24 ms·

I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

519 points by stargrave 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
westurner 3y ago
Would it be feasible to sed-replace the RHEL and/or Fedora selinux and container-selinux rulesets for use with other Linux distros? AFAIU only SUSE can run both AppArmor and SELinux? And browsers are running as unconfined in selinux with like all major distros; even on ChromiumOS (which was based on Gentoo, Gnome, and Chrome) where WASM or a paid shell (or 15-30% cut from the Play Store only) is the only way for the kids to Python on the Chromebooks we bought them for school. Wouldn't it be great for them to not have to switch OSes and distros throughout the day.
- mattdm 3y ago
  I don't know about "sed-replace", but you can download the RHEL selinux-policy source package from https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/selinux-policy https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/selinux-policy
hospitalJail 3y ago
Is this a clickbait title? Or do I misunderstand the word enterprise? They are not done with using Linux for "a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort." or "a business or company." They are no longer going to use a specific version of linux that was made by "a business or company." Do people really care that much about linux distros? Between 2 decades of personal use and a few years of professional Fortune 20 use, linux seems to be linux to me. (Could just be that I have stuck to Debian flavors)
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the name of a product. Geerling supports a massive collection of Ansible playbooks, which goes pretty far beyond anybody’s personal use of Linux and would explain why this is a bigger deal than you or I ditching support for a distro.
  - hospitalJail 3y ago
    I've always heard it as Red Hat. Weird to see the parenthesis. I would not have cared if it said 'I'm done with red hat enterprise linux' I took it as 'I'm done with enterprise linux'
    - Arnavion 3y ago
      The parentheses means they're done with RHEL the OS and RH the company as a whole.
- brightball 3y ago
  Geerling is a big name in Red Hat. He’s responsible for most of the popular Ansible packages out there.
- re-thc 3y ago
  > Do people really care that much about linux distros? They sadly do. There's a whole wave of consultants and engineers tied to the RHEL ecosystem and wouldn't be able to install without typing "yum".
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    "sadly"? Your second point is valid but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package
    - re-thc 3y ago
      > "sadly"? In response to the origin post that Linux is Linux. Kubernetes and Docker tries really hard to hide this differentiator of Linux distros. > but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package It gets worse than that. It's a daily struggle to explain the different between npm, yarn and pnpm for example. If only they understood what is "an npm package".
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Was rpm -i deprecated ? /s
  - freedude 3y ago
    dnf, yum is slated to be deprecated. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_basic_system_settings/managing-software-packages_configuring-basic-system-settings https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
- teilo 3y ago
  Yes, we care about flavors of Linux in the enterprise. RHEL is an industry standard distribution that nearly all vendors support. We have a significant amount of commercial software that is only supported on RHEL or its derivates. Not running on a supported distro? You get no support. That’s a non-starter for mission critical systems in the enterprise. We used to be able to run this software, fully supported, on CentOS. IBM pulled the rug out from under us. Rocky and Alma rose to the occasion, and the various vendors supported one or both, since it was still RHEL minus branding. Now IBM is cutting off those distros also in an attempt to force everyone into RHEL licenses and support contracts. But because it IS Linux, after all, a lot of enterprises like mine have NEVER needed support for the OS itself. We just needed our vendors to support their software running on it, and we needed vulnarability patching on the OS, something which CentOS, Rocky, and Alma always provided. If I had my way, 100% of what we run would be on Debian. I have Debian running everywhere possible. But not all 3rd party applications support Debian. I’m hoping that one consequence of IBM’s move here will be to drive them all to Debian.
  - volkadav 3y ago
    Yeah, I'm hopeful the five year support window for Debian LTS releases now will help drive that migration. I suspect though the lowest-effort path for migrating from one commercial vendor to another will be towards Canonical, given Ubuntu's LTS releases and existing infrastructure around commercial support / certified hardware compatibility lists / etc. I may not be a huge fan of some of their decisions over the years but as my objections have tended to be technical rather than business/contractual/ethical I think they'd be nicer to deal with than IBM or Oracle, heh. :)
- volkadav 3y ago
  There can be quite a number of distro-specific quirks to bear in mind if you're targeting more than one, enough so that as a downstream product vendor it's nice to only have one or two ideally slowly-moving targets (say, RHEL and Ubuntu LTS) to test on/document/support instead of dozens. In turn it's also nice as an end-user to have a platform with long periods of stability/support so you're not having to rebuild/retune your systems' foundational bits every year. (I have no particular dog in this fight. I mostly left the RedHat ecosystem behind a long time ago, but I understand it's still a big deal for a lot of vendors and clients. From an individual dev/user perspective, I agree that more or less as long as whatever is a posix-y environment, I can figure it out and get my work done, whether it's solaris or slackware or whatever haha.)
poo-yie 3y ago
I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?
- donatj 3y ago
  You’re missing the fact that they are pedaling GPL software, and thus they are inclined to be offering it for free to the whole world, definitionally.
  - lagniappe 3y ago
    I'm asking this non-facetiously: Is there a wikipedia page or a written record of all the people/corps who've been taken to task in court over a GPL violation, or a large company such as IBM? If yes, was the penalty commensurate?
    - donatj 3y ago
      This appears to be a decent though seemingly incomplete list with outcomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation
      - komatineni 3y ago
        Thanks for the pointer actually.
      - lagniappe 3y ago
        Thanks, this is just what I was looking for.
        away271828 3y ago
        It is incomplete however. For example, there was a long-running lawsuit against VMware that was never resolved. [1] Was sort of an odd case and pretty much no one else in the industry wanted to go near it. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmware-lawsuit/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...
pamhalpert 3y ago
Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the "freeloader" comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything. If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on the developer program with free subs, and removing pain in the ass subscription limitations which is why people want to use Cent/Rocky/Alma to begin with.
- criddell 3y ago
  > RESELLING without contributing anything I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.
  - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
    You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?
    - otterley 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
        I'm actually from one of the countries they are moving jobs to, it's very US-centric to see racism whenever someone uses any geographic location that's not the "rich West". Red Hat had some pretty sizeable layoffs recently and a bulk of their recruiting efforts are in the countries with cheaper labour.
      - isityouyesitsme 3y ago
        Thinly-veiled racism? You are conflating geopolitics and economics that could concern someone who could end up being affected by such a trend (which the poster isn't, as they said later) with racism. Is someone in a given country supposed to be HAPPY that a company founded in their country is intentionally putting support engineers within their founding country out of work, while simultaneously making support a worse experience for users? Have you ever been in the situation of being on midnight call to the other side of the world while speaking with someone with whom you're having a mutually difficult time communicating? It sucks. Moving support into localities for better servicing the customer is fine. This isn't the trend. Fuck RH and anyone else who does this.
jrochkind1 3y ago
The Software Freedom Conservancy legal analysis of RHEL and GPL that OP links to is the most interesting part to me. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
- BeefySwain 3y ago
  Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452101
- cryptonector 3y ago
  Wishy-washy language there about skirting lines doesn't make that a very good analysis. You can use others' GPL code in your products and charge money for it. You have to "publish" the GPL'ed sources (and any sources of yours that derive from GPL'ed code) on demand -- publish as in: if someone asks, you have to give it to them, but there's no requirement that there be a public download page or anything like that, and you can send the sources out in DVDs or flash drives or whatever media you like, and you can charge nominal amounts for the media. I.e., you don't have to make it easy to get the sources. And you don't have to provide the built product for free. You can do a lot within the boundaries of the GPL. If IBM/RH does that, so what? One can even do this sort of thing w/o GPL. For example, SQLite3 is in the public domain, yet the SQLite Consortium exists and makes what I imagine is good money for D. R. Hipp and his employees with zero competition from forks precisely because SQLite3 is very difficult to credibly fork, and SQLite3 is difficult to fork because the better test suite for it is proprietary and secret. To a business, open source is a tool. Even for individuals, open source is a tool. A young person just starting out and with few resources might make useful software open source so as to gain notoriety and better employment, or even to start a business.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Yup. It goes from "These businesses are abusing the GPL and software freedom!" to "Well, they are following the GPL but that doesn't result in what I want!" This is why we have GPL 2 and 3, for example. Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat, but nowhere near RHEL.
1oyvey 3y ago
I 100% support and appreciate Jeff's (and everyone's) right to take a stance when it comes to how they spend their time. We have a finite amount of time available to us, and should spend it on what's important to us, especially as that changes. See Jeff's blog post on "Saying No"[1] that really hits home with why this is important. What I'm having trouble understanding is the overwhelming use of IBM-related anecdotes (regardless of historical truthiness, and I'm not making any claim that it's wise or unwise to be wary - that's to each their own), reframed statements painted to appear like Red Hat's made brash statements about its community, and the general gall needed to make statements such as "tell your employees to stop [doing a thing]". I get that this event may have felt like a violation of trust, and that a violation of trust probably hurts the most. To that end, I suppose emotional responses make sense. But it would have been significantly less cognitive load (on ones self, as an open source maintainer/contributor) to just pull your support and move forward. [1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/just-say-no https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/just-say-no
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
INTPenis 3y ago
[flagged]
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  This honestly sounds like an infomercial testimonial and is bizarre to read on here.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    I assure you I'm not being payed by anyone to make comments online, in fact my $dayjob is paying huge amounts of money to IBM/Red Hat for our partnership with them. I've been using open source for over 20 years, and I admit to using CentOS because it was a FREE version of a stable RHEL distro. I wish I could find a free, community-based and non-commercial distro in the Linux ecosystem that I was happy with, but I just can't. The closest one is Debian, but I still don't want to leave RHEL.
- GordonS 3y ago
  I'm curious what features RHEL has over Debian, that make it worth paying for? I used CentOS for years, then switched to Debian, and it's been plain sailing, so I'm wondering what l could gain with RHEL.
  - INTPenis 3y ago
    Sure, I'm reading from my personal notes since I've answered this question so many times online. And keep in mind that I wrote these notes a couple of years ago. I work with large clients and having a known corporation behind your product is pretty nice, besides that RHEL-compatible distros are still the only ones supported by a lot of proprietary enterprise software. I'm not only a RHEL-convert, but an SElinux convert, and I think it's pretty neat. It can completely sandbox an application, but it does have a steep learning curve. Red Hat are behind a lot of innovation within the entire Linux ecosystem. Dnf have some features that large clients require, like history and rollback. Debian apt (last I checked) started services on install, which can be very disruptive. It also means they sometimes uninstall similar services because there's a conflict. Cutting edge podman/oci stuff, signed container images, and more. And before you reply with "yes but Debian also has X", keep in mind that Red hat has probably been doing it much longer.
gtirloni 3y ago
I'm running Debian for a week now and it works great. I only regret not jumping the RH ship earlier.
zitterbewegung 3y ago
Red Hat is done with you also. IBM right now only cares about paying customers.
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  Shocking
mattl 3y ago
Will Red Hat start discreetly tagging source code releases per subscription to find out who is sharing source code?
- mbreese 3y ago
  If they haven’t already, I’m sure you could expect them to. That’s the only way to really police the policy.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I've read a suggestion that that actually would violate the assorted open source licenses in question, which generally require some version of giving the user the same source as was used to build the binaries they got. Of course, they might be able to just do it on the more permissively licensed packages.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    So all it would take is a couple of separate releases of the SC, and you can diff to see the changes.
    - mattl 3y ago
      Yeah, a few well intentioned people could buy copies of RHEL and compare source code releases.
jmclnx 3y ago
>Red Hat seems to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer as of this writing -- EDIT: I read twitter, seems it may mean number of machines as opposed to open sockets. But a very confusing post. I stopped with RHEL 2 months ago at work, I use Slackware at home. What does that quote mean, if I get a RHEL developer license, am I limited to the number of open sockets ? That almost goes back to the per user licenses in the old UNIX Days. If I ever had to use RHEL, I would now say no just because of this.
- buzer 3y ago
  > am I limited to the number of open sockets I assume they mean CPU sockets.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    I was thinking the same, if so that is a direct line to how AIX is provisioned, limitations on use and pay more to get more. I the author of the post says, time stop RHEL support. I wonder if/when the FSF will weigh in.
    - jmclnx 3y ago
      >TYPO: I the author of the post says I meant to say: Like the author of the post says
  - yrro 3y ago
    In Red Hat Subscription Management I can see that each entitlement for the "Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals" product is good for a system with up to 128 sockets. And you get 16 (or possibly 240, or possibly this is a bug) entitlements.
    - yrro 3y ago
      It's now back down to 16, aww!
- keeler 3y ago
xt00 3y ago
Could somebody who maintains a particularly important open source software change the license to say basically “you must release your source code to anyone who requests it free of charge whether they are a customer or not”? Yes Redhat is a for profit company, but them deciding to make a business off of software that has licenses that might change to their detriment is their problem. Oh wait is that what they are doing to others now too? Well I guess that’s what happens..
- eastbound 3y ago
  Free has never meant monetarily free. Open-source means you can recompile, and thus maintain after the EOL of the provider, and code secrets aren’t secret. This is already a step above proprietary software. For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code. But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.
  - f33d5173 3y ago
    Open source means you can redistribute the code having received it. If you aren't allowed to do so, the program is 'source-available', not open source.
    - neverartful 3y ago
      This is very enlightening! Thanks for sharing it. Ok, I can now see how RH might have backed themselves into a corner with the license.
  - xt00 3y ago
    Yea selling an entire OS that consists of a ton of other peoples open source projects—often paid for by other companies to have somebody work on a thing — then when people say “hey we should get a copy of the small tweaks you did to all of those bits” and they say no, seems like a situation where changing the license on enough critical parts force the OS maker to not withhold the software. What would stop Redhat from saying “we’ve decided the only customers we care about will pay us 50k to be a customer, therefore anybody who doesn’t pay 50k cannot get source from us.. and anybody distributing the source code owes us 50k..”
dmix 3y ago
I've heard people on HN say you can't build a huge business off open source. That Red Hat was a one-off. Maybe this supports the narrative? Assuming it goes poorly I mean.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Why? They did have a good thing going; that they then went and decided to shoot their own foot doesn't invalidate the earlier success.
  - dmix 3y ago
    I can't personally judge yet how much this will affect their business, bad for optics and community and all that sure. But regardless the narrative still implies they were already successful (aka "a one-off success"). Businesses rarely last forever. A decade plus of success is still a big success. The point is more about the extreme difficulty of building for-profit businesses strictly off Linux-style OSS. Where people will pay for premium versions supported by paid dev teams. Otherwise it's just a glorified consulting business and not really an OSS software selling business. I'd be interested to hear the motivations for doing so. Whether they strong downward financial pressure or were stable + merely wanted more growth.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    Did they shoot themselves in the foot? It was a lot easier selling RHEL licenses when people were running on-prem workloads. These days the support contract many enterprises want is from their cloud provider, not their OS vendor.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Fantastic opportunity for someone to found Blue Hat.
InTheArena 3y ago
Time to rally around the flag here. This is an incredibly hostile move by Redhat - and the attitude that only they provide value in the ecosystem is incredibly toxic and a direct threat to what open source stands for.
- komatineni 3y ago
  Without a doubt. Not sure if this is purely from IBM + Corp or Redhat sales folks finally getting over the whole idea of FOSS
lowercased 3y ago
I wish I could get rid of RHEL. Forced to use it - and pay through the nose - with a state agency I'm doing contract work for.
belltaco 3y ago
If the SFC loses this case I wonder if this will lead to the creation and mass adoption of GPL v4 explicitly forbidding this loophole(and others which have popped up over the years).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MDGeist 3y ago
IBM trying to shake some loose change out of Red Hat users and copying Elastic's homework with the licensing switcheroo?
Anon_Forever 3y ago
RHEL isn't a choice for a lot of us. If you work in finserv/government (especially DoD), many/most of the time RHEL is effectively the only option.
- dmix 3y ago
  That probably won't change will it?
  - Anon_Forever 3y ago
    Probably not, at least not initially. Hopefully we see more usage of distros like Alpine out in the security field.
    - pnutjam 3y ago
      Why not SLES?
      - Anon_Forever 3y ago
        SLES is worse than RHEL in my eyes. Their support is horrendous, absolutely the worst in the industry. Their early move to btrfs caused so many headaches at client sites. I haven't trusted their technical decision making since.
satish-setty 3y ago
> They used to have edgy ads quoting Ghandi and ... It's funny they used to be so devoted to that Ghandi quote ... It is Gandhi, not Ghandi!
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  oops, mis-typed that!
commandersaki 3y ago
Glad to see redhat go down the shitter. I was never a fan, but that's not the reason to hate on redhat. Everything is behind a paywall or a license. They just seemed like another Microsoft, especially when they started licensing Linux on at a per CPU core level. I think the only thing going for it is their support, but in my 20 years in the industry I've only ever used vendor support like once or twice, I've usually overcome obstacles on my own. At a previous workplace we had Ubuntu without licensing or support. The company tried to make us switch our infrastructure to redhat because they wanted indemnification. So we instead purchased Ubuntu support/licensing and again - never once did we use it or need it. Virtually everything we built we figured out ourselves. So when it comes to vendor support, I usually don't give a shit.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  My interest in RHEL+clones waned when a kernel update didn't play nice with ZFS, DKMS notwithstanding, and then dropped to zero when searches for configuration information began to inevitably lead to paywalled pages on Red Hat's site (also a problem for Wildfly vs. JBoss).
- pnutjam 3y ago
  Vendor support is pretty crappy. By the time you're done gathering all the logs and running out the response time clock you've usually figured it out. Then at least half the time they do help, it's wrong because you're environment has some special requirement.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
synergy20 3y ago
I'm done with everything related to Redhat after Redhat8(no it's not RHEL 8, it's their non-enterprise distro before it's ditched and Fedora was invented as far as I can recall), yes it's about two decades ago. I since switched to Debian ecosystem, and never looked back. I was pissed off enough to never use any rpm-based distro ever since.
- commandersaki 3y ago
  Yep, don't understand why the hate now and not back then when Redhat commercialised the hell out of everything. Even RH7 was bad trying to push their Satellite crap. However I note back then there was no Ubuntu and Debian was always lagging far far behind.
numbsafari 3y ago
People talk about how pre-IBM RedHat was somehow a good player. Perhaps that is true on the Linux side, where there were more eyes. Outside of Linux, I can say they were definitely toxic after acquiring JBoss, locking down previously open-sourced features, shipping bugs that could only be fixed if you had access to the enterprise contract, deleting content from the Wiki that they wanted behind the paywall of the enterprise contract. Even if some of that started pre-acquisition, it certainly accelerated post. It's amazing to me that anyone upstream would lift a finger for RedHat at this point.
johnea 3y ago
How many times is everyone going to be so "shocked" when a corporation screws them over in a business descision? Why would you have picked Red Hat in the first place? Choose an independent distribution for more technical and end user oriented project trajectory. Archlinux was the poster child for this until it basically fell to Red Hat with systemd adoption. At this point Voidlinux is the most robust independent distro...
jlbooker 3y ago
The IBM MBAs have finally taken over Redhat. Anything to squeeze another dollar out, even if it's counterproductive in the long term. We knew it would happen. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long.
- balozi 3y ago
  Said MBAs are in it for their annual bonuses. You'll see this in many companies today: go-nowhere/soon-to-be-canceled projects are launched -> bonuses are awarded -> people move on -> rinse and repeat. Only fools stick around for long-term gains. On the other hand - maybe the workers have finally cracked the corporate secret.
- ruraljuror 3y ago
  I hear a lot of this sentiment, but from what I see both internally at rh and news publicly available there is nothing to back up what you are saying. The decision seems to have been made by many long-tenured folk. So what if the opposite of what you’re saying is true?
  - Yeroc 3y ago
    Perhaps long-tenured folk that are now incentivized differently from how they were previously?
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    I work with some long-tenured folks and am myself one (at a different open source company) and let me tell you that incentives are not the same as they were two decades ago -- and we've not sold out to fucking IBM. Redhat people, as good as they may have been in the past, are now IBM people and if they aren't operating like IBM people they will be replaced by people who do.
kkielhofner 3y ago
Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would want to waste their time being a tester for a commercial product is very strange to me when there is Debian and even Arch which (for a rolling release) seems to be substantially more stable, better documented, etc. I understand why it exists and it has its place but absent a few specific scenarios I have no idea why it would be a first choice for anyone.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Fedora has been one of the most stable distributions I've ever used (I used it as my main system for ~6 years, but moved to another distribution now for unrelated reasons). It's also mostly developed by the community — Red Hat provides the infrastructure, but not much actual development.
- noirscape 3y ago
  Fedoras big strength is the update speed. The problem with distros is that you're always picking an update cycle tradeoff. Debian has decades old versions of packages that they'll backport security fixes into till pretty much the end of time (RHEL also does this but is well, commercially backed while Debian is entirely volunteer driven, which has opened up Debian to maintainer shenanigans a couple of times). Ubuntu is more up-to-date by virtue of simply importing the Debian backports repo every 9 months. Arch Linux meanwhile runs on "whatever the latest upstream is", and with that you have pretty much 90% of the actively used Linux distros covered. All of these models are untenable for someone who likes to stay up-to-date with the latest version but doesn't want to drop down into the occasional shell hell that Arch provides. Fedora kinda... sits in the middle of that. It updates to latest version every 6 months, has a generally sane-ish release cycle that follows the most popular scripting language (Fedoras cycle is specifically staggered to allow for python releases to coincide with it every other release). That in turn makes it the best OS to recommend for Desktop Linux if you're new to Linux. As for why not Arch/Debian/Ubuntu for beginners: Arch requires wanting to maintain the OS for the sporadic breakdown or strange default setting (not to mention the shell being an expected skill beyond running package management commands), Debian is too out-of-date to be useful and Ubuntu is only slightly better than Debian.
freedomben 3y ago
I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. I'm unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I'm re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don't believe that Red Hat's leadership cares a whole lot about open source anymore. If they do, they've demonstrated that they are willing to harm open source in order to (short-term at least) increase sales. (congrats salespeople, you finally won and killed CentOS. And congrats to all the people who used to tell the salesperson "I can run CentOS for free, why should I buy RHEL?") But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion or the company's opinion. I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community. But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive. Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don't agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious. What's the goal here? Is it to polarize into good and evil sides? Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the "other side" seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them? I like a lot of OP's content, but I am a little worried that he's a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it's driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.
- lakomen 3y ago
  It is exactly the right response.
- dmix 3y ago
  > But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion. Yeah, Red Hat wasn't the one that called them "freeloaders", this was language The Register used in an article: >> Having given the move time to successfully eliminate most of the clones, Red Hat then killed off its own official free version of its paid-for flagship product. Instead, it switched to offering a free test version, an announcement which it made accompanied with lots of positive-sounding language about community involvement, and so on. In fact, what it was really doing was cutting off those that might be seen, from its perspective, as a bunch of freeloaders. The move was accompanied with free production deployment of RHEL for developers – but only up to 16 machines. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tpush 3y ago
And another comment section full of people who don't understand the GPL but are very confident about their wrong takes.
- jjnoakes 3y ago
  Agreed. I don't know why, but I expected more from HN commenters.
bvrmn 3y ago
Some reasons why Stream is not replacement for Centos alike (Alma, Rocky, ...). 1. Stream can't be used as base to build el-compatible packages. There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility. 2. Stream has no large (several years) support cycle and can't be used as a stable system. Yes, there is a big community who don't need a paid licensed support from a RH and ready to help with bug reports and testing.
- indigodaddy 3y ago
  How long typically do packages percolate in Stream before making their way to EL?
  - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
    The time delta to the next minor version, usually. RHEL has a release in the spring and the fall. The last pair of releases were in May and November. If something landed in CentOS Stream in between May and November, it will probably be part of the November release. If it's after that, then it'll be part of the next spring release. It's not particularly complex, in my opinion.
- mattdm 3y ago
  > There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility. This is incorrect. Or, sure, there are no _guarantees_, but any such break would also break a future RHEL release, and is therefore a bug. 2. Five years.
  - bvrmn 3y ago
    AFAIK, there is no rule RHEL is strictly based on Stream.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      RHEL is branched from Stream and released from the branch every 6 months. I challenge you to find _one_ package in RHEL (as of the git.centos.org c9 branch) that reverted an ABI breakage that is in Stream, without said reversion having been applied to Stream as well.
predictabl3 3y ago
I don't mean this antagonistically and I realize I am lucky to have this perspective maybe, but all of this just reinforces a thought I've had for a long time, I feel bad for people forced to use these types of enterprise-y Linuxes.
- Double_a_92 3y ago
  There is nothing wrong with RHEL, it's all about the support contract (which you want or even legally need as a big company). RH / IBM is trying to hit the partner companies of RockyLinux, AlmaLinux and so on. E.g. for RockyLinux there is a company called CIQ which sells enterprise support, which itself may or may not already be a dick move towards RH since they are chipping at their business without really contributing to it.
liv-io 3y ago
For all the RHEL to Debian refugees, here are some Ansible roles. I made the jump when they killed CentOS: https://github.com/liv-io/ansible-roles-debian https://github.com/liv-io/ansible-roles-debian
JeremyNT 3y ago
I'm sympathetic to Jeff's position, but this is I believe the third post from this individual about this topic to reach the HN front page in the last week. At this point I feel like there's no more blood to be wrung from this stone. Jeff is free to take his ball and go home with it - just like Red Hat, in fact - but I think we're past the "this is notable news" phase and another post from Jeff about his frustrations doesn't really further the conversation.
- xena 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure Hacker News isn't the target audience for this post.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    It wasn't. I usually write a blog post separate from the script of my video (this requires a lot more time, but I feel like audiences like HN deserve better writing than a YouTube script). But in this case I pasted the script almost verbatim (just adjusting formatting).
  - freedomben 3y ago
    True enough. If it were I suspect OP wouldn't have glossed over the entirety of Red Hat's contribution as Red Hat would grab a copy of "Linux", add Red Hat magic sauce, RHEL comes out. Reminds me of the "how to draw an owl" post :-D
- jchw 3y ago
  Personally, I don't mind it. It's a big deal in the world of open source, and as someone who was mostly uninitialized about CentOS and RHEL after all these years, I find these posts somewhat enlightening, even this one. I'll grant you that it's probably not necessary to have three posts or have them all go to HN's frontpage, but all-in-all it doesn't seem like such a big deal either. The people voted, I suppose.
- dark-star 3y ago
  Exactly, who is this Geerling guy anyway? ;-) (I'm kidding, of course, but a few days ago I had to google him...I don't follow many Tech YouTubers' channels anymore)
throwawayyy9237 3y ago
I hope I'm not misunderstanding this, but isn't the current arrangement perfectly valid under GPL? GPL states: - If I provided _modified_ binaries - I also have to provide the sources That's what's happening now for people that can download the binaries. What happened before was: - _Anyone_ could download the sources (Not a GPL requirement). So, now, IIUC if you can download the binaries you can download the sources. If you can't download the binaries (not a customer, for instance) you can't download the sources. The contract termination is not related to GPL in this sense.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  GPL grants you the right to redistribute those binaries and sources. The contract is terminated if you exercise your GPL rights. One of GPL clauses is that you can't add more restrictions. Terminating a contract seems like a restriction to me. Also, terminating a contract is very different from not renewing one.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Nah. GPLv3: > You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License. Given that there are a mix of licenses in use on Red Hat's distribution, they could be in a world of hurt. There's GPL, GPLv3, LGPL, CDDL, Apache, and so on. These all have different terms. GPLv3 in particular is the one that I think gets legally interesting, and I think it would be a neat court case. Courts have recently taken up issues like non-compete agreements, and of course the enforceability of various contracts and licenses has always been a topic for interesting court cases. This would be the same way. Is the GPLv3 actually enforceable? Can you legally have a license or contract forcing action on the recipient of a piece of IP? To say that RH did nothing wrong might actually come down to the legal fund at IBM of course, since courts are neither fair nor free.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  The issue with the GPL isn't about being able to download source code. It's unambiguous that they are complying with that requirement. The issue is the sentence "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." They're violating that by disallowing the people they do give the source code to from publicly mirroring it (on pain of terminating their contract).
fariszr 3y ago
> [^1] Red Hat seems to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer as of this writing, but nothing official has been announced yet. https://twitter.com/fareszr/status/1673145072714665984 https://twitter.com/fareszr/status/1673145072714665984 Hey I'm the one who wrote that tweet. Mike, who first noted this on Mastodon, just updated his tweet (toot?) to say that his contacts at Red hat confirmed that this is a bug, the dev Subscription is still limited to 16 servers.
WaitWaitWha 3y ago
I was quite upset with the abandonment of CentOS. Now RHEL is pushing even more. But, let's forget the ethical quandary they walked into. As others pointed out, this is self-defeating business direction. Vast majority of government Linux systems in several countries was CentOS and RHEL. Lot of the improvement can be directly traced to FOSS improvements, outside of RHEL. Majority of the recommendations to use Cent & RHEL in government systems came from the users and developers. It is clear today that users & developers (aka customers or consumers) can make serious impact to a brand by simply refusing to do business with the organization that upset them. Pivoting from CentOS/RHEL to another distro is significantly easier then pivoting from a tangible product or store.
peoplearepeople 3y ago
Redhat will simply find themselves not supported if none of the open source projects can run CI against their distro.
- chudsandbedbugs 3y ago
  Open source projects can get RHEL for free. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux-open-source-organizations https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-ent...
  - peoplearepeople 3y ago
    That seems like the same difficult process, just without paying. People need to be able to just get their docker image from dockerhub or similar
egberts1 3y ago
Embrace, engulf, extinguish. Looking at you as well, systemd and Pottering. I am an embedded engineer and this act of engulfing is also stifling me and my effort to provide a reliable and easy-to-maintain Linux/GNU away from the likes of RedHat.
nazgulsenpai 3y ago
What about the small companies that started using CentOS then grew to needing enterprise support and switched to Red Hat? I'm sure they considered this before making the change, but I always assumed this was at least part of the strategy. Now there will be no free entry point that can be converted with a simple repo-swap.
cturner 3y ago
RHEL has a major ecosystem advantage related to drivers that they may not be aware of. They risk ruining this, as I will try to explain. At the time industry started to take Linux seriously, RHEL was the dominant distro. As a result, and by accident, RHEL+derivs became the primary target for commercial hardware drivers. As an example - it's easier to get obscure low-latency network and packet-capture cards working on RHEL+derivs than on other systems. RHEL+derivs is the assumed standard when you talk to firms that make that kind of stuff. As a result of driver support, redhat derivs became the standard for commercial deployment. Redhat did not get this volume. The deployed volume is with all the Centos/Rocky/Alma that is deployed in hedge funds, prop firms, oil search grids, etc. As I see it, this driver situation is the real value in the Redhat ecosystem. The userland is a bit of a mess, the package manager does not impress me. But I deploy RHEL-derivs because drivers work with no hassle. If Redhat were able to cancel the derivatives, they would trigger the tipping point where industry ceases to treat RHEL+derivs as the standard driver target. Firms using centos on five thousand servers are not suddenly going to start paying USD 350 / year / server where previously they paid nothing. They will move to Debian, and eat the pain of the transition. Commercial driver culture would swiftly follow. That culture change would not take years. It would take days. I think Redhat's per-server sales model is naive. USD 350 / year gets you a license with no support. This probably gets some commerce from small-business, and a bit more from firms with traditional service expectations. But is that really where the opportunity is? When I set up a data-centre presence, I want to PXE-boot each server. This way I can modify the system image for the grid by creating a new PXE image and rebooting hosts. Getting to this setup is fiddly. I wish there was an off-the-shelf solution from Redhat that did a good job of it. USD 2000 per year per site per 100 servers, including support for the PXE device itself. Redhat could coexist with the derivs if it took this path. If they built this as an appliance, that product could become ubiquitous like firewalls and network switches.
- nine_k 3y ago
  If you don't mind, what makes more niche hardware drivers work / build better against RHEL? I suppose RHEL uses basically the same kernel, with patches that don't alter its interface too substantially. So I presume that a driver in source form, or even partly in binary blob form, should build and work approximately equally well with any stock kernel. Beside the driver developers apparently using RHEL / CentOS (so on them the drivers are known to work), what am I missing?
parasense 3y ago
To quote Jeff: > Here's how it used to work: > Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux > They would release a new version. > They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Hat no longer does any RHEL development behind the corporate firewall, and does everything out in the open in CentOS Stream. There is one caveat for security CVEs, but effectively those go into CentOS Stream and RHEL at the same time when the CVE embargo expires. What this comes down to is wilfully ignoring CentOS stream. All the clones of RHEL can simply track CentOS stream, and even replicate all the "Secret Sauce" that is the CentOS Stream CI/CD workflow. The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Two thoughts: > The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before. Doing so bug-for-bug requires more effort than it did a few weeks ago. And they're basically doing that work in parallel with Red Hat itself (duplication of effort). Also, making a change like this (forcing Rocky and AlmaLinux to change in the middle of the 9.x release cycle), when the previous change (killing CentOS) was _also_ in the middle of the 8.x release cycle, with not even 24 hours warning... makes me feel this change was not _only_ made "to make CentOS and RHEL development better." If that were the case, the changes would be announced with at _least_ weeks (if not months) of warning, so the community could plan for it instead of getting blind-sided... now twice in a row.
  - CrLf 3y ago
    Why do bug-for-bug with RHEL at all? Why not turn Alma and Rocky into stable distributions in their own right? If this pushes RHEL into oblivion, why should anyone care? The Debian ecosystem isn't centered on Ubuntu, it's centered on Debian. Comparisons between the two ecosystems are invalid because of this simple fact. It would be nice to see the "Red Hat" ecosystem recenter around something which isn't a direct source release of a commercial product. Alma and Rocky should rebase on CentOS Stream for starters, and then try to get closer to Fedora as an upstream. (BTW, I speak as someone who did corporate systems administration for years and understands the use case of replacing RHEL licenses with free CentOS installs perfectly.)
CrLf 3y ago
Why can't AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux drop their bug-for-bug compatibility commitment, and become stable distributions in their own right, based on CentOS Stream? I think this ecosystem would gain a lot from these distributions having their own identity, instead of being just 1:1 copies of RHEL. Change my mind. ;)
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  Many enterprise apps are distributed as binary release that compatible with RHEL, and people want to run them without using RHEL, especially in situations when it doesn't make sense to purchase RHEL licenses.
  - CrLf 3y ago
    I understand that scenario, having lived in it for many years. However, in practice, that doesn't require bug-for-bug compatibility. The proof of this is that such software tends to run perfectly fine even across different RHEL major versions with just a few compatibility packages.
    - neurostimulant 3y ago
      I don't use red hat based distro myself so I'm curious: if you want to run an old binary built for, say, RHEL from 5 years ago, can you run that binary on centos stream without dependency issue?
      - CrLf 3y ago
        Don't know specifically about CentOS Stream, but I used to run things like IBM DB2, IBM TSM, and a few other stuff that was built for RHEL 4.x/5.x on RHEL 5.x/6.x. One thing that I like about RPM is how most packages specify dependencies based on contents, not on package name or version. So, even if a package changes name, if it still contains the required ".so.x.y.z" library, it will work. PS: I don't understand how people can complain about rpm/yum/dnf, 20 years ago it was already years ahead of what apt/deb is today.
CodeWriter23 3y ago
I think any GPL-licensee who charges for support is in no way encumbered by the GPL if they withdraw that support for any reason they choose.
game_the0ry 3y ago
Can someone in Red Hat's engineering org walk into the CEO's office and bitch slap the common sense back into them? Bc I am sick of seeing Red Hat being sacrificed to the alter of "shareholder primacy."
firefoxkekw 3y ago
I havent seen a single server or workstation running rhel in the data science field, the most used distro in ds already was ubuntu and with the launch of pro covering the universe repository for security updates, I cant understand why redhat is making this move, cant see the endgame.
kazinator 3y ago
What is the actual issue here? It's not explained well. Is that the CentOS Stream is not a bona fide community distro, but simply a sneaky name for something that is actually "RHEL Beta"? The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition. Which makes it a dickhead move for it to be using the name. Technically, it would way more sense for a bona fide community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn't it, so the point is moot.
- yrro 3y ago
  > What is the actual issue here? RHEL source code may now only be obtained via the Red Hat customer portal rather than pulled from Git. This means that RHEL rebuilds (which _want_ to be downstream of RHEL) now have no way to obtain sources, since in order to use the customer portal you have to agree to not distribute the content downloaded from it to anyone else. > The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition. There's no paywall in front of CentOS Stream. Anyone can download it for free like any other Linux distro. > Technically, it would way more sense for a bona fide community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn't it, so the point is moot. CentOS Stream _is_ upstream of RHEL. It's far more of a community OS than CentOS ever was. Paywalls and subscriptions are for RHEL not CentOS Stream. The problem is that the traditional CentOS community does not _want_ to be upstream of RHEL. But they also don't want to pay for it...
qa_acc 3y ago
Nowadays I feel like a fool , why should I do open source contribution? To enrich these big corporation that thank you with that behaviours and pissing a you professional category ? - They stole your code embedding it in close commercial crap without credits for the authors nor source code publishing; - They stole your code using it to create AI appliance that are absolutely not intelligent but act like indirection layer to nullify the license and than they say that developer can be substitute but those "AI" appliances; - As Mr. Geerling point out, now they shamelessly pass on the GPL license without fear of retaliation; I hope that the community will do its move, first of all updating the GPL to explicitly forbid this loophole, I'm talking about paywall and illegal restriction of the source code distribution. Moreover , I think some kind of open source licence enforcement organisation should exist. Licenses without enforcement are hot air. For plenty of that organisation Open Source programmers are only simpletons , not dedicated peoples building their fortune. IMHO, I would like to see the possibility to bill for commercial use of open source code easily with license that explicitly cover this area and, again, organisation doing enforcement. Time is a priceless resource and IMHO is inconceivable that corporation etc reduce open source programmers to the role of slave workers of third world countries.
ynx 3y ago
> Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own. I feel like this ignores the fact that Linux's continued success is, in large part, a direct consequence of its ability to compete for government contracts by way of Red Hat pursuing compliance and funding development to that effect, in addition to a massive amount of Linux development that Red Hat does directly fund. Like, yeah - they're not the only reason Linux is successful, but RHEL's success definitely played a big part in making it suitable for the datacenter.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  No, not really. Ubuntu and Debian are far more prevalent in the datacentre than Redhat. Linux became popular through grass roots deployments and then companies cashed in on that. There seems to be a new narrative that it was the companies that started the ball rolling but it's not so.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    The companies absolutely got the ball rolling. Sure, the grass roots started the ball rolling, but that roll was not going to get Linux anywhere without the kinds of investment that Redhat and others brought in the second half of the 90s.
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      Depends on what you mean by "anywhere". If your only goal in life is to see Linux take over the datacenter, well you should be happy. But if Linux ok the desktop is more of your goal, then I think that the corporations have actually been a detriment because they prioritize changes that help the server ecosystem, even if it makes the desktop shittier.
  - ynx 3y ago
    Red Hat did way more than "cash in" considering how many open source projects it has created or funded directly or even indirectly by employing a very large number of their maintainers.
rafaelturk 3y ago
What are my alternatives?
tomohawk 3y ago
Our team has seen 2 breaking changes in the past month from RH that caused problems in production. One in RHEL7 and one in RHEL8. It's definitely making us question the wisdom of the RHEL LTS approach. The LTS part is not what we're seeing.
- pnutjam 3y ago
  Same, RHEL says you should be compatible against all minor versions and it doesn't matter if it's 8.5 or 8.6. Upgrades can happen without you noticing, but our software would only run on specific minor versions without investing time and development energy. Several installs I've worked on required an OS rebuild because the version crept into an unsupported minor version.
throwaway104782 3y ago
Just gonna plug Suse that basically does what Red Hat + CentOS (not stream) used to be. Even more so because OpenSuse Leap is now binary compatible, not just source/ bug compatible like the RHEL flavors, the binaries in the Leap repositories are the same ones that are in the SLE repositories and you can switch from Leap to SLE with no issues. Amazing distro, it runs my home lab and would not change it for anything.
Agingcoder 3y ago
We started leaving red hat and red hat derivatives (centos) in favor of Debian when they were bought by ibm, assuming things wouldn’t turn out for the best. While I was never a huge red hat fan, I do regret what’s happening now - I think that having a major corporate backer of open source code was very important. Other companies have since at least partially filled the gap, but still, I don’t like this. I guess that the red hat of the 90s is no longer the same company- time flies.
vegasbrianc 3y ago
IBM behind the scenes squeezing every drop of value out of Red Hat…sad to see but this will continue
totallywrong 3y ago
> I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. Of course not, but it gets you a lot of attention.
strangescript 3y ago
I will never understand why someone would choose to use RHL over Debian flavored distro unless you want the enterprise support they provide. In which case, you reap what you sow.
- TillE 3y ago
  Honestly surprised to see so much chat about RHEL here. I'm sure there are reasons to use it, but it seems so niche. Like 90% of cloud stuff is running Debian or Ubuntu. Given their customer base, I certainly wouldn't be putting any special effort into supporting RHEL unless I was being paid for it.
crabbone 3y ago
I'm a "second generation refugee from XIV". XIV was a storage company started by Moshe Yanai, it pioneered many things in storage world. It was the catalyst that created many talented storage programmers that created their own successful companies: Infinidat, XtremIO, Weka, Elastifile, and many more. IBM acquired XIV... and ran it into the ground. To anyone who had this kind of experience with IBM the possibility of RHEL dying under the guidance of IBM was almost as good as certainty. My guess is that RHEL in not such a long time will take it's proud place somewhere between zLinux and AIX, and most will never hear from it again.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Sounds like it is time to fork and own it. Just as legal as what IBM is doing and people might vote with their feet rather than pay the IBM tax. There's enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I'm guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a few smaller companies there should be enough to pull together an independent fork, a and leave IBM to piece together long term support by themselves. The goal would be to have a stable long term version but I'd say IBM's involvement might be optional at this point. And what's left of Red Hat might be tempted to jump ship. Shape it like a foundation and make sure that there is no single corporate owner that can change their mind and you have a fine basis for decades to come.
- CrLf 3y ago
  Red Hat has even been making this easier for the last few years... Back in 2003, when they discontinued Red Hat Linux (RHEL's predecessor) and locked binary RPMs behind a subscription (to similar outrage), the clones didn't have an easy time. RHEL's build process was behind closed doors and doing rebuilds meant reverse engineering the proper build order. This is why CentOS major versions took quite a while to appear after the corresponding RHEL releases (and made CentOS a major effort). Since Red Hat assimilated CentOS, and culminating with CentOS Stream becoming the upstream for RHEL itself, the build system became unified. This is highly valuable. That clones aren't taking advantage of this to jumpstart themselves into independence (and ensuring the Red Hat ecosystem has a future, with or without Red Hat) is just sad.
smcleod 3y ago
We should be calling Redhat what it really is these days - IBM. It’s not the old Redhat that many of us used to depend upon - IBM chipped away and it and pretty quickly too, they’ll run it into the ground and flog it off at a loss.
pabs3 3y ago
Video version of this rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36488156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36488156
happyjack 3y ago
I think this is just the beginning of a whole wave of open source behind paywall type of deal. Ubuntu put the Amazon store app in their distro, for Christ's sake. The only downside I see to this (I don't care to get involved in the ethics or centos or "freeloading" debates/conversation) is gatekeeping / whistleblowing may get much harder. Granted, I don't care to or have ever looked at RHEL source code, but there is a lot of independent observers out there looking at code that runs servers and desktop software for very important things. Projects in my area that come to mind are scientific Linux and those spins that were directly supported by fermi and the like, and were based on RHEL. That code got put on all kinds of servers and desktops in very important applications.

519 points by stargrave 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Would it be feasible to sed-replace the RHEL and/or Fedora selinux and container-selinux rulesets for use with other Linux distros? AFAIU only SUSE can run both AppArmor and SELinux? And browsers are running as unconfined in selinux with like all major distros; even on ChromiumOS (which was based on Gentoo, Gnome, and Chrome) where WASM or a paid shell (or 15-30% cut from the Play Store only) is the only way for the kids to Python on the Chromebooks we bought them for school. Wouldn't it be great for them to not have to switch OSes and distros throughout the day.

mattdm 3y ago
I don't know about "sed-replace", but you can download the RHEL selinux-policy source package from https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/selinux-policy https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/selinux-policy

hospitalJail 3y ago

Is this a clickbait title? Or do I misunderstand the word enterprise? They are not done with using Linux for "a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort." or "a business or company." They are no longer going to use a specific version of linux that was made by "a business or company." Do people really care that much about linux distros? Between 2 decades of personal use and a few years of professional Fortune 20 use, linux seems to be linux to me. (Could just be that I have stuck to Debian flavors)

mynameisvlad 3y ago
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the name of a product. Geerling supports a massive collection of Ansible playbooks, which goes pretty far beyond anybody’s personal use of Linux and would explain why this is a bigger deal than you or I ditching support for a distro.
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  I've always heard it as Red Hat. Weird to see the parenthesis. I would not have cared if it said 'I'm done with red hat enterprise linux' I took it as 'I'm done with enterprise linux'
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    The parentheses means they're done with RHEL the OS and RH the company as a whole.
brightball 3y ago
Geerling is a big name in Red Hat. He’s responsible for most of the popular Ansible packages out there.
re-thc 3y ago
> Do people really care that much about linux distros? They sadly do. There's a whole wave of consultants and engineers tied to the RHEL ecosystem and wouldn't be able to install without typing "yum".
- raverbashing 3y ago
  "sadly"? Your second point is valid but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package
  - re-thc 3y ago
    > "sadly"? In response to the origin post that Linux is Linux. Kubernetes and Docker tries really hard to hide this differentiator of Linux distros. > but it seems most developers today can't install anything that isn't an npm package It gets worse than that. It's a daily struggle to explain the different between npm, yarn and pnpm for example. If only they understood what is "an npm package".
- hulitu 3y ago
  Was rpm -i deprecated ? /s
- freedude 3y ago
  dnf, yum is slated to be deprecated. https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/configuring_basic_system_settings/managing-software-packages_configuring-basic-system-settings https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp...
teilo 3y ago
Yes, we care about flavors of Linux in the enterprise. RHEL is an industry standard distribution that nearly all vendors support. We have a significant amount of commercial software that is only supported on RHEL or its derivates. Not running on a supported distro? You get no support. That’s a non-starter for mission critical systems in the enterprise. We used to be able to run this software, fully supported, on CentOS. IBM pulled the rug out from under us. Rocky and Alma rose to the occasion, and the various vendors supported one or both, since it was still RHEL minus branding. Now IBM is cutting off those distros also in an attempt to force everyone into RHEL licenses and support contracts. But because it IS Linux, after all, a lot of enterprises like mine have NEVER needed support for the OS itself. We just needed our vendors to support their software running on it, and we needed vulnarability patching on the OS, something which CentOS, Rocky, and Alma always provided. If I had my way, 100% of what we run would be on Debian. I have Debian running everywhere possible. But not all 3rd party applications support Debian. I’m hoping that one consequence of IBM’s move here will be to drive them all to Debian.
- volkadav 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm hopeful the five year support window for Debian LTS releases now will help drive that migration. I suspect though the lowest-effort path for migrating from one commercial vendor to another will be towards Canonical, given Ubuntu's LTS releases and existing infrastructure around commercial support / certified hardware compatibility lists / etc. I may not be a huge fan of some of their decisions over the years but as my objections have tended to be technical rather than business/contractual/ethical I think they'd be nicer to deal with than IBM or Oracle, heh. :)
volkadav 3y ago
There can be quite a number of distro-specific quirks to bear in mind if you're targeting more than one, enough so that as a downstream product vendor it's nice to only have one or two ideally slowly-moving targets (say, RHEL and Ubuntu LTS) to test on/document/support instead of dozens. In turn it's also nice as an end-user to have a platform with long periods of stability/support so you're not having to rebuild/retune your systems' foundational bits every year. (I have no particular dog in this fight. I mostly left the RedHat ecosystem behind a long time ago, but I understand it's still a big deal for a lot of vendors and clients. From an individual dev/user perspective, I agree that more or less as long as whatever is a posix-y environment, I can figure it out and get my work done, whether it's solaris or slackware or whatever haha.)

poo-yie 3y ago

I'm surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat's decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don't make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical's Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?

donatj 3y ago
You’re missing the fact that they are pedaling GPL software, and thus they are inclined to be offering it for free to the whole world, definitionally.
- lagniappe 3y ago
  I'm asking this non-facetiously: Is there a wikipedia page or a written record of all the people/corps who've been taken to task in court over a GPL violation, or a large company such as IBM? If yes, was the penalty commensurate?
  - donatj 3y ago
    This appears to be a decent though seemingly incomplete list with outcomes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation
    - komatineni 3y ago
      Thanks for the pointer actually.
    - lagniappe 3y ago
      Thanks, this is just what I was looking for.
      - away271828 3y ago
        It is incomplete however. For example, there was a long-running lawsuit against VMware that was never resolved. [1] Was sort of an odd case and pretty much no one else in the industry wanted to go near it. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmware-lawsuit/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-developer-abandons-vmwar...

pamhalpert 3y ago

Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the "freeloader" comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything. If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on the developer program with free subs, and removing pain in the ass subscription limitations which is why people want to use Cent/Rocky/Alma to begin with.

criddell 3y ago
> RESELLING without contributing anything I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.
- CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
  You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?
  - otterley 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - CAP_NET_ADMIN 3y ago
      I'm actually from one of the countries they are moving jobs to, it's very US-centric to see racism whenever someone uses any geographic location that's not the "rich West". Red Hat had some pretty sizeable layoffs recently and a bulk of their recruiting efforts are in the countries with cheaper labour.
    - isityouyesitsme 3y ago
      Thinly-veiled racism? You are conflating geopolitics and economics that could concern someone who could end up being affected by such a trend (which the poster isn't, as they said later) with racism. Is someone in a given country supposed to be HAPPY that a company founded in their country is intentionally putting support engineers within their founding country out of work, while simultaneously making support a worse experience for users? Have you ever been in the situation of being on midnight call to the other side of the world while speaking with someone with whom you're having a mutually difficult time communicating? It sucks. Moving support into localities for better servicing the customer is fine. This isn't the trend. Fuck RH and anyone else who does this.

jrochkind1 3y ago

The Software Freedom Conservancy legal analysis of RHEL and GPL that OP links to is the most interesting part to me. https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

BeefySwain 3y ago
Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36452101
cryptonector 3y ago
Wishy-washy language there about skirting lines doesn't make that a very good analysis. You can use others' GPL code in your products and charge money for it. You have to "publish" the GPL'ed sources (and any sources of yours that derive from GPL'ed code) on demand -- publish as in: if someone asks, you have to give it to them, but there's no requirement that there be a public download page or anything like that, and you can send the sources out in DVDs or flash drives or whatever media you like, and you can charge nominal amounts for the media. I.e., you don't have to make it easy to get the sources. And you don't have to provide the built product for free. You can do a lot within the boundaries of the GPL. If IBM/RH does that, so what? One can even do this sort of thing w/o GPL. For example, SQLite3 is in the public domain, yet the SQLite Consortium exists and makes what I imagine is good money for D. R. Hipp and his employees with zero competition from forks precisely because SQLite3 is very difficult to credibly fork, and SQLite3 is difficult to fork because the better test suite for it is proprietary and secret. To a business, open source is a tool. Even for individuals, open source is a tool. A young person just starting out and with few resources might make useful software open source so as to gain notoriety and better employment, or even to start a business.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Yup. It goes from "These businesses are abusing the GPL and software freedom!" to "Well, they are following the GPL but that doesn't result in what I want!" This is why we have GPL 2 and 3, for example. Disclaimer: I work at Red Hat, but nowhere near RHEL.

1oyvey 3y ago

I 100% support and appreciate Jeff's (and everyone's) right to take a stance when it comes to how they spend their time. We have a finite amount of time available to us, and should spend it on what's important to us, especially as that changes. See Jeff's blog post on "Saying No"[1] that really hits home with why this is important. What I'm having trouble understanding is the overwhelming use of IBM-related anecdotes (regardless of historical truthiness, and I'm not making any claim that it's wise or unwise to be wary - that's to each their own), reframed statements painted to appear like Red Hat's made brash statements about its community, and the general gall needed to make statements such as "tell your employees to stop [doing a thing]". I get that this event may have felt like a violation of trust, and that a violation of trust probably hurts the most. To that end, I suppose emotional responses make sense. But it would have been significantly less cognitive load (on ones self, as an open source maintainer/contributor) to just pull your support and move forward. [1]https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/just-say-no https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/just-say-no

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

INTPenis 3y ago

[flagged]

mynameisvlad 3y ago
This honestly sounds like an infomercial testimonial and is bizarre to read on here.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  I assure you I'm not being payed by anyone to make comments online, in fact my $dayjob is paying huge amounts of money to IBM/Red Hat for our partnership with them. I've been using open source for over 20 years, and I admit to using CentOS because it was a FREE version of a stable RHEL distro. I wish I could find a free, community-based and non-commercial distro in the Linux ecosystem that I was happy with, but I just can't. The closest one is Debian, but I still don't want to leave RHEL.
GordonS 3y ago
I'm curious what features RHEL has over Debian, that make it worth paying for? I used CentOS for years, then switched to Debian, and it's been plain sailing, so I'm wondering what l could gain with RHEL.
- INTPenis 3y ago
  Sure, I'm reading from my personal notes since I've answered this question so many times online. And keep in mind that I wrote these notes a couple of years ago. I work with large clients and having a known corporation behind your product is pretty nice, besides that RHEL-compatible distros are still the only ones supported by a lot of proprietary enterprise software. I'm not only a RHEL-convert, but an SElinux convert, and I think it's pretty neat. It can completely sandbox an application, but it does have a steep learning curve. Red Hat are behind a lot of innovation within the entire Linux ecosystem. Dnf have some features that large clients require, like history and rollback. Debian apt (last I checked) started services on install, which can be very disruptive. It also means they sometimes uninstall similar services because there's a conflict. Cutting edge podman/oci stuff, signed container images, and more. And before you reply with "yes but Debian also has X", keep in mind that Red hat has probably been doing it much longer.

gtirloni 3y ago

I'm running Debian for a week now and it works great. I only regret not jumping the RH ship earlier.

zitterbewegung 3y ago

Red Hat is done with you also. IBM right now only cares about paying customers.

Alifatisk 3y ago
Shocking

mattl 3y ago

Will Red Hat start discreetly tagging source code releases per subscription to find out who is sharing source code?

mbreese 3y ago
If they haven’t already, I’m sure you could expect them to. That’s the only way to really police the policy.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I've read a suggestion that that actually would violate the assorted open source licenses in question, which generally require some version of giving the user the same source as was used to build the binaries they got. Of course, they might be able to just do it on the more permissively licensed packages.
- aaomidi 3y ago
  So all it would take is a couple of separate releases of the SC, and you can diff to see the changes.
  - mattl 3y ago
    Yeah, a few well intentioned people could buy copies of RHEL and compare source code releases.

jmclnx 3y ago

>Red Hat seems to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer as of this writing -- EDIT: I read twitter, seems it may mean number of machines as opposed to open sockets. But a very confusing post. I stopped with RHEL 2 months ago at work, I use Slackware at home. What does that quote mean, if I get a RHEL developer license, am I limited to the number of open sockets ? That almost goes back to the per user licenses in the old UNIX Days. If I ever had to use RHEL, I would now say no just because of this.

buzer 3y ago
> am I limited to the number of open sockets I assume they mean CPU sockets.
- jmclnx 3y ago
  I was thinking the same, if so that is a direct line to how AIX is provisioned, limitations on use and pay more to get more. I the author of the post says, time stop RHEL support. I wonder if/when the FSF will weigh in.
  - jmclnx 3y ago
    >TYPO: I the author of the post says I meant to say: Like the author of the post says
- yrro 3y ago
  In Red Hat Subscription Management I can see that each entitlement for the "Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals" product is good for a system with up to 128 sockets. And you get 16 (or possibly 240, or possibly this is a bug) entitlements.
  - yrro 3y ago
    It's now back down to 16, aww!
keeler 3y ago

xt00 3y ago

Could somebody who maintains a particularly important open source software change the license to say basically “you must release your source code to anyone who requests it free of charge whether they are a customer or not”? Yes Redhat is a for profit company, but them deciding to make a business off of software that has licenses that might change to their detriment is their problem. Oh wait is that what they are doing to others now too? Well I guess that’s what happens..

eastbound 3y ago
Free has never meant monetarily free. Open-source means you can recompile, and thus maintain after the EOL of the provider, and code secrets aren’t secret. This is already a step above proprietary software. For example: Wordpress themes are OSS. You must pay the gatekeeper, but you can inspect the code. But free lunch is something else. Which OSS developers can also require, I’m not discussing that.
- f33d5173 3y ago
  Open source means you can redistribute the code having received it. If you aren't allowed to do so, the program is 'source-available', not open source.
  - neverartful 3y ago
    This is very enlightening! Thanks for sharing it. Ok, I can now see how RH might have backed themselves into a corner with the license.
- xt00 3y ago
  Yea selling an entire OS that consists of a ton of other peoples open source projects—often paid for by other companies to have somebody work on a thing — then when people say “hey we should get a copy of the small tweaks you did to all of those bits” and they say no, seems like a situation where changing the license on enough critical parts force the OS maker to not withhold the software. What would stop Redhat from saying “we’ve decided the only customers we care about will pay us 50k to be a customer, therefore anybody who doesn’t pay 50k cannot get source from us.. and anybody distributing the source code owes us 50k..”

dmix 3y ago

I've heard people on HN say you can't build a huge business off open source. That Red Hat was a one-off. Maybe this supports the narrative? Assuming it goes poorly I mean.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Why? They did have a good thing going; that they then went and decided to shoot their own foot doesn't invalidate the earlier success.
- dmix 3y ago
  I can't personally judge yet how much this will affect their business, bad for optics and community and all that sure. But regardless the narrative still implies they were already successful (aka "a one-off success"). Businesses rarely last forever. A decade plus of success is still a big success. The point is more about the extreme difficulty of building for-profit businesses strictly off Linux-style OSS. Where people will pay for premium versions supported by paid dev teams. Otherwise it's just a glorified consulting business and not really an OSS software selling business. I'd be interested to hear the motivations for doing so. Whether they strong downward financial pressure or were stable + merely wanted more growth.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  Did they shoot themselves in the foot? It was a lot easier selling RHEL licenses when people were running on-prem workloads. These days the support contract many enterprises want is from their cloud provider, not their OS vendor.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Fantastic opportunity for someone to found Blue Hat.

InTheArena 3y ago

Time to rally around the flag here. This is an incredibly hostile move by Redhat - and the attitude that only they provide value in the ecosystem is incredibly toxic and a direct threat to what open source stands for.

komatineni 3y ago
Without a doubt. Not sure if this is purely from IBM + Corp or Redhat sales folks finally getting over the whole idea of FOSS

lowercased 3y ago

I wish I could get rid of RHEL. Forced to use it - and pay through the nose - with a state agency I'm doing contract work for.

belltaco 3y ago

If the SFC loses this case I wonder if this will lead to the creation and mass adoption of GPL v4 explicitly forbidding this loophole(and others which have popped up over the years).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

MDGeist 3y ago

IBM trying to shake some loose change out of Red Hat users and copying Elastic's homework with the licensing switcheroo?

Anon_Forever 3y ago

RHEL isn't a choice for a lot of us. If you work in finserv/government (especially DoD), many/most of the time RHEL is effectively the only option.

dmix 3y ago
That probably won't change will it?
- Anon_Forever 3y ago
  Probably not, at least not initially. Hopefully we see more usage of distros like Alpine out in the security field.
  - pnutjam 3y ago
    Why not SLES?
    - Anon_Forever 3y ago
      SLES is worse than RHEL in my eyes. Their support is horrendous, absolutely the worst in the industry. Their early move to btrfs caused so many headaches at client sites. I haven't trusted their technical decision making since.

satish-setty 3y ago

> They used to have edgy ads quoting Ghandi and ... It's funny they used to be so devoted to that Ghandi quote ... It is Gandhi, not Ghandi!

geerlingguy 3y ago
oops, mis-typed that!

commandersaki 3y ago

Glad to see redhat go down the shitter. I was never a fan, but that's not the reason to hate on redhat. Everything is behind a paywall or a license. They just seemed like another Microsoft, especially when they started licensing Linux on at a per CPU core level. I think the only thing going for it is their support, but in my 20 years in the industry I've only ever used vendor support like once or twice, I've usually overcome obstacles on my own. At a previous workplace we had Ubuntu without licensing or support. The company tried to make us switch our infrastructure to redhat because they wanted indemnification. So we instead purchased Ubuntu support/licensing and again - never once did we use it or need it. Virtually everything we built we figured out ourselves. So when it comes to vendor support, I usually don't give a shit.

flyinghamster 3y ago
My interest in RHEL+clones waned when a kernel update didn't play nice with ZFS, DKMS notwithstanding, and then dropped to zero when searches for configuration information began to inevitably lead to paywalled pages on Red Hat's site (also a problem for Wildfly vs. JBoss).
pnutjam 3y ago
Vendor support is pretty crappy. By the time you're done gathering all the logs and running out the response time clock you've usually figured it out. Then at least half the time they do help, it's wrong because you're environment has some special requirement.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

synergy20 3y ago

I'm done with everything related to Redhat after Redhat8(no it's not RHEL 8, it's their non-enterprise distro before it's ditched and Fedora was invented as far as I can recall), yes it's about two decades ago. I since switched to Debian ecosystem, and never looked back. I was pissed off enough to never use any rpm-based distro ever since.

commandersaki 3y ago
Yep, don't understand why the hate now and not back then when Redhat commercialised the hell out of everything. Even RH7 was bad trying to push their Satellite crap. However I note back then there was no Ubuntu and Debian was always lagging far far behind.

numbsafari 3y ago

People talk about how pre-IBM RedHat was somehow a good player. Perhaps that is true on the Linux side, where there were more eyes. Outside of Linux, I can say they were definitely toxic after acquiring JBoss, locking down previously open-sourced features, shipping bugs that could only be fixed if you had access to the enterprise contract, deleting content from the Wiki that they wanted behind the paywall of the enterprise contract. Even if some of that started pre-acquisition, it certainly accelerated post. It's amazing to me that anyone upstream would lift a finger for RedHat at this point.

johnea 3y ago

How many times is everyone going to be so "shocked" when a corporation screws them over in a business descision? Why would you have picked Red Hat in the first place? Choose an independent distribution for more technical and end user oriented project trajectory. Archlinux was the poster child for this until it basically fell to Red Hat with systemd adoption. At this point Voidlinux is the most robust independent distro...

jlbooker 3y ago

The IBM MBAs have finally taken over Redhat. Anything to squeeze another dollar out, even if it's counterproductive in the long term. We knew it would happen. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long.

balozi 3y ago
Said MBAs are in it for their annual bonuses. You'll see this in many companies today: go-nowhere/soon-to-be-canceled projects are launched -> bonuses are awarded -> people move on -> rinse and repeat. Only fools stick around for long-term gains. On the other hand - maybe the workers have finally cracked the corporate secret.
ruraljuror 3y ago
I hear a lot of this sentiment, but from what I see both internally at rh and news publicly available there is nothing to back up what you are saying. The decision seems to have been made by many long-tenured folk. So what if the opposite of what you’re saying is true?
- Yeroc 3y ago
  Perhaps long-tenured folk that are now incentivized differently from how they were previously?
- asadotzler 3y ago
  I work with some long-tenured folks and am myself one (at a different open source company) and let me tell you that incentives are not the same as they were two decades ago -- and we've not sold out to fucking IBM. Redhat people, as good as they may have been in the past, are now IBM people and if they aren't operating like IBM people they will be replaced by people who do.

kkielhofner 3y ago

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would want to waste their time being a tester for a commercial product is very strange to me when there is Debian and even Arch which (for a rolling release) seems to be substantially more stable, better documented, etc. I understand why it exists and it has its place but absent a few specific scenarios I have no idea why it would be a first choice for anyone.

5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
Fedora has been one of the most stable distributions I've ever used (I used it as my main system for ~6 years, but moved to another distribution now for unrelated reasons). It's also mostly developed by the community — Red Hat provides the infrastructure, but not much actual development.
noirscape 3y ago
Fedoras big strength is the update speed. The problem with distros is that you're always picking an update cycle tradeoff. Debian has decades old versions of packages that they'll backport security fixes into till pretty much the end of time (RHEL also does this but is well, commercially backed while Debian is entirely volunteer driven, which has opened up Debian to maintainer shenanigans a couple of times). Ubuntu is more up-to-date by virtue of simply importing the Debian backports repo every 9 months. Arch Linux meanwhile runs on "whatever the latest upstream is", and with that you have pretty much 90% of the actively used Linux distros covered. All of these models are untenable for someone who likes to stay up-to-date with the latest version but doesn't want to drop down into the occasional shell hell that Arch provides. Fedora kinda... sits in the middle of that. It updates to latest version every 6 months, has a generally sane-ish release cycle that follows the most popular scripting language (Fedoras cycle is specifically staggered to allow for python releases to coincide with it every other release). That in turn makes it the best OS to recommend for Desktop Linux if you're new to Linux. As for why not Arch/Debian/Ubuntu for beginners: Arch requires wanting to maintain the OS for the sporadic breakdown or strange default setting (not to mention the shell being an expected skill beyond running package management commands), Debian is too out-of-date to be useful and Ubuntu is only slightly better than Debian.

freedomben 3y ago

I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. I'm unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I'm re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don't believe that Red Hat's leadership cares a whole lot about open source anymore. If they do, they've demonstrated that they are willing to harm open source in order to (short-term at least) increase sales. (congrats salespeople, you finally won and killed CentOS. And congrats to all the people who used to tell the salesperson "I can run CentOS for free, why should I buy RHEL?") But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion or the company's opinion. I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community. But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive. Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don't agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious. What's the goal here? Is it to polarize into good and evil sides? Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the "other side" seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them? I like a lot of OP's content, but I am a little worried that he's a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it's driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.

lakomen 3y ago
It is exactly the right response.
dmix 3y ago
> But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion. Yeah, Red Hat wasn't the one that called them "freeloaders", this was language The Register used in an article: >> Having given the move time to successfully eliminate most of the clones, Red Hat then killed off its own official free version of its paid-for flagship product. Instead, it switched to offering a free test version, an announcement which it made accompanied with lots of positive-sounding language about community involvement, and so on. In fact, what it was really doing was cutting off those that might be seen, from its perspective, as a bunch of freeloaders. The move was accompanied with free production deployment of RHEL for developers – but only up to 16 machines. https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tpush 3y ago

And another comment section full of people who don't understand the GPL but are very confident about their wrong takes.

jjnoakes 3y ago
Agreed. I don't know why, but I expected more from HN commenters.

bvrmn 3y ago

Some reasons why Stream is not replacement for Centos alike (Alma, Rocky, ...). 1. Stream can't be used as base to build el-compatible packages. There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility. 2. Stream has no large (several years) support cycle and can't be used as a stable system. Yes, there is a big community who don't need a paid licensed support from a RH and ready to help with bug reports and testing.

indigodaddy 3y ago
How long typically do packages percolate in Stream before making their way to EL?
- Conan_Kudo 3y ago
  The time delta to the next minor version, usually. RHEL has a release in the spring and the fall. The last pair of releases were in May and November. If something landed in CentOS Stream in between May and November, it will probably be part of the November release. If it's after that, then it'll be part of the next spring release. It's not particularly complex, in my opinion.
mattdm 3y ago
> There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility. This is incorrect. Or, sure, there are no _guarantees_, but any such break would also break a future RHEL release, and is therefore a bug. 2. Five years.
- bvrmn 3y ago
  AFAIK, there is no rule RHEL is strictly based on Stream.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    RHEL is branched from Stream and released from the branch every 6 months. I challenge you to find _one_ package in RHEL (as of the git.centos.org c9 branch) that reverted an ABI breakage that is in Stream, without said reversion having been applied to Stream as well.

predictabl3 3y ago

I don't mean this antagonistically and I realize I am lucky to have this perspective maybe, but all of this just reinforces a thought I've had for a long time, I feel bad for people forced to use these types of enterprise-y Linuxes.

Double_a_92 3y ago
There is nothing wrong with RHEL, it's all about the support contract (which you want or even legally need as a big company). RH / IBM is trying to hit the partner companies of RockyLinux, AlmaLinux and so on. E.g. for RockyLinux there is a company called CIQ which sells enterprise support, which itself may or may not already be a dick move towards RH since they are chipping at their business without really contributing to it.

liv-io 3y ago

For all the RHEL to Debian refugees, here are some Ansible roles. I made the jump when they killed CentOS: https://github.com/liv-io/ansible-roles-debian https://github.com/liv-io/ansible-roles-debian

JeremyNT 3y ago

I'm sympathetic to Jeff's position, but this is I believe the third post from this individual about this topic to reach the HN front page in the last week. At this point I feel like there's no more blood to be wrung from this stone. Jeff is free to take his ball and go home with it - just like Red Hat, in fact - but I think we're past the "this is notable news" phase and another post from Jeff about his frustrations doesn't really further the conversation.

xena 3y ago
I'm pretty sure Hacker News isn't the target audience for this post.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  It wasn't. I usually write a blog post separate from the script of my video (this requires a lot more time, but I feel like audiences like HN deserve better writing than a YouTube script). But in this case I pasted the script almost verbatim (just adjusting formatting).
- freedomben 3y ago
  True enough. If it were I suspect OP wouldn't have glossed over the entirety of Red Hat's contribution as Red Hat would grab a copy of "Linux", add Red Hat magic sauce, RHEL comes out. Reminds me of the "how to draw an owl" post :-D
jchw 3y ago
Personally, I don't mind it. It's a big deal in the world of open source, and as someone who was mostly uninitialized about CentOS and RHEL after all these years, I find these posts somewhat enlightening, even this one. I'll grant you that it's probably not necessary to have three posts or have them all go to HN's frontpage, but all-in-all it doesn't seem like such a big deal either. The people voted, I suppose.
dark-star 3y ago
Exactly, who is this Geerling guy anyway? ;-) (I'm kidding, of course, but a few days ago I had to google him...I don't follow many Tech YouTubers' channels anymore)

throwawayyy9237 3y ago

I hope I'm not misunderstanding this, but isn't the current arrangement perfectly valid under GPL? GPL states: - If I provided _modified_ binaries - I also have to provide the sources That's what's happening now for people that can download the binaries. What happened before was: - _Anyone_ could download the sources (Not a GPL requirement). So, now, IIUC if you can download the binaries you can download the sources. If you can't download the binaries (not a customer, for instance) you can't download the sources. The contract termination is not related to GPL in this sense.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago
GPL grants you the right to redistribute those binaries and sources. The contract is terminated if you exercise your GPL rights. One of GPL clauses is that you can't add more restrictions. Terminating a contract seems like a restriction to me. Also, terminating a contract is very different from not renewing one.
BirAdam 3y ago
Nah. GPLv3: > You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License. Given that there are a mix of licenses in use on Red Hat's distribution, they could be in a world of hurt. There's GPL, GPLv3, LGPL, CDDL, Apache, and so on. These all have different terms. GPLv3 in particular is the one that I think gets legally interesting, and I think it would be a neat court case. Courts have recently taken up issues like non-compete agreements, and of course the enforceability of various contracts and licenses has always been a topic for interesting court cases. This would be the same way. Is the GPLv3 actually enforceable? Can you legally have a license or contract forcing action on the recipient of a piece of IP? To say that RH did nothing wrong might actually come down to the legal fund at IBM of course, since courts are neither fair nor free.
josephcsible 3y ago
The issue with the GPL isn't about being able to download source code. It's unambiguous that they are complying with that requirement. The issue is the sentence "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." They're violating that by disallowing the people they do give the source code to from publicly mirroring it (on pain of terminating their contract).

fariszr 3y ago

> [^1] Red Hat seems to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer as of this writing, but nothing official has been announced yet. https://twitter.com/fareszr/status/1673145072714665984 https://twitter.com/fareszr/status/1673145072714665984 Hey I'm the one who wrote that tweet. Mike, who first noted this on Mastodon, just updated his tweet (toot?) to say that his contacts at Red hat confirmed that this is a bug, the dev Subscription is still limited to 16 servers.

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

I was quite upset with the abandonment of CentOS. Now RHEL is pushing even more. But, let's forget the ethical quandary they walked into. As others pointed out, this is self-defeating business direction. Vast majority of government Linux systems in several countries was CentOS and RHEL. Lot of the improvement can be directly traced to FOSS improvements, outside of RHEL. Majority of the recommendations to use Cent & RHEL in government systems came from the users and developers. It is clear today that users & developers (aka customers or consumers) can make serious impact to a brand by simply refusing to do business with the organization that upset them. Pivoting from CentOS/RHEL to another distro is significantly easier then pivoting from a tangible product or store.

peoplearepeople 3y ago

Redhat will simply find themselves not supported if none of the open source projects can run CI against their distro.

chudsandbedbugs 3y ago
Open source projects can get RHEL for free. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux-open-source-organizations https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/extending-no-cost-red-hat-ent...
- peoplearepeople 3y ago
  That seems like the same difficult process, just without paying. People need to be able to just get their docker image from dockerhub or similar

egberts1 3y ago

Embrace, engulf, extinguish. Looking at you as well, systemd and Pottering. I am an embedded engineer and this act of engulfing is also stifling me and my effort to provide a reliable and easy-to-maintain Linux/GNU away from the likes of RedHat.

nazgulsenpai 3y ago

What about the small companies that started using CentOS then grew to needing enterprise support and switched to Red Hat? I'm sure they considered this before making the change, but I always assumed this was at least part of the strategy. Now there will be no free entry point that can be converted with a simple repo-swap.

cturner 3y ago

RHEL has a major ecosystem advantage related to drivers that they may not be aware of. They risk ruining this, as I will try to explain. At the time industry started to take Linux seriously, RHEL was the dominant distro. As a result, and by accident, RHEL+derivs became the primary target for commercial hardware drivers. As an example - it's easier to get obscure low-latency network and packet-capture cards working on RHEL+derivs than on other systems. RHEL+derivs is the assumed standard when you talk to firms that make that kind of stuff. As a result of driver support, redhat derivs became the standard for commercial deployment. Redhat did not get this volume. The deployed volume is with all the Centos/Rocky/Alma that is deployed in hedge funds, prop firms, oil search grids, etc. As I see it, this driver situation is the real value in the Redhat ecosystem. The userland is a bit of a mess, the package manager does not impress me. But I deploy RHEL-derivs because drivers work with no hassle. If Redhat were able to cancel the derivatives, they would trigger the tipping point where industry ceases to treat RHEL+derivs as the standard driver target. Firms using centos on five thousand servers are not suddenly going to start paying USD 350 / year / server where previously they paid nothing. They will move to Debian, and eat the pain of the transition. Commercial driver culture would swiftly follow. That culture change would not take years. It would take days. I think Redhat's per-server sales model is naive. USD 350 / year gets you a license with no support. This probably gets some commerce from small-business, and a bit more from firms with traditional service expectations. But is that really where the opportunity is? When I set up a data-centre presence, I want to PXE-boot each server. This way I can modify the system image for the grid by creating a new PXE image and rebooting hosts. Getting to this setup is fiddly. I wish there was an off-the-shelf solution from Redhat that did a good job of it. USD 2000 per year per site per 100 servers, including support for the PXE device itself. Redhat could coexist with the derivs if it took this path. If they built this as an appliance, that product could become ubiquitous like firewalls and network switches.

nine_k 3y ago
If you don't mind, what makes more niche hardware drivers work / build better against RHEL? I suppose RHEL uses basically the same kernel, with patches that don't alter its interface too substantially. So I presume that a driver in source form, or even partly in binary blob form, should build and work approximately equally well with any stock kernel. Beside the driver developers apparently using RHEL / CentOS (so on them the drivers are known to work), what am I missing?

parasense 3y ago

To quote Jeff: > Here's how it used to work: > Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux > They would release a new version. > They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch A few remarks. The "add magic sauce" part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Hat no longer does any RHEL development behind the corporate firewall, and does everything out in the open in CentOS Stream. There is one caveat for security CVEs, but effectively those go into CentOS Stream and RHEL at the same time when the CVE embargo expires. What this comes down to is wilfully ignoring CentOS stream. All the clones of RHEL can simply track CentOS stream, and even replicate all the "Secret Sauce" that is the CentOS Stream CI/CD workflow. The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before.

geerlingguy 3y ago
Two thoughts: > The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before. Doing so bug-for-bug requires more effort than it did a few weeks ago. And they're basically doing that work in parallel with Red Hat itself (duplication of effort). Also, making a change like this (forcing Rocky and AlmaLinux to change in the middle of the 9.x release cycle), when the previous change (killing CentOS) was _also_ in the middle of the 8.x release cycle, with not even 24 hours warning... makes me feel this change was not _only_ made "to make CentOS and RHEL development better." If that were the case, the changes would be announced with at _least_ weeks (if not months) of warning, so the community could plan for it instead of getting blind-sided... now twice in a row.
- CrLf 3y ago
  Why do bug-for-bug with RHEL at all? Why not turn Alma and Rocky into stable distributions in their own right? If this pushes RHEL into oblivion, why should anyone care? The Debian ecosystem isn't centered on Ubuntu, it's centered on Debian. Comparisons between the two ecosystems are invalid because of this simple fact. It would be nice to see the "Red Hat" ecosystem recenter around something which isn't a direct source release of a commercial product. Alma and Rocky should rebase on CentOS Stream for starters, and then try to get closer to Fedora as an upstream. (BTW, I speak as someone who did corporate systems administration for years and understands the use case of replacing RHEL licenses with free CentOS installs perfectly.)

CrLf 3y ago

Why can't AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux drop their bug-for-bug compatibility commitment, and become stable distributions in their own right, based on CentOS Stream? I think this ecosystem would gain a lot from these distributions having their own identity, instead of being just 1:1 copies of RHEL. Change my mind. ;)

neurostimulant 3y ago
Many enterprise apps are distributed as binary release that compatible with RHEL, and people want to run them without using RHEL, especially in situations when it doesn't make sense to purchase RHEL licenses.
- CrLf 3y ago
  I understand that scenario, having lived in it for many years. However, in practice, that doesn't require bug-for-bug compatibility. The proof of this is that such software tends to run perfectly fine even across different RHEL major versions with just a few compatibility packages.
  - neurostimulant 3y ago
    I don't use red hat based distro myself so I'm curious: if you want to run an old binary built for, say, RHEL from 5 years ago, can you run that binary on centos stream without dependency issue?
    - CrLf 3y ago
      Don't know specifically about CentOS Stream, but I used to run things like IBM DB2, IBM TSM, and a few other stuff that was built for RHEL 4.x/5.x on RHEL 5.x/6.x. One thing that I like about RPM is how most packages specify dependencies based on contents, not on package name or version. So, even if a package changes name, if it still contains the required ".so.x.y.z" library, it will work. PS: I don't understand how people can complain about rpm/yum/dnf, 20 years ago it was already years ahead of what apt/deb is today.

CodeWriter23 3y ago

I think any GPL-licensee who charges for support is in no way encumbered by the GPL if they withdraw that support for any reason they choose.

game_the0ry 3y ago

Can someone in Red Hat's engineering org walk into the CEO's office and bitch slap the common sense back into them? Bc I am sick of seeing Red Hat being sacrificed to the alter of "shareholder primacy."

firefoxkekw 3y ago

I havent seen a single server or workstation running rhel in the data science field, the most used distro in ds already was ubuntu and with the launch of pro covering the universe repository for security updates, I cant understand why redhat is making this move, cant see the endgame.

kazinator 3y ago

What is the actual issue here? It's not explained well. Is that the CentOS Stream is not a bona fide community distro, but simply a sneaky name for something that is actually "RHEL Beta"? The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition. Which makes it a dickhead move for it to be using the name. Technically, it would way more sense for a bona fide community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn't it, so the point is moot.

yrro 3y ago
> What is the actual issue here? RHEL source code may now only be obtained via the Red Hat customer portal rather than pulled from Git. This means that RHEL rebuilds (which _want_ to be downstream of RHEL) now have no way to obtain sources, since in order to use the customer portal you have to agree to not distribute the content downloaded from it to anyone else. > The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I'm assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition. There's no paywall in front of CentOS Stream. Anyone can download it for free like any other Linux distro. > Technically, it would way more sense for a bona fide community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn't it, so the point is moot. CentOS Stream _is_ upstream of RHEL. It's far more of a community OS than CentOS ever was. Paywalls and subscriptions are for RHEL not CentOS Stream. The problem is that the traditional CentOS community does not _want_ to be upstream of RHEL. But they also don't want to pay for it...

qa_acc 3y ago

Nowadays I feel like a fool , why should I do open source contribution? To enrich these big corporation that thank you with that behaviours and pissing a you professional category ? - They stole your code embedding it in close commercial crap without credits for the authors nor source code publishing; - They stole your code using it to create AI appliance that are absolutely not intelligent but act like indirection layer to nullify the license and than they say that developer can be substitute but those "AI" appliances; - As Mr. Geerling point out, now they shamelessly pass on the GPL license without fear of retaliation; I hope that the community will do its move, first of all updating the GPL to explicitly forbid this loophole, I'm talking about paywall and illegal restriction of the source code distribution. Moreover , I think some kind of open source licence enforcement organisation should exist. Licenses without enforcement are hot air. For plenty of that organisation Open Source programmers are only simpletons , not dedicated peoples building their fortune. IMHO, I would like to see the possibility to bill for commercial use of open source code easily with license that explicitly cover this area and, again, organisation doing enforcement. Time is a priceless resource and IMHO is inconceivable that corporation etc reduce open source programmers to the role of slave workers of third world countries.

ynx 3y ago

> Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own. I feel like this ignores the fact that Linux's continued success is, in large part, a direct consequence of its ability to compete for government contracts by way of Red Hat pursuing compliance and funding development to that effect, in addition to a massive amount of Linux development that Red Hat does directly fund. Like, yeah - they're not the only reason Linux is successful, but RHEL's success definitely played a big part in making it suitable for the datacenter.

olddustytrail 3y ago
No, not really. Ubuntu and Debian are far more prevalent in the datacentre than Redhat. Linux became popular through grass roots deployments and then companies cashed in on that. There seems to be a new narrative that it was the companies that started the ball rolling but it's not so.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  The companies absolutely got the ball rolling. Sure, the grass roots started the ball rolling, but that roll was not going to get Linux anywhere without the kinds of investment that Redhat and others brought in the second half of the 90s.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    Depends on what you mean by "anywhere". If your only goal in life is to see Linux take over the datacenter, well you should be happy. But if Linux ok the desktop is more of your goal, then I think that the corporations have actually been a detriment because they prioritize changes that help the server ecosystem, even if it makes the desktop shittier.
- ynx 3y ago
  Red Hat did way more than "cash in" considering how many open source projects it has created or funded directly or even indirectly by employing a very large number of their maintainers.

rafaelturk 3y ago

What are my alternatives?

tomohawk 3y ago

Our team has seen 2 breaking changes in the past month from RH that caused problems in production. One in RHEL7 and one in RHEL8. It's definitely making us question the wisdom of the RHEL LTS approach. The LTS part is not what we're seeing.

pnutjam 3y ago
Same, RHEL says you should be compatible against all minor versions and it doesn't matter if it's 8.5 or 8.6. Upgrades can happen without you noticing, but our software would only run on specific minor versions without investing time and development energy. Several installs I've worked on required an OS rebuild because the version crept into an unsupported minor version.

throwaway104782 3y ago

Just gonna plug Suse that basically does what Red Hat + CentOS (not stream) used to be. Even more so because OpenSuse Leap is now binary compatible, not just source/ bug compatible like the RHEL flavors, the binaries in the Leap repositories are the same ones that are in the SLE repositories and you can switch from Leap to SLE with no issues. Amazing distro, it runs my home lab and would not change it for anything.

Agingcoder 3y ago

We started leaving red hat and red hat derivatives (centos) in favor of Debian when they were bought by ibm, assuming things wouldn’t turn out for the best. While I was never a huge red hat fan, I do regret what’s happening now - I think that having a major corporate backer of open source code was very important. Other companies have since at least partially filled the gap, but still, I don’t like this. I guess that the red hat of the 90s is no longer the same company- time flies.

vegasbrianc 3y ago

IBM behind the scenes squeezing every drop of value out of Red Hat…sad to see but this will continue

totallywrong 3y ago

> I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. Of course not, but it gets you a lot of attention.

strangescript 3y ago

I will never understand why someone would choose to use RHL over Debian flavored distro unless you want the enterprise support they provide. In which case, you reap what you sow.

TillE 3y ago
Honestly surprised to see so much chat about RHEL here. I'm sure there are reasons to use it, but it seems so niche. Like 90% of cloud stuff is running Debian or Ubuntu. Given their customer base, I certainly wouldn't be putting any special effort into supporting RHEL unless I was being paid for it.

crabbone 3y ago

I'm a "second generation refugee from XIV". XIV was a storage company started by Moshe Yanai, it pioneered many things in storage world. It was the catalyst that created many talented storage programmers that created their own successful companies: Infinidat, XtremIO, Weka, Elastifile, and many more. IBM acquired XIV... and ran it into the ground. To anyone who had this kind of experience with IBM the possibility of RHEL dying under the guidance of IBM was almost as good as certainty. My guess is that RHEL in not such a long time will take it's proud place somewhere between zLinux and AIX, and most will never hear from it again.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Sounds like it is time to fork and own it. Just as legal as what IBM is doing and people might vote with their feet rather than pay the IBM tax. There's enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I'm guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a few smaller companies there should be enough to pull together an independent fork, a and leave IBM to piece together long term support by themselves. The goal would be to have a stable long term version but I'd say IBM's involvement might be optional at this point. And what's left of Red Hat might be tempted to jump ship. Shape it like a foundation and make sure that there is no single corporate owner that can change their mind and you have a fine basis for decades to come.

CrLf 3y ago
Red Hat has even been making this easier for the last few years... Back in 2003, when they discontinued Red Hat Linux (RHEL's predecessor) and locked binary RPMs behind a subscription (to similar outrage), the clones didn't have an easy time. RHEL's build process was behind closed doors and doing rebuilds meant reverse engineering the proper build order. This is why CentOS major versions took quite a while to appear after the corresponding RHEL releases (and made CentOS a major effort). Since Red Hat assimilated CentOS, and culminating with CentOS Stream becoming the upstream for RHEL itself, the build system became unified. This is highly valuable. That clones aren't taking advantage of this to jumpstart themselves into independence (and ensuring the Red Hat ecosystem has a future, with or without Red Hat) is just sad.

smcleod 3y ago

We should be calling Redhat what it really is these days - IBM. It’s not the old Redhat that many of us used to depend upon - IBM chipped away and it and pretty quickly too, they’ll run it into the ground and flog it off at a loss.

pabs3 3y ago

Video version of this rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36488156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36488156

happyjack 3y ago

I think this is just the beginning of a whole wave of open source behind paywall type of deal. Ubuntu put the Amazon store app in their distro, for Christ's sake. The only downside I see to this (I don't care to get involved in the ethics or centos or "freeloading" debates/conversation) is gatekeeping / whistleblowing may get much harder. Granted, I don't care to or have ever looked at RHEL source code, but there is a lot of independent observers out there looking at code that runs servers and desktop software for very important things. Projects in my area that come to mind are scientific Linux and those spins that were directly supported by fermi and the like, and were based on RHEL. That code got put on all kinds of servers and desktops in very important applications.