting (looking at you Canonical) base distro.
  - johnvanommen 3y ago
    > Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative? I'd always assumed the MicroFocus acquisition of SuSE had something to do with OpenStack, and when OpenStack stopped being The Big New Thing, that impacted SuSE. Basically: * I was on the HP OpenStack team * HP burned through over a billion on that, and sold the product off to SuSE * Somewhere in the mix there, MicroFocus was divested from HP. Even working there, it was hard to follow, because HP also split into HP and HPE * As various vendors lost interest in OpenStack (Cisco, EMC, VMWare, etc), SuSE replaced their CEO who was behind the acquisition in the first place I talked to some SuSE folks about OpenStack at one of the VMWare conferences, and they seemed confident in it's future, and then just weeks later I read that they'd discontinued the product in it's current state The entire thing is incredibly confusing because HPE also had two versions of OpenStack. "Helion Open Stack" and "Carrier Grade OpenStack" and they were two different teams.
IshKebab 3y ago
Are you asking why a commercial company doesn't want to give its main product away for free? I'm surprised CentOS lasted as long as it did.
- bananapub 3y ago
  what do you feel RH's main product is? is it: 1. a collection of very old binaries of software with lots of testing done, or 2. a linux distribution that happens to have a very good support contract and a web of agreements with other vendors ?
  - steve1977 3y ago
    Based on the experience I had with their support (covered by a support contract), it must be 1.
    - ahoka 3y ago
      So the value is having to live with the same bugs for 10 years?
      - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
        The value is not having to reverse-engineer, rewrite and recompile software every week because some random library changed in a non-compatible way.
      - somerandomqaguy 3y ago
        For some people yes. The bugs you know about usually will have a workaround that minimizes it's impacts. It's the bugs you don't know about that are typically most difficult to deal with.
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  I guess the question that would lead to is why a company that didn't want to give it's main product away for free would have had a main product that was licensed as open source for so many years. We all know that an open source license means people can use it, copy it, modify it, and run it where they want, without paying anyone, right? (Is it even legally possible to have a linux distribution that isn't open source? I'm not sure?)
ehayes 3y ago
As an ex Red Hatter (pre IBM) this feels like top-down IBM influence, and against the always open spirit of the old Red Hat.
- freedomben 3y ago
  I'm also an ex-er but was there post acqui. It's definitely IBM influence, but it's long-time Red Hat people who are actually making these decisions. I don't think these are people that actually believed in Red Hat in the first place. Or if they did, they're willing to IBM-ify in order to keep their jobs (or ascend the ladder)
  - BeefWellington 3y ago
    It's exactly this. When I worked at IBM some years ago via another acquisition, this is the same pattern I saw. Senior leadership -- people who had been at the prior company for nearly two decades -- were the ones gladly steering it aground in order to do what IBM wanted. You can see this with Red Hat - the Chairman and the CEO are both long-time RHers. Were they just the opportunists? All the talk about running RH as an independent subsidiary was either smoke and mirrors or the IBM management style has infected the leadership at Red Hat.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      > or the IBM management style has infected the leadership at Red Hat. Tbh, if it hadn't, they would have been outed long ago.
  - jehb 3y ago
    I have to agree. All IBM is asking for is to hit certain numbers. Now, those numbers might be short sighted and unrealistic, but in my experience the operational decisions were still coming from inside Red Hat, at least through the middle of last year when I left. It doesn't matter whether IBM or Wall Street is demanding double-digit growth numbers every quarter, the end result is the same. Despite a really strong push by a lot of people inside the company to put culture first, in the end, a demand for unsustainable growth is going to wreck any culture, no matter how strong.
freedomben 3y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hatter but my opinion is my own Red Hat, you NEED to fix this. I get that it sucks to have your business built on selling support, and a couple of companies have popped up selling cheaper support but not taking on the cost of building the thing. I get that (you think) it's going to cause problems for you (it might, I'm not sure yet). But you're torching an insane amount of good will that was built up over 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds. You are making yourselves an enemy and a villain, rather than a friend. You need to stop the bleeding. I don't have any answers, but I have some ideas: 1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support. If those don't agree, other projects will emerge who will agree and will take their place. Don't make their lives unnecessarily hard by throwing up roadblocks in their way. There will probably be popup companies selling third party support for Alma/Rocky etc here and there, but I doubt that type of support competition makes a serious dent to enterprise sales. In fact, I think it helps you by increasing adoption. A rising tide raises all boats, especially in this field. 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy
- acomjean 3y ago
  almost 20 years ago when I took a Red Hat Kernel internals class (at Redhat) they basically told us to use CentOS if we wanted to experiment with RHEL. (We were preparing for a transition from the HPUX/Solaris machines.). But it worked, some of our architects did that and we could get the scheduler behaving similar to HPUX. I left that company, but I'm pretty sure they did switch and RedHat got a big contract out of it. We've come a long way.
- neilv 3y ago
  > 1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support. I don't know how the support business breaks down for this, but for the large customers, I can't imagine any of the little rebranding projects taking the support business that the IT dept. itself calls. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," and in this case it's literally true again: RH still have some of the best technical experts. (Imagine being a huge company with a urgent mission-critical kernel problem: you want to be able to get a Red Hat commando team parachuting in, including a Sr. Principal Engineer who specializes in hard debugging tasks in that vast code base. Not have Bob's Discount Distro's support line be lost after you say you already tried rebooting and reinstalling your global operations.) At the same time, if anyone distro is rebranding RHEL not just as an open source hippie volunteer thing (that a lot of not-ready-to-pay-for-RHEL smaller businesses use), but also trying to make it a support business out of it, then that might be poking the lion. The hippie commune might get ripped apart in a rampage. Which might be what's happening now? (Credible support options from AWS and maybe Oracle are a different matter.) > 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy Maybe CentOS had been providing this market segmentation with upgrade path to enterprise support, until recently? RHEL is not easy to switch to, and I've had a client that was very capable shop look at switching to RHEL, and nope right back, because they didn't want to learn the new bureaucracy. If they'd been able to use RHEL for free since they were smaller, becoming an RH enterprise support customer as they grew would be easy and a no-brainer. (Docker and then K8s have shaken this up a bit.)
tguvot 3y ago
"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." i worked in many different companies (including multi-billion revenue per year), and all of them used centos in order to have "proper enterprise linux" but for free. The only cases when real redhat was used is for something that actually required it by licensing/support terms - like Oracle, or alternatively contractual obligations for SLA. Pretty sure that IBM/Redhat know this as well and "third party open source packages compatability" not exactly something that they care about. Availability of sources only takes business from them. I personally somewhat happy about it. I moved to Debian 20 years ago and it "uncomfortable" to live in RH derived world. Even though Redhat 4 (or 4.1) was first ever Linux distribution that I installed back in 1997 PS. Also when RedHat "partnered" with CentOS back in 2014, it was somewhat obvious what is the direction. If there is anything that it surprising, then it will be that it took so much time.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  > i worked in many different companies, and all of them used centos in order to have "proper enterprise linux" but for free. The only cases when real redhat was used is for something that actually required it by licensing/support terms - like Oracle, or alternatively contractual obligations for SLA. I worked on a product that allowed both RHEL and CentOS, and then moved to a different one that mandated RHEL with a supported contract. The latter was far less stressful to deal with, because any time there was an OS issue, we could pretty easily tell them, "Go to Red Hat." The shops that were on CentOS on the other product tended to be small businesses (and cheapskates), and every time an OS issue arose, it was a screaming match trying to convince them that we're not going to fix their OS for them.
  - tguvot 3y ago
    i just edited my post when you replied. companies where i worked had multi-billion revenues. it's not exactly small business. they just don't want to pay money for proper redhat. they had money to do so, but savings are savings.
    - 3y ago
game_the0ry 3y ago
Corporate brain fucking up yet another formerly admired organization. RIP Redhat. And fuck you, IBM.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Everybody treats the sale of a company like you’ve won a game of Life. I went through a few where I obviously did not become a millionaire, and with a lot of time and unpacking it with coworkers and people with similar experiences, it’s more like an Irish Wake. Sure there’s booze and laughter, but something unique has been lost to the world, and that’s why we are all here.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Y'all are talking to the subsidiary of a Fortune 500 like it has ears, or feelings. It doesn't. It doesn't care about your open source. It doesn't care about logic, or slowly shooting itself in the foot, or alienating its base. It cares about sales, profits, and the balance sheet. As long as it can make a profit, the people supporting and developing for its platform for free can go fly a kite. And it will continue to burn itself into the ground until it becomes a write-off. Because there is no founder worried about its livelihood to try to right the ship. There is merely an executive VP who needs to jigger the numbers to make it look like they got another win this year so he can make his bonus. I call this Corporate Source.
- gary_0 3y ago
  Do not anthropomorphize the IBM.
  - Thoreandan 3y ago
    (1992) https://genius.com/Information-society-where-would-i-be-without-ibm-lyrics https://genius.com/Information-society-where-would-i-be-with...
  - Nifty3929 3y ago
    This is an important point! Corporations don't make decisions - individual people do. A corporation is a piece of paper in a drawer.
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    I always come back to Bryan Cantrill telling me not to stick my arm into a lawnmower.
    - Jalad 3y ago
      Amazing talk that's referenced in this thread. Good review of Sun's opensource history, and a hilarious amount of shade thrown at Oracle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc The specific clip starts at 33 minutes but I recommend watching the whole thing. Also Bryan is on HN!
andix 3y ago
I think a lot of companies are using RHEL and Alma/Rocky side by side. Because they are compatible, because people have an easy time to switch between them. I don't think that those people will move their license free servers to RHEL, but they will probably switch to Debian/Ubuntu. So in the end Red Hat will have a smaller market share and less support from the community. Currently most software provides a package at least for RHEL and Debian/Ubuntu. That may change in the future, if the amount of RHEL compatible systems drop significantly.
- izacus 3y ago
  Noone is switching from RHEL to Ubuntu or Debian. If you're on RHEL it's because you need their ridiculous long support cycle which noone else comes close for. It's used by people building medical hardware and telescopes, not for website deployments.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    We did... Enterprise ERP systems...
  - wingmanjd 3y ago
    Fwiw, we moved (are moving) on from RHEL and derivatives to Debian/ Ubuntu servers at $DAYJOB. We were planning on deploying Centos 8 before the Stream debacle came along.
  - genmud 3y ago
    Incorrect, for the longest time the US government only knew how to support linux via RHEL, that is rapidly changing. So if you sold software or services to the US government that was running on linux, your only viable choice was RH. That has started to change, Ubuntu pro is certified for use in the USG and has STIGs, which are hardening requirements for Ubuntu. Many places would develop on centos or scientific Linux and then when it went into production use RHEL, since they were effectively 1:1 ports. So yea, I imagine there are quite a few orgs who might switch.
  - andix 3y ago
bubblethink 3y ago
This is a pretty good opportunity for Canonical to pick up the slack. Aside from the snap related self-sabotage, Canonical was on a pretty good trajectory.
- nvy 3y ago
  Don't forget baking Amazon ads into their default desktop environment. Unity, was it? I forget which one.
- phatfish 3y ago
  Given their team up with Microsoft on Azure I don't see a redemption arc anytime soon. What is left, SUSE I suppose for an enterprise style LTS distro?
apienx 3y ago
Rocky Linux listing the following (funny) options: - Buy a farm in Nebraska or Montana. Raise cattle Stack suggests goats instead, as they may be easier (plus milk, cheese, gyro's, and they will eat poison ivy!) - Utilize RH subscriptions to access CDN sources and create local source mirrors for every package which we can then import from Q for legal: we need to review the licensing terms - Infiltrate RH https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.24fab14385c0aa2db6fa7340a8b2aae7 https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.24fab14385c0aa2db6fa7340a8b...
- nhanlon 3y ago
  Author of that pad here: For the record, someone changed their color to something similar to mine and added the 'Infiltrate RH' line which has been since removed. But thank you for appreciating my humor lol
snitty 3y ago
Didn't expect the RaspberryPi YouTube guy…
- b800h 3y ago
  NOBODY expects the RaspberryPi YouTube guy! His chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and absurdly impractical Kubernetes clusters. His TWO weapons.. etc.
- superdug 3y ago
  Geerling is one of those guys who speaks with authority, mainly by not speaking unless he's sure he's an authority on the matter. I've solved many problems by just following his youtube antics and blog posts. He's also kind of an Hn rockstar and lurks here on occassion.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Aww, thanks. I think for me, this whole thing hurts the most because I know SO many people in the Red Hat ecosystem. From Fedora, to Ansible, to RHEL, to Kubernetes/Openshift people... I've worked closely with so many. And there are still many who work there, and I know the words I wrote will sting for some of them. I don't hold any of this against them. It's just... painful to see the Red Hat that I remember from a decade ago, slowly becoming, what? IBM-ified? There's still a lot of good in that company, but it is being blotted out over time.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  Funny, I mostly knew him as the Ansible guy. He wouldn't be notorious without RH and look at him now.
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Notorious? I didn't know he was notorious at all..?
    - totallywrong 3y ago
stndef 3y ago
Red Hat, you made the internet's nicest man, Jeff Geerling, upset and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
charcircuit 3y ago
Imagine if a Windows developer complained that they had to get a license for Windows in order to make sure their software worked on Windows. It is entitled to think that just because you are a developer that you deserve a license.
- izacus 3y ago
  The business hustlers of Hacker News demand everything be given to them for free so they can then extract maximum margin for their Salas built on top of free (as in beer) software. It angers them when they find out that someone needs to pay for OSS development too.
  - izacus 3y ago
    Salas/SaaS. Autocorrect:/
- freedomben 3y ago
  That's a fair point, but as one of the developers who complains about it, the difference for me at least is I don't support Windows or Mac unless someone in the community will test it. I only have Linux in my life, and I'm not buying Windows or Mac in order to support those platforms. I'm not buying RHEL to support that either. I'm a big Fedora user these days so I'll probably end up supporting RHEL by inference since most Fedora packages will work unchanged on RHEL, but I won't be testing it. I'm also considering moving back to Arch, but Fedora is so good that it's hard to picture leaving and Arch has the same problem that Fedora now has (that there's no "server" version I can use, and I like to use the same ecosystem on servers as I do locally. That's actually why I started using EL in the first place and have since been the cause of hundreds of purchased licenses over the years). And no CentOS Stream and Fedora Server aren't quite good enough because at this point in my life I have many dozens of boxes to maintain. I can't migrate every box every 6 to 12 months when Fedora revs, and I can't install and test updates constantly with CentOS. It would take a ton of my dev time that needs to be used for dev.
- coredog64 3y ago
  Historically, Microsoft had very easy to access developer programs to ensure that people were building software for Windows. More recently, they gave out free VM images for time-bombed Windows for the purpose. Currently, Windows 10 is free if you don’t need to access customizable features like desktop background and are okay with a permanent notice on your desktop.
superdug 3y ago
I started my life with a plethora of distros, but I still remember redhat 5.2. Redhat in the latter years as it tried to incentivize became known to me as redhate. Their insistence on gnome over kde was what broke us up, I thought getting bought by IBM would be the nail in the coffin, it appears I was right.
putnambr 3y ago
Is there any risk to the Quarkus project from Red Hat's involvement? It's been my go-to for Java webservices, but Red Hat's track record is making me consider something like Helidon.
- damethos 3y ago
  Hi. Irrelevant with this thread, but can you please reply to me here if you got the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336 Search for my username and you will find my question! Thanks!
bragr 3y ago
Everyone seems to forget Redhat is owned by IBM, and this is their core business model. IBM doesn't care that this guy is mad, they were never going to make money off him. If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them because of this, and if you make software for banking companies (continuing the example), you'll pay up for the licensees to test your software on. If you're open to moving to another distro (Rocky, Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, etc), you were probably never to going to license Redhat anyways.
- johnvanommen 3y ago
  > If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them because of this Not sure if it ever happened, but when I was at BofA there was definitely interest from up high on going to Oracle Linux
  - Nifty3929 3y ago
    Out of the frying pan and into....
- bigger_cheese 3y ago
  It's ironic my org switched from AIX + websphere to Red Hat + Jboss I believe due to licensing.
- tim333 3y ago
  The IBM owners / shareholders probably aren't enthusiastic. Unless short like Chanos https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/94584-jim-chanos-on-hedgeyetv-ibm-is-the-ultimate-value-trap?type=macro%2Chedgeye-tv https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/94584-jim-chanos-on-hedgeye...
- theossuary 3y ago
  This is patently false. Redhat is making bank off of this guy. Jeff has written 100s of Ansible roles for free and made them widely available. I've used dozens of his roles as a contractor for F500 companies to help get projects off the ground quickly. Now instead of giving him free binary compatible OSes to develop his roles against, he'll probably just drop support because there's too much hassle. The next time I go to install an OS, it'll be Debian, because most of the tools I'll use won't have packages for RHEL like OSes. This is so dumb it hurts, Redhat won't recover from this. It'll cripple their package ecosystem over the next decade.
Ericson2314 3y ago
This is a bummer. But as a NixOS developer I gotta say it also has its upsides.
taylodl 3y ago
Is anyone surprised? Red Hat has been running roughshod over the Linux community for some time now. I say good riddance!
ilyt 3y ago
Nothing unexpected after IBM takeover sadly. Pick Debian for your next install.
bubblethink 3y ago
Seeing how Intel, AMD, AWS, etc. are involved in some way or the other in maintaining their distros or supporting RHEL derivatives, it would make sense for them to band together and do an LTS distro from scratch, or pump enough money into Canonical so that it becomes a viable competitor. The distro is not where the alpha is. So why all the fuss ?
- izacus 3y ago
  Why on earth would they do that?
- kjs3 3y ago
  Only if they make Canonical dump snap.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Pouring money into canonical seems unlikely to make ubuntu better. Paying people to work on Debian as individual contributors probably would.
oneplane 3y ago
Seems like we're in a period of ecosystems shooting themselves in the foot, be it 'social' media, software, banking or politics. I suppose, in a way, we have gotten accustomed to a relatively long period of stability. As for what RHEL thinks they are doing with this: every time a (IMO: nasty) enterprise vendor starts packaging their software in containers (IMO: a good thing!), distributions become less relevant by the day, and so does their view on software distribution.
- noizejoy 3y ago
  Business models break, when money is no longer almost free. Interest rates near zero created a historically rather unique environment. That’s now apparently ending.
- meribold 3y ago
  > Seems like we're in a period of ecosystems shooting themselves in the foot, be it 'social' media, software, banking or politics. Examples of companies besides Red Hat that have also been burning huge amounts of good will lately indeed come to mind easily: Activision Blizzard, Reddit, Netflix, …
- colechristensen 3y ago
  We’re in a period of unsustainably subsidized free environments being culled. People trying to monetize free things in order to continue providing free things seems to not be working all that well. The thing you do to make money and the free thing you offer probably just need to be separate for long term stability. The Linux kernel model of lots of institutions supporting an actually free project is probably the only real long term successful free model.
  - oneplane 3y ago
    I suppose the linux kernel model has the benefit of having a mutual dependency so you can't really easily long-term extract value without adding value. (i.e. forking the kernel means you'll be spending a lot of time keeping up, so doing to work to upstream your stuff has a real benefit)
totallywrong 3y ago
> When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but free", users like me were justifiably angered. I miss CentOS too. But how is that justifiable anger? Are you angry at the myriad of companies using open source code to build a paid product, and not giving it for free? I absolutely think that it backfired and they shouldn't have done it, but I also understand they had no obligation to maintain a 1:1 free alternative of their main product. That's just an unrealistic expectation imo.
- shaan7 3y ago
  These days isn't OpenShift their main product?
- soneil 3y ago
  Changing the support terms from 10 years to 1 year mid-stream lost them a lot of trust. It's not just what they did, it's how.
  - totallywrong 3y ago
    To that, I couldn't agree more.
- leni536 3y ago
  It's not comparable, as the source code is mostly not theirs.
  - totallywrong 3y ago
    As long as they comply with the licenses, which they do, that's largely irrelevant I'm afraid.
    - soneil 3y ago
      I'm a little confused how this new move still complies with many licences. As a paying customer you receive access the sources, as you're supposed to - but under contractual terms that you can't share them. Take the GPL as the most famous example. Providing me GPL'd sources that I'm not allowed to redistribute under the same terms definitely feels like it's against the spirit of the agreement. I'm too warm-blooded to argue whether it's under the letter.
singpolyma3 3y ago
Can someone explain what the value of RHEL is supposed to be?
- shaan7 3y ago
  This comment sums it up quite well I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438048
- op00to 3y ago
  Yes, your Red Hat sales person can explain it, or perhaps their web site. Posters are not here to do the bare minimum of research for you that is freely available.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Respectfully, what's wrong with CentOS for testing purposes?
- jacooper 3y ago
  Isnt 100% compatible with RHEL, so the result won't really represent what would happen on RHEL.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    If it's not 100% compatible then how compatible is it? If 100% compatibility is the requirement then the only option has always been RHEL built, packaged, and distributed by Red Hat. Not some 3rd party's infrastructure.
    - teruakohatu 3y ago
      Apparently the package versions don't match and the order they are released don't match RHEL, so it is not possible to be sure a package that works on CentOS Stream works on any given version of RHEL.
    - secabeen 3y ago
      CentOS Stream is not the same operating system as RHEL. Original CentOS nearly was. 99+% of the time, if you ran into a bug in CentOS, that bug could be replicated in RHEL. For most people, that 99%+ compatibility was enough.
mrmister00 3y ago
Of course they're dumb, they are IBM now.
synergy20 3y ago
I have been using debian and ubuntu for almost two decades without using Redhat, things seems OK, will this change by Redhat push more users to debian|ubuntu side? Canonical probably will do something similar in the future, but at least we have Debian.
- fariszr 3y ago
  I mean they might've already done it, is Ubuntu Pros source code open?
ledgerdev 3y ago
Reminds me of the wise words of Steve Jobs, the sales and marketing people are running things now. The product Genius has been rotted out, by people who have no conception of good product, no feeling in their heart about wanting to help customers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
PedroBatista 3y ago
Red Hat is IBM, do the math. This is not the inflammatory surface level comment that it seems to be, Red Hat invests and supports a lot of opensource projects and there are many good people there, but.. Red Hat is IBM, do the math.
jacobsenscott 3y ago
It is completely mystifying to me that anyone would use a "commercial" version of linux at all. I can't image commercial linux support is better than google and s.*overflow. I guess the answer is, as always, lawyers.
- teruakohatu 3y ago
  > I can't image commercial linux support is better than google You get a real expert engineer answering your questions and even fixing package source verses an outdated answer on SO.
- tredre3 3y ago
  > I can't image commercial linux support is better than google and s.*overflow. I guess the answer is, as always, lawyers. Then I guess you've never dealt with Red Hat. Sure I can spend a few hours Googling about mysterious log entries, blindly try various solutions that will fuck my system even more, and eventually I might even find a solution. OR I can just ping my support contact, get on with other tasks, and receive a magical solution by the end of the day. And if it's a software bug, they might even patch it!
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Wow that sounds like commercial support actually worth paying for. I work a lot with MS and we pay them a lot for support, which is terrible. It's double-outsourced (first to Accenture which then outsources to a number of other companies). It means the support agents are very far from anyone in the core product and they are measured on the amount of escalations so they are extremely reluctant to do that. Meaning if you have a question that's easily answered in the docs, it's great. If it's not and something is actually broken on their side (which is usually the case because we can read...), you're stuck defending yourself against "It says in the docs it should work so you're doing it wrong". Once you manage to convince them something is really not working as it should they'll stall by constantly demanding logs and updates to the latest version. By the time they review the logs another version is out and they will demand that. Eventually after a couple weeks you can manage to escalate to an account manager and force the issue to go to someone who actually knows anything. It's the kind of support that really feels like part of the problem rather than a trusted advisor. I'm kinda surprised RedHat isn't like this, in my experience it's only been small companies that I've seen excellent support from.
CrLf 3y ago
I don't think Red Hat is trying to kill clones, but I believe they're trying to kill clones that are "1:1 compatible with RHEL". They're trying to force a shift in what clones are supposed to be, and that started with CentOS Stream. Locking the sources to RHEL-proper is just the next step. This may signal their death as a widely-recognizable Linux distribution vendor, but I can't really say I blame them. If CentOS Stream isn't adequate for production — and I see it as being at least as adequate as Debian for those that also upgraded from one RHEL major to the next soon after its release — then the future of clones may lie in becoming downstreams of CentOS just like RHEL is. I do see the value in a CentOS Stream derivative that's more conservative, but it doesn't need to be 1:1 bug compatible with RHEL. Honestly, I don't see the point of 1:1 clones unless you're running some closed-source commercial software. And such software tends to not be supported by its vendor even on 1:1 compatible RHEL clones. I like the Red Hat flavor of Linux, and I like the fact that I can have a machine with an OS installed in 2014 continuing to get security fixes without having to upgrade major versions. But I don't care if that's 1:1 compatible with RHEL (and it doesn't really need to be supported for 10 years).
- fariszr 3y ago
  Well, for those people who like upgrading, CentOS Stream still doesn't support in place upgrades.
  - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    Wait, dnf system-upgrade won’t work? Granted, CentOS Stream has only seen two major releases in its current form, but still.
    - fariszr 3y ago
      AFAIK yes, neither on RHEL. There is no official way to do in place upgrades on CentOS stream.
      - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
BringerOfChaos 3y ago
I'm a former Red Hatter. I left just after the IBM acquisition. We all saw stupid stuff like this coming. It's a sad loss, but the Debian (and Debian-based) world is lovely.
- ddtaylor 3y ago
  As a long time Debian user for 20+ years I have to say I really prefer dnf/yum over apt/dpkg now. It's significantly faster and has much less version deadlock snafus from my experience in the last 5 years. I still use and support servers from both sides and my Debian servers are often a chore to work with by comparison.
nolist_policy 3y ago
This is great actually! Redhat continues to keep the same maintainers and devs on payroll and working on the same open-source projects, so the OSS ecosystem won't loose anything in that regard. But where will the big research labs that previously used Scientific Linux, then Almalinux go now? CentOS Stream? Debian? They will switch some systems to RHEL, but probably only a minority. I wonder what distro will gain from this, makes me excited for the future.

702 points by thepbone 3y ago

nickdothutton 3y ago

Red Hat is IBM now. That might not be clear today, but give it 5 or 10 years and it will be.

kjs3 3y ago
IBM bought them in 2019. Do you need another 5 or 10 years to figure it out?
- nickdothutton 3y ago
  I don’t, no. I knew the future before the deal was closed. So did most of my friends and former colleagues (who quit at the first sign on the dead hand reaching out into their business units).

jpswade 3y ago

This isn’t a RedHat problem, it’s an IBM problem.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zb3 3y ago

Why should Red Hat provide its main product (stability, compatibility, support) for free? Why are enterprise users so entitled? Why should Red Hat care about them at all?

jillesvangurp 3y ago
While I agree with that partially, unfortunately I don't agree that it's a wise move for IBM. There is indeed a weird dynamic where IBM is basically funding third party companies to make a profit reselling what is advertised as a bug for bug compatible version of their own software while struggling to sell the original. So, I can see the logic of IBM wanting to end that. Of course the flip side is that that might prompt those third party companies to cut loose and join forces on creating a proper alternative that is effectively an independent fork that replaces Red Hat as an upstream. Amazon would be well familiar with that playbook of course. And they already have Amazon Linux as their in house preferred Red Hat derivative. And I seriously doubt Amazon cares a lot about bug for bug compatibility. In fact the whole point for them is probably not having most of those bugs to begin with. They just want a stable upstream that they can pull changes from. That's what makes this such a dumb move. IBM/Red Hat might get a few users to jump ship to the paid Red Hat. But most simply won't. And the further which ever fork emerges as the alternative diverges the less likely it becomes that users will still want to consider switching. Users want a stable upstream but it's not a given that IBM is the ideal steward of that upstream. And with Amazon, Oracle, Rocky, Alma, etc. all needing the same thing, the logical alternative for them would be to unite and form a foundation that takes that role.

mcdermott 3y ago

Glad that we dumped CentOS/RHEL in favor of Ubuntu LTS years ago.

kristianpaul 3y ago

"Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding. Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on." https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

BirAdam 3y ago
I believe that it would stand to reason that if IBM/RH is not permitting redistribution of sources made available in their customer portal, this would constitute a violation of the GPL for any GPL package. I would assume that IBM/RH will then need to take the Apple approach and quickly start working to replace GCC with LLVM and next rid itself of all GPL software and stick with MIT/BSD/OSC...
- pabs3 3y ago
  They do not restrict redistribution of what you already have access to, but they don't give access to future updates if you do redistribute. The GPL doesn't require them to give access to future updates either.
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    That is an excellent point I hadn’t thought of.

ddtaylor 3y ago

As it stands I really like Fedora and I'm inclined to continue to give it a shot. I hope I don't have to eat my words on that. I believe that the Fedora Project is somewhat independent of RedHat, although they have a sponsorship arrangement.

fariszr 3y ago
Its relatively independent, but I don't see how fedora can be a RHEL replacement.
- GlacierFox 3y ago
  It can if you like upgrading your entire operating system every 6 months.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

120photo 3y ago

How about everyone chip in so that Rocky/Alma can get a subscription to RHEL and get the source that way? The GPL does not say they have to publish the code in the wild just that they have to provide it when they distribute. There are many companies that use OSS, make modifications, and since they never distribute are not required to make that source available.

9659 3y ago
We could make a big list of people that are ready to buy a subscription. Everytime RHEL has an update: * A subscription is purchased * Download all the source rpm's. * Put them on the internet * RH terminates the license and the purchaser is put on a list * goto next person on list and repeat. A few thousand people would keep this going.

mathattack 3y ago

This is a natural outgrowth of being owned by IBM. They are in the business of harvesting revenue from existing customers until they revolt. They don’t care about open source or smaller customers. They care about squeezing and auditing the enterprise. This is bad for RedHat because there are other options.

sumanthvepa 3y ago

I for one would be okay with a distro like AlmaLinux migrating away from being an exact RHEL downstream clone to being an independent stable RPM based distribution. Stability and RPM ecosystem compatibility is what people are really looking for when they use a distribution like RHEL. So any reasonable distribution that provides those two will be sufficient to migrate away from Fedora/Redhat entirely.

kjs3 3y ago
I wouldn't, and neither would a lot of other shops I'm familiar with. Being able to run binary compatible distro in dev/test/QA and pretty seamlessly migrate to supported RHEL in prod is an important cost and risk containment measure. Now it's either 1) deal with 'is this bug our issue or because of something in the close-but-not-exact distro', 2) Dump our current supported distro for another; RH support has been in my experience very, very good, and no I don't think Rocky or the rest will come close any time soon, or 3) take a pretty big financial hit licensing RHEL everywhere. May be time to look at SuSE again.

javitury 3y ago

RHEL market share won't last forever, so they have decided to milk the Red Hat cow as fast as they can. Long term, people will switch to containers and cloud apps (Kubernetes, AWS). In this new environment, operating systems are commoditized and RHEL's moat will slowly shrink. Instead, developers will focus on alpine, debian or similar.

creatonez 3y ago
Red Hat has significant involvement in container platforms right now.
- javitury 3y ago
  Those are different Red Hat products and belong to different layers of the cloud stack. Previously third party developers targeted RHEL directly, enhancing the RHEL ecosystem. Red Hat could play long term by (indirectly) giving away the base product to the community, and profit from the increase in support subscriptions. New projects don't target RHEL as often as their primary platform, they prefer containers now. There is less ecosystem enhancement and it's more profitable to milk existing RHEL users. Centos Stream makes it possible to smooth the transition to the new paradigm. Openshift, Coreos, etc have different purposes and follow different market dynamics. Mainstream developers don't target them directly.
time0ut 3y ago
My company is steadily moving from being a heavy RH shop (RHEL and OpenShift) to Amazon (Amazon Linux 2 and EKS) as we migrate from our colos to AWS. RH has been a good vendor and I have no complaints, but it makes little sense in the long run. I am sure they are feeling it.

mynonameaccount 3y ago

I disagree. RedHat can do whatever they want just like you can do whatever you want. Don't like what RedHat is doing, then change your distro.

dang 3y ago

Recent and related: Impact of RHEL Changes to AlmaLinux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 - June 2023 (43 comments) Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 - June 2023 (299 comments) Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 - June 2023 (27 comments)

anyoneamous 3y ago

Quick tip for any AWS users (or users of any cloud provider, really): if this affects you, let your account manager know, along with your thoughts on how you anticipate responding. That feedback is invaluable for service teams who are trying to figure out what OS support to prioritize for the tools they might be building.

soulbadguy 3y ago

I can't help that think this kind of move should be expected once IBM bought red hat. The core of the issue is an trying to extract more value from a well run/well optimize business which usually happens after such large acquisition. There is a fundamental limit to the kind of return on investment that a OSS first/sell support model can provide. In the short term, it's probably more profitable to pivot to more close model, and try to extract even more value from captive audience... But only time will tell how that pans out in the long term.

sparc24 3y ago

Just use AL2023 aka Fedora LTS. 2 years of updates and 5 years of maintenance. That is exactly what everyone wants. Long term support and more frequent updates.

snapplebobapple 3y ago

Can someone explain how it is allowed to prohibit republishing gpl sources? I tho7ght the gpl expressly forbade this behavior?

TZubiri 3y ago

If you want to target their OS just contact them and ask for a license. Stop with demonizing source code privacy or monetizing our craft.

__d 3y ago
I did this. I was told to use CentOS or pay for the developer license thing at USD100/year. Which I did. It's not a lot of money, and it gets me access to support, more docs, etc. I don't really begrudge them that fee, given all the FOSS work they support.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

Redhat has some packaging scripts that detect rpath and refuse to install binaries that set it. This has caused me a good couple of days of grief and lead directly to shipping a worse product. Specifically, clang -fopenmp a.cpp -o a.out used to give you a binary that would run with ./a.out, but now it'll give you something that complains that it can't find the openmp runtime library. Unless you happen to have llvm installed globally, like redhat presumably does. I now cheerfully try to talk people into dropping IBM Linux support whenever it comes up in discussion. Haven't succeeded yet but will keep trying. I want it out of the requirements graph. I liked rpath and will not forget the unjustified line of reasoning behind disabling it.

pabs3 3y ago

I'm reminded of Drew Devault's 2021 blog post " Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation": https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your-monopoly.html https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...

ZeroSolstice 3y ago

As I'm reading the comments I'm a bit curious what services people are running, or dependent on CentOS for, that FreeBSD or Debian can not provide? In the past I could see buying into an eco-system of tooling that helped you manage fleets of servers but with Ansible, Docker, etc wouldn't the tooling be agnostic to the OS? What exactly is it that you are running in your infrastructure that doesn't have a stable alternative? - DNS - DHCP - Webservers - Database servers - Firewalls - IDS - VPN - Auth services You can PXE boot, use tools like foreman, upload images to VPS provider(s). At least speaking for FreeBSD you have regular release cycles, security advisories, etc. I'm probably old but this scenario has played out plenty of times and the comments are the same that were on mailing lists when RedHat Linux was moved to Fedora. I remember when the CentOS maintainer(s?) disappeared and delays between CentOS 5/6 and RHEL6. People talked about how their business were so dependent on this OS how could a maintainer just abandon it..etc. Now resources and efforts are split between Alma and Rocky linux at what point do you evaluate what you "really" need from your systems and if the constant wait-and-see, buy-out, merge, fork process just becomes noise. Has it never come up in any risk assessment for large companies to have a contingency if the OS is no longer available or the licensing changes?

CoolCold 3y ago
> Docker FreeBSD is lacking support of Docker - they prefer to think they can ingest system management knowledge into Frontend Developers and suggest to use Jails (with ZFS/Nullfs/VNET/other horrible words for Joe The Svelte Dev ) > upload images to VPS Some still have things running on premises > dependent on CentOS for, that FreeBSD or Debian can not provide Good luck running SAP products on this > FreeBSD you have regular release cycles, security advisories FreeBSD lacks the idea of LTS. At most you (to my knowledge) you may have updates to a) the very minimal set of things aka base system b) it ends in ~ 5 years, not even 7 or 10 c) someone will need to the the job to keep security support for ports tree for 5 years to ensure versions are kept the same. Or in other words - requires more human power on your side comparing to offloading that to the vendor. For some FreeBSD guys example may be needed. Imagine you installed latest Ubuntu LTS (22.04) which has Nginx (as part of the whole distribution provided, not "base"/"ports" separated) and it's version is 1.18 and for next 5+ years it will keep the same version. No surprises. You even run auto-upgrade everynight and reboot server ~ once a month for kernel updates. Then repeat the same on FreeBSD - the ports tree will get updated with newer Nginx ( I've checked https://ports.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=nginx&stype=all https://ports.freebsd.org/cgi/ports.cgi?query=nginx&stype=al... here, it's 1.24.0 and no older versions available) and when 1.25.1 will be become new mainline (probably in 1.26?) your configuration will stop working as they have deprecated "ssl on;" construct. Or, other sample - let's say I'm developing Nginx module and selling it in binary form. I realize that my auditory is Centos/Ubuntu users. I know in advance in that case, which compatibility I need to support in terms of ABI, features, support articles and training. It helps me [as vendor of 3rd party software] with planning and keeping lower costs.

johnea 3y ago

It's not because they're not dumb, it's because they're IBM...

dizhn 3y ago

Anectodal data point to provide some perspective to the IBM acquisition. My friend worked Redhat sales towards the end of 2000s. As we all know Redhat makes money from support. Everywhere they went IBM was eating their lunch with their Redhat support sales.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

RHE going enshittification?

cowmix 3y ago

"yes" That's today's episode of EZ answers to EZ questions.

Alifatisk 3y ago
What a great episode, see you on the next!

ape4 3y ago

IBM, are you d*mb?

mcguire 3y ago
Yes.

formerly_proven 3y ago

bodeadly 3y ago
Yeah, I don't get it either. On a related note, folks who are thinking we'll just use Debian or SUSE or whatever other distro, don't understand what RH does. RH is one of the principal contributors to core Linux components used by all distros. Who makes some 10GbE driver work really well? RedHat. And that driver makes it's way back into the kernel sources used by all distros. So I think there's a lack of understanding of the dynamic here. The allure of RHEL clones is that it's all been checked over by organized engineers who's job security depends on the quality of their work. I would much prefer not to rely on a couple of free-timers producing a result equivalent to what RH does. And yet there is a huge demand from folks that simply cannot pay what RH wants. So my guess is that something new is going to come out of all of this ....

wronglebowski 3y ago

Given my experience, RHEL is a favorite among enterprise environments. As such IBM will continue to pursue a strategy that forces people into that business funnel. They do not care who falls out of it, the ecosystem will only become more closed. I think we need to be more realistic about where things are headed. SUSE? Market cap of 2.2 Billion, IBM paid 34 for RH. Ubuntu? Still not profitable. As we continue to see the tech sector cool and become more mature belts will tighten and things will consolidate.

jzb 3y ago
SUSE is tenacious AF, you have to give 'em that. This could be an opportunity for them to grab some market share. I'd love to see it. I don't wish ill on Red Hat, either, but I'd love to see SUSE grow and be a stronger player here. It'd be good for the larger ecosystem.
aeyes 3y ago
About 15 years ago the (German) company I worked at had a lot of their customers from different industries run on SLES. But over time many customers just weren't willing to sign up for OS support contracts anymore (and also switched from Oracle to MySQL). SLES/openSUSE never managed to get the same support from third parties and communities as CentOS/Fedora. With RHEL 6 we migrated all customers from SLES to CentOS/RHEL. This allowed to have a homogenous environment with and without enterprise support contracts. We'll have to see where this is going. Certain enterprise software (like Oracle) requires the use of certified operating systems or you lose support. Oracle Linux looks like the more natural choice.
pcthrowaway 3y ago
Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative? If anything, this makes me feel like they're undervalued, especially now that they're the only company shipping an enterprise linux with an open source and privacy respecting (looking at you Canonical) base distro.
- johnvanommen 3y ago
  > Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE not a viable alternative? I'd always assumed the MicroFocus acquisition of SuSE had something to do with OpenStack, and when OpenStack stopped being The Big New Thing, that impacted SuSE. Basically: * I was on the HP OpenStack team * HP burned through over a billion on that, and sold the product off to SuSE * Somewhere in the mix there, MicroFocus was divested from HP. Even working there, it was hard to follow, because HP also split into HP and HPE * As various vendors lost interest in OpenStack (Cisco, EMC, VMWare, etc), SuSE replaced their CEO who was behind the acquisition in the first place I talked to some SuSE folks about OpenStack at one of the VMWare conferences, and they seemed confident in it's future, and then just weeks later I read that they'd discontinued the product in it's current state The entire thing is incredibly confusing because HPE also had two versions of OpenStack. "Helion Open Stack" and "Carrier Grade OpenStack" and they were two different teams.

IshKebab 3y ago

Are you asking why a commercial company doesn't want to give its main product away for free? I'm surprised CentOS lasted as long as it did.

bananapub 3y ago
what do you feel RH's main product is? is it: 1. a collection of very old binaries of software with lots of testing done, or 2. a linux distribution that happens to have a very good support contract and a web of agreements with other vendors ?
- steve1977 3y ago
  Based on the experience I had with their support (covered by a support contract), it must be 1.
  - ahoka 3y ago
    So the value is having to live with the same bugs for 10 years?
    - ElectricalUnion 3y ago
      The value is not having to reverse-engineer, rewrite and recompile software every week because some random library changed in a non-compatible way.
    - somerandomqaguy 3y ago
      For some people yes. The bugs you know about usually will have a workaround that minimizes it's impacts. It's the bugs you don't know about that are typically most difficult to deal with.
jrochkind1 3y ago
I guess the question that would lead to is why a company that didn't want to give it's main product away for free would have had a main product that was licensed as open source for so many years. We all know that an open source license means people can use it, copy it, modify it, and run it where they want, without paying anyone, right? (Is it even legally possible to have a linux distribution that isn't open source? I'm not sure?)

ehayes 3y ago

As an ex Red Hatter (pre IBM) this feels like top-down IBM influence, and against the always open spirit of the old Red Hat.

freedomben 3y ago
I'm also an ex-er but was there post acqui. It's definitely IBM influence, but it's long-time Red Hat people who are actually making these decisions. I don't think these are people that actually believed in Red Hat in the first place. Or if they did, they're willing to IBM-ify in order to keep their jobs (or ascend the ladder)
- BeefWellington 3y ago
  It's exactly this. When I worked at IBM some years ago via another acquisition, this is the same pattern I saw. Senior leadership -- people who had been at the prior company for nearly two decades -- were the ones gladly steering it aground in order to do what IBM wanted. You can see this with Red Hat - the Chairman and the CEO are both long-time RHers. Were they just the opportunists? All the talk about running RH as an independent subsidiary was either smoke and mirrors or the IBM management style has infected the leadership at Red Hat.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    > or the IBM management style has infected the leadership at Red Hat. Tbh, if it hadn't, they would have been outed long ago.
- jehb 3y ago
  I have to agree. All IBM is asking for is to hit certain numbers. Now, those numbers might be short sighted and unrealistic, but in my experience the operational decisions were still coming from inside Red Hat, at least through the middle of last year when I left. It doesn't matter whether IBM or Wall Street is demanding double-digit growth numbers every quarter, the end result is the same. Despite a really strong push by a lot of people inside the company to put culture first, in the end, a demand for unsustainable growth is going to wreck any culture, no matter how strong.

freedomben 3y ago

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hatter but my opinion is my own Red Hat, you NEED to fix this. I get that it sucks to have your business built on selling support, and a couple of companies have popped up selling cheaper support but not taking on the cost of building the thing. I get that (you think) it's going to cause problems for you (it might, I'm not sure yet). But you're torching an insane amount of good will that was built up over 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds. You are making yourselves an enemy and a villain, rather than a friend. You need to stop the bleeding. I don't have any answers, but I have some ideas: 1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support. If those don't agree, other projects will emerge who will agree and will take their place. Don't make their lives unnecessarily hard by throwing up roadblocks in their way. There will probably be popup companies selling third party support for Alma/Rocky etc here and there, but I doubt that type of support competition makes a serious dent to enterprise sales. In fact, I think it helps you by increasing adoption. A rising tide raises all boats, especially in this field. 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy

acomjean 3y ago
almost 20 years ago when I took a Red Hat Kernel internals class (at Redhat) they basically told us to use CentOS if we wanted to experiment with RHEL. (We were preparing for a transition from the HPUX/Solaris machines.). But it worked, some of our architects did that and we could get the scheduler behaving similar to HPUX. I left that company, but I'm pretty sure they did switch and RedHat got a big contract out of it. We've come a long way.
neilv 3y ago
> 1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support. I don't know how the support business breaks down for this, but for the large customers, I can't imagine any of the little rebranding projects taking the support business that the IT dept. itself calls. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," and in this case it's literally true again: RH still have some of the best technical experts. (Imagine being a huge company with a urgent mission-critical kernel problem: you want to be able to get a Red Hat commando team parachuting in, including a Sr. Principal Engineer who specializes in hard debugging tasks in that vast code base. Not have Bob's Discount Distro's support line be lost after you say you already tried rebooting and reinstalling your global operations.) At the same time, if anyone distro is rebranding RHEL not just as an open source hippie volunteer thing (that a lot of not-ready-to-pay-for-RHEL smaller businesses use), but also trying to make it a support business out of it, then that might be poking the lion. The hippie commune might get ripped apart in a rampage. Which might be what's happening now? (Credible support options from AWS and maybe Oracle are a different matter.) > 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy Maybe CentOS had been providing this market segmentation with upgrade path to enterprise support, until recently? RHEL is not easy to switch to, and I've had a client that was very capable shop look at switching to RHEL, and nope right back, because they didn't want to learn the new bureaucracy. If they'd been able to use RHEL for free since they were smaller, becoming an RH enterprise support customer as they grew would be easy and a no-brainer. (Docker and then K8s have shaken this up a bit.)

tguvot 3y ago

"Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." i worked in many different companies (including multi-billion revenue per year), and all of them used centos in order to have "proper enterprise linux" but for free. The only cases when real redhat was used is for something that actually required it by licensing/support terms - like Oracle, or alternatively contractual obligations for SLA. Pretty sure that IBM/Redhat know this as well and "third party open source packages compatability" not exactly something that they care about. Availability of sources only takes business from them. I personally somewhat happy about it. I moved to Debian 20 years ago and it "uncomfortable" to live in RH derived world. Even though Redhat 4 (or 4.1) was first ever Linux distribution that I installed back in 1997 PS. Also when RedHat "partnered" with CentOS back in 2014, it was somewhat obvious what is the direction. If there is anything that it surprising, then it will be that it took so much time.

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
> i worked in many different companies, and all of them used centos in order to have "proper enterprise linux" but for free. The only cases when real redhat was used is for something that actually required it by licensing/support terms - like Oracle, or alternatively contractual obligations for SLA. I worked on a product that allowed both RHEL and CentOS, and then moved to a different one that mandated RHEL with a supported contract. The latter was far less stressful to deal with, because any time there was an OS issue, we could pretty easily tell them, "Go to Red Hat." The shops that were on CentOS on the other product tended to be small businesses (and cheapskates), and every time an OS issue arose, it was a screaming match trying to convince them that we're not going to fix their OS for them.
- tguvot 3y ago
  i just edited my post when you replied. companies where i worked had multi-billion revenues. it's not exactly small business. they just don't want to pay money for proper redhat. they had money to do so, but savings are savings.
  - 3y ago

game_the0ry 3y ago

Corporate brain fucking up yet another formerly admired organization. RIP Redhat. And fuck you, IBM.

hinkley 3y ago
Everybody treats the sale of a company like you’ve won a game of Life. I went through a few where I obviously did not become a millionaire, and with a lot of time and unpacking it with coworkers and people with similar experiences, it’s more like an Irish Wake. Sure there’s booze and laughter, but something unique has been lost to the world, and that’s why we are all here.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Y'all are talking to the subsidiary of a Fortune 500 like it has ears, or feelings. It doesn't. It doesn't care about your open source. It doesn't care about logic, or slowly shooting itself in the foot, or alienating its base. It cares about sales, profits, and the balance sheet. As long as it can make a profit, the people supporting and developing for its platform for free can go fly a kite. And it will continue to burn itself into the ground until it becomes a write-off. Because there is no founder worried about its livelihood to try to right the ship. There is merely an executive VP who needs to jigger the numbers to make it look like they got another win this year so he can make his bonus. I call this Corporate Source.

gary_0 3y ago
Do not anthropomorphize the IBM.
- Thoreandan 3y ago
  (1992) https://genius.com/Information-society-where-would-i-be-without-ibm-lyrics https://genius.com/Information-society-where-would-i-be-with...
- Nifty3929 3y ago
  This is an important point! Corporations don't make decisions - individual people do. A corporation is a piece of paper in a drawer.
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  I always come back to Bryan Cantrill telling me not to stick my arm into a lawnmower.
  - Jalad 3y ago
    Amazing talk that's referenced in this thread. Good review of Sun's opensource history, and a hilarious amount of shade thrown at Oracle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc The specific clip starts at 33 minutes but I recommend watching the whole thing. Also Bryan is on HN!

andix 3y ago

I think a lot of companies are using RHEL and Alma/Rocky side by side. Because they are compatible, because people have an easy time to switch between them. I don't think that those people will move their license free servers to RHEL, but they will probably switch to Debian/Ubuntu. So in the end Red Hat will have a smaller market share and less support from the community. Currently most software provides a package at least for RHEL and Debian/Ubuntu. That may change in the future, if the amount of RHEL compatible systems drop significantly.

izacus 3y ago
Noone is switching from RHEL to Ubuntu or Debian. If you're on RHEL it's because you need their ridiculous long support cycle which noone else comes close for. It's used by people building medical hardware and telescopes, not for website deployments.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  We did... Enterprise ERP systems...
- wingmanjd 3y ago
  Fwiw, we moved (are moving) on from RHEL and derivatives to Debian/ Ubuntu servers at $DAYJOB. We were planning on deploying Centos 8 before the Stream debacle came along.
- genmud 3y ago
  Incorrect, for the longest time the US government only knew how to support linux via RHEL, that is rapidly changing. So if you sold software or services to the US government that was running on linux, your only viable choice was RH. That has started to change, Ubuntu pro is certified for use in the USG and has STIGs, which are hardening requirements for Ubuntu. Many places would develop on centos or scientific Linux and then when it went into production use RHEL, since they were effectively 1:1 ports. So yea, I imagine there are quite a few orgs who might switch.
- andix 3y ago

bubblethink 3y ago

This is a pretty good opportunity for Canonical to pick up the slack. Aside from the snap related self-sabotage, Canonical was on a pretty good trajectory.

nvy 3y ago
Don't forget baking Amazon ads into their default desktop environment. Unity, was it? I forget which one.
phatfish 3y ago
Given their team up with Microsoft on Azure I don't see a redemption arc anytime soon. What is left, SUSE I suppose for an enterprise style LTS distro?

apienx 3y ago

Rocky Linux listing the following (funny) options: - Buy a farm in Nebraska or Montana. Raise cattle Stack suggests goats instead, as they may be easier (plus milk, cheese, gyro's, and they will eat poison ivy!) - Utilize RH subscriptions to access CDN sources and create local source mirrors for every package which we can then import from Q for legal: we need to review the licensing terms - Infiltrate RH https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.24fab14385c0aa2db6fa7340a8b2aae7 https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.24fab14385c0aa2db6fa7340a8b...

nhanlon 3y ago
Author of that pad here: For the record, someone changed their color to something similar to mine and added the 'Infiltrate RH' line which has been since removed. But thank you for appreciating my humor lol

snitty 3y ago

Didn't expect the RaspberryPi YouTube guy…

b800h 3y ago
NOBODY expects the RaspberryPi YouTube guy! His chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and absurdly impractical Kubernetes clusters. His TWO weapons.. etc.
superdug 3y ago
Geerling is one of those guys who speaks with authority, mainly by not speaking unless he's sure he's an authority on the matter. I've solved many problems by just following his youtube antics and blog posts. He's also kind of an Hn rockstar and lurks here on occassion.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Aww, thanks. I think for me, this whole thing hurts the most because I know SO many people in the Red Hat ecosystem. From Fedora, to Ansible, to RHEL, to Kubernetes/Openshift people... I've worked closely with so many. And there are still many who work there, and I know the words I wrote will sting for some of them. I don't hold any of this against them. It's just... painful to see the Red Hat that I remember from a decade ago, slowly becoming, what? IBM-ified? There's still a lot of good in that company, but it is being blotted out over time.
totallywrong 3y ago
Funny, I mostly knew him as the Ansible guy. He wouldn't be notorious without RH and look at him now.
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Notorious? I didn't know he was notorious at all..?
  - totallywrong 3y ago

stndef 3y ago

Red Hat, you made the internet's nicest man, Jeff Geerling, upset and you should be ashamed of yourselves.

charcircuit 3y ago

Imagine if a Windows developer complained that they had to get a license for Windows in order to make sure their software worked on Windows. It is entitled to think that just because you are a developer that you deserve a license.

izacus 3y ago
The business hustlers of Hacker News demand everything be given to them for free so they can then extract maximum margin for their Salas built on top of free (as in beer) software. It angers them when they find out that someone needs to pay for OSS development too.
- izacus 3y ago
  Salas/SaaS. Autocorrect:/
freedomben 3y ago
That's a fair point, but as one of the developers who complains about it, the difference for me at least is I don't support Windows or Mac unless someone in the community will test it. I only have Linux in my life, and I'm not buying Windows or Mac in order to support those platforms. I'm not buying RHEL to support that either. I'm a big Fedora user these days so I'll probably end up supporting RHEL by inference since most Fedora packages will work unchanged on RHEL, but I won't be testing it. I'm also considering moving back to Arch, but Fedora is so good that it's hard to picture leaving and Arch has the same problem that Fedora now has (that there's no "server" version I can use, and I like to use the same ecosystem on servers as I do locally. That's actually why I started using EL in the first place and have since been the cause of hundreds of purchased licenses over the years). And no CentOS Stream and Fedora Server aren't quite good enough because at this point in my life I have many dozens of boxes to maintain. I can't migrate every box every 6 to 12 months when Fedora revs, and I can't install and test updates constantly with CentOS. It would take a ton of my dev time that needs to be used for dev.
coredog64 3y ago
Historically, Microsoft had very easy to access developer programs to ensure that people were building software for Windows. More recently, they gave out free VM images for time-bombed Windows for the purpose. Currently, Windows 10 is free if you don’t need to access customizable features like desktop background and are okay with a permanent notice on your desktop.

superdug 3y ago

I started my life with a plethora of distros, but I still remember redhat 5.2. Redhat in the latter years as it tried to incentivize became known to me as redhate. Their insistence on gnome over kde was what broke us up, I thought getting bought by IBM would be the nail in the coffin, it appears I was right.

putnambr 3y ago

Is there any risk to the Quarkus project from Red Hat's involvement? It's been my go-to for Java webservices, but Red Hat's track record is making me consider something like Helidon.

damethos 3y ago
Hi. Irrelevant with this thread, but can you please reply to me here if you got the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336 Search for my username and you will find my question! Thanks!

bragr 3y ago

Everyone seems to forget Redhat is owned by IBM, and this is their core business model. IBM doesn't care that this guy is mad, they were never going to make money off him. If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them because of this, and if you make software for banking companies (continuing the example), you'll pay up for the licensees to test your software on. If you're open to moving to another distro (Rocky, Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, etc), you were probably never to going to license Redhat anyways.

johnvanommen 3y ago
> If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them because of this Not sure if it ever happened, but when I was at BofA there was definitely interest from up high on going to Oracle Linux
- Nifty3929 3y ago
  Out of the frying pan and into....
bigger_cheese 3y ago
It's ironic my org switched from AIX + websphere to Red Hat + Jboss I believe due to licensing.
tim333 3y ago
The IBM owners / shareholders probably aren't enthusiastic. Unless short like Chanos https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/94584-jim-chanos-on-hedgeyetv-ibm-is-the-ultimate-value-trap?type=macro%2Chedgeye-tv https://app.hedgeye.com/insights/94584-jim-chanos-on-hedgeye...
theossuary 3y ago
This is patently false. Redhat is making bank off of this guy. Jeff has written 100s of Ansible roles for free and made them widely available. I've used dozens of his roles as a contractor for F500 companies to help get projects off the ground quickly. Now instead of giving him free binary compatible OSes to develop his roles against, he'll probably just drop support because there's too much hassle. The next time I go to install an OS, it'll be Debian, because most of the tools I'll use won't have packages for RHEL like OSes. This is so dumb it hurts, Redhat won't recover from this. It'll cripple their package ecosystem over the next decade.

Ericson2314 3y ago

This is a bummer. But as a NixOS developer I gotta say it also has its upsides.

taylodl 3y ago

Is anyone surprised? Red Hat has been running roughshod over the Linux community for some time now. I say good riddance!

ilyt 3y ago

Nothing unexpected after IBM takeover sadly. Pick Debian for your next install.

bubblethink 3y ago

Seeing how Intel, AMD, AWS, etc. are involved in some way or the other in maintaining their distros or supporting RHEL derivatives, it would make sense for them to band together and do an LTS distro from scratch, or pump enough money into Canonical so that it becomes a viable competitor. The distro is not where the alpha is. So why all the fuss ?

izacus 3y ago
Why on earth would they do that?
kjs3 3y ago
Only if they make Canonical dump snap.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Pouring money into canonical seems unlikely to make ubuntu better. Paying people to work on Debian as individual contributors probably would.

oneplane 3y ago

Seems like we're in a period of ecosystems shooting themselves in the foot, be it 'social' media, software, banking or politics. I suppose, in a way, we have gotten accustomed to a relatively long period of stability. As for what RHEL thinks they are doing with this: every time a (IMO: nasty) enterprise vendor starts packaging their software in containers (IMO: a good thing!), distributions become less relevant by the day, and so does their view on software distribution.

noizejoy 3y ago
Business models break, when money is no longer almost free. Interest rates near zero created a historically rather unique environment. That’s now apparently ending.
meribold 3y ago
> Seems like we're in a period of ecosystems shooting themselves in the foot, be it 'social' media, software, banking or politics. Examples of companies besides Red Hat that have also been burning huge amounts of good will lately indeed come to mind easily: Activision Blizzard, Reddit, Netflix, …
colechristensen 3y ago
We’re in a period of unsustainably subsidized free environments being culled. People trying to monetize free things in order to continue providing free things seems to not be working all that well. The thing you do to make money and the free thing you offer probably just need to be separate for long term stability. The Linux kernel model of lots of institutions supporting an actually free project is probably the only real long term successful free model.
- oneplane 3y ago
  I suppose the linux kernel model has the benefit of having a mutual dependency so you can't really easily long-term extract value without adding value. (i.e. forking the kernel means you'll be spending a lot of time keeping up, so doing to work to upstream your stuff has a real benefit)

totallywrong 3y ago

> When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but free", users like me were justifiably angered. I miss CentOS too. But how is that justifiable anger? Are you angry at the myriad of companies using open source code to build a paid product, and not giving it for free? I absolutely think that it backfired and they shouldn't have done it, but I also understand they had no obligation to maintain a 1:1 free alternative of their main product. That's just an unrealistic expectation imo.

shaan7 3y ago
These days isn't OpenShift their main product?
soneil 3y ago
Changing the support terms from 10 years to 1 year mid-stream lost them a lot of trust. It's not just what they did, it's how.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  To that, I couldn't agree more.
leni536 3y ago
It's not comparable, as the source code is mostly not theirs.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  As long as they comply with the licenses, which they do, that's largely irrelevant I'm afraid.
  - soneil 3y ago
    I'm a little confused how this new move still complies with many licences. As a paying customer you receive access the sources, as you're supposed to - but under contractual terms that you can't share them. Take the GPL as the most famous example. Providing me GPL'd sources that I'm not allowed to redistribute under the same terms definitely feels like it's against the spirit of the agreement. I'm too warm-blooded to argue whether it's under the letter.

singpolyma3 3y ago

Can someone explain what the value of RHEL is supposed to be?

shaan7 3y ago
This comment sums it up quite well I think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438048
op00to 3y ago
Yes, your Red Hat sales person can explain it, or perhaps their web site. Posters are not here to do the bare minimum of research for you that is freely available.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Respectfully, what's wrong with CentOS for testing purposes?

jacooper 3y ago
Isnt 100% compatible with RHEL, so the result won't really represent what would happen on RHEL.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  If it's not 100% compatible then how compatible is it? If 100% compatibility is the requirement then the only option has always been RHEL built, packaged, and distributed by Red Hat. Not some 3rd party's infrastructure.
  - teruakohatu 3y ago
    Apparently the package versions don't match and the order they are released don't match RHEL, so it is not possible to be sure a package that works on CentOS Stream works on any given version of RHEL.
  - secabeen 3y ago
    CentOS Stream is not the same operating system as RHEL. Original CentOS nearly was. 99+% of the time, if you ran into a bug in CentOS, that bug could be replicated in RHEL. For most people, that 99%+ compatibility was enough.

mrmister00 3y ago

Of course they're dumb, they are IBM now.

synergy20 3y ago

I have been using debian and ubuntu for almost two decades without using Redhat, things seems OK, will this change by Redhat push more users to debian|ubuntu side? Canonical probably will do something similar in the future, but at least we have Debian.

fariszr 3y ago
I mean they might've already done it, is Ubuntu Pros source code open?

ledgerdev 3y ago

Reminds me of the wise words of Steve Jobs, the sales and marketing people are running things now. The product Genius has been rotted out, by people who have no conception of good product, no feeling in their heart about wanting to help customers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4

PedroBatista 3y ago

Red Hat is IBM, do the math. This is not the inflammatory surface level comment that it seems to be, Red Hat invests and supports a lot of opensource projects and there are many good people there, but.. Red Hat is IBM, do the math.

jacobsenscott 3y ago

It is completely mystifying to me that anyone would use a "commercial" version of linux at all. I can't image commercial linux support is better than google and s.*overflow. I guess the answer is, as always, lawyers.

teruakohatu 3y ago
> I can't image commercial linux support is better than google You get a real expert engineer answering your questions and even fixing package source verses an outdated answer on SO.
tredre3 3y ago
> I can't image commercial linux support is better than google and s.*overflow. I guess the answer is, as always, lawyers. Then I guess you've never dealt with Red Hat. Sure I can spend a few hours Googling about mysterious log entries, blindly try various solutions that will fuck my system even more, and eventually I might even find a solution. OR I can just ping my support contact, get on with other tasks, and receive a magical solution by the end of the day. And if it's a software bug, they might even patch it!
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Wow that sounds like commercial support actually worth paying for. I work a lot with MS and we pay them a lot for support, which is terrible. It's double-outsourced (first to Accenture which then outsources to a number of other companies). It means the support agents are very far from anyone in the core product and they are measured on the amount of escalations so they are extremely reluctant to do that. Meaning if you have a question that's easily answered in the docs, it's great. If it's not and something is actually broken on their side (which is usually the case because we can read...), you're stuck defending yourself against "It says in the docs it should work so you're doing it wrong". Once you manage to convince them something is really not working as it should they'll stall by constantly demanding logs and updates to the latest version. By the time they review the logs another version is out and they will demand that. Eventually after a couple weeks you can manage to escalate to an account manager and force the issue to go to someone who actually knows anything. It's the kind of support that really feels like part of the problem rather than a trusted advisor. I'm kinda surprised RedHat isn't like this, in my experience it's only been small companies that I've seen excellent support from.

CrLf 3y ago

I don't think Red Hat is trying to kill clones, but I believe they're trying to kill clones that are "1:1 compatible with RHEL". They're trying to force a shift in what clones are supposed to be, and that started with CentOS Stream. Locking the sources to RHEL-proper is just the next step. This may signal their death as a widely-recognizable Linux distribution vendor, but I can't really say I blame them. If CentOS Stream isn't adequate for production — and I see it as being at least as adequate as Debian for those that also upgraded from one RHEL major to the next soon after its release — then the future of clones may lie in becoming downstreams of CentOS just like RHEL is. I do see the value in a CentOS Stream derivative that's more conservative, but it doesn't need to be 1:1 bug compatible with RHEL. Honestly, I don't see the point of 1:1 clones unless you're running some closed-source commercial software. And such software tends to not be supported by its vendor even on 1:1 compatible RHEL clones. I like the Red Hat flavor of Linux, and I like the fact that I can have a machine with an OS installed in 2014 continuing to get security fixes without having to upgrade major versions. But I don't care if that's 1:1 compatible with RHEL (and it doesn't really need to be supported for 10 years).

fariszr 3y ago
Well, for those people who like upgrading, CentOS Stream still doesn't support in place upgrades.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Wait, dnf system-upgrade won’t work? Granted, CentOS Stream has only seen two major releases in its current form, but still.
  - fariszr 3y ago
    AFAIK yes, neither on RHEL. There is no official way to do in place upgrades on CentOS stream.
    - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

BringerOfChaos 3y ago

I'm a former Red Hatter. I left just after the IBM acquisition. We all saw stupid stuff like this coming. It's a sad loss, but the Debian (and Debian-based) world is lovely.

ddtaylor 3y ago
As a long time Debian user for 20+ years I have to say I really prefer dnf/yum over apt/dpkg now. It's significantly faster and has much less version deadlock snafus from my experience in the last 5 years. I still use and support servers from both sides and my Debian servers are often a chore to work with by comparison.

nolist_policy 3y ago

This is great actually! Redhat continues to keep the same maintainers and devs on payroll and working on the same open-source projects, so the OSS ecosystem won't loose anything in that regard. But where will the big research labs that previously used Scientific Linux, then Almalinux go now? CentOS Stream? Debian? They will switch some systems to RHEL, but probably only a minority. I wonder what distro will gain from this, makes me excited for the future.