6 ms·

Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors.

Regardless whether Red Hat said it or not, why not call it what it is? Not every CentOS user was a freeloader and the same is true for its spiritual successors. However, a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community. Secondly, a substantial chunk of those users used CentOS because they wanted all the benefits of Red Hat EL without paying for it. That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me. Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code. As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine. Red Hat puts enormous amounts of money in the FLOSS ecosystem, I think it's completely fair for them to nudge customers with deep-enough pockets to pay for subscriptions. For other users, there are plenty of other options. [1] For non-copyleft licenses, Red Hat are of course not obliged to provide source code.

LexiMax 3y ago
> As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine. This cannot be stressed enough. If we are unhappy with this outcome, maybe we should be taking another look at the licenses we choose when we release our work to the world.
vbezhenar 3y ago
License situation is still unclear to me. GPL explicitly does not allow to forbid further redistribution. RedHat does that. I'm not a lawyer, but from a layman PoV this seems sketchy.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  I'm not going to analyze if this is illegal or not (I don't think it is). It has been discussed elsewhere already. But even if it where illegal, the only people in a position to sue would be the contributors of the upstream projects that get packaged into RHEL. And I don't see anyone having the appetite for that. I contribute a lot to QEMU and there I'm practically working side-by-side with redhat devs. They contribute so much (maintainership, code review, testing infrastructure and much more), suing them wouldn't occur to me in the slightest.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    Don't think of it as suing your coworkers, think of it as suing your coworkers corporporate overlords?
    - freedomben 3y ago
      I think you're missing GP's point (or possibly I am but I don't think so). They aren't saying they are buddies and so they wouldn't want to sue. They are saying "Red Hat pays a lot of people to work on this, possibly to the point where the project would be dead without them. They're not just packaging up somebody else's code and shipping it" I adamantly agree with GP. There are important projects that wouldn't exist without Red Hat, or if they did they would pale in comparison to the proprietary solutions and wouldn't be seriously used. Qemu/KVM is a big one. Without Red Hat's investment, it would all be VMware and anyone wanting to (seriously)_virtualize on Linux would be using VMware.
- microtonal 3y ago
  IANAL, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat does have to give you the source code. They only have to provide the source code to customers to which they distribute the binaries. Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. AFAIK, the current kerfuffle is about providing RHEL source packages through git.centos.org. They currently only provide RHEL through a subscription and they fulfill the GPL if they offer their RHEL subscribers the source code.
  - error503 3y ago
    >Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. The fact that the subscription agreement does not allow this is exactly what we're discussing here.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      The GPL does not say that they are obligated to sell you the next version. The entire point of the GPL is to let you own the software you have bought and, examine, learn and change. The rule Red Hat have brought in is that if you exercise that right then they don't want to continue selling their software to you. That is totally within their rights, it's not like they are suing you for illegal distribution.
    - houseofzeus 3y ago
      It doesn't prevent you redistributing what you have already been given (binaries or source), it does however allow Red Hat to not give you future iterations.
      - error503 3y ago
        They can't prevent you, because that would violate the GPL. However I'd say getting your subscription revoked as a penalty means it is not 'allowed'. The intent of the GPL to allow distribution to third parties seems pretty clear, and a company refusing to deal with you after you exercised a right explicitly granted by the licence definitely seems like a 'dick move', despite being legal.
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
> a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community So what? There is no obligation to contribute back in any way.
- microtonal 3y ago
  Which is exactly what I said. The license does not require you to contribute back. The license also does not require Red Hat to give you the source code, unless they distribute the binaries to you (through their subscription service).
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    The difference is that RedHat changed the status quo. Perhaps not illegal but worthy of complaint and contempt.
freedomben 3y ago
Don't underestimate the impact that even someone using CentOS and not contributing back can still have. It's still a person or group of people learning the Red Hat way. Lots of people (myself included) started on CentOS, and later bought RHEL when the need came up because I was already super familiar with RHEL because of my years on CentOS. Increasing proliferation of usage is a huge factor in driving growth.
- evan1107 3y ago
  Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    It comes close, but doesn't fill the niche because according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream should not be used in production. People do and for the most part they have no issues, but as long as the maintainers themselves are telling people not to run it in production, I would never recommend somebody to use it for serious workloads. And if you can't use it for serious workloads, then you should invest your time into a different ecosystem that can be used for serious workloads.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      According to Red Hat, CentOS Linux should not have been used in production either.
    - symlinkk 3y ago
      If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it, so maybe you should send some of that money to RedHat for licenses?
      - 3y ago
Pet_Ant 3y ago
> That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me. I'll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL's value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform's dominance is contributing value.
- jzb 3y ago
  "CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard" Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride. Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray with CentOS that involved some long gaps between updates, a whole kerfuffle about a founder disappearing and the domain ownership being in question... CentOS, as a project independent of Red Hat, existed for about 10 years. This included several long periods of slow updates to minor versions and long waits for major versions of RHEL. (e.g. it took almost 3 months for CentOS to push out 5.6 after RHEL 5.6, and even longer to get CentOS 6 out of RHEL 6). Before Red Hat took over CentOS a chief point of criticism was that CentOS took too long to update and the core group wouldn't let new folks in to contribute. (See: https://lwn.net/Articles/435744/ https://lwn.net/Articles/435744/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190402181426/http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8608/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190402181426/http://www.linux-...) Now, users have Stream which is pretty much everything you'd have wanted except the ability to claim that it's exactly specific RHEL release. In my book a major improvement, unless what I want is the ability to get support for RHEL from vendors without actually paying for RHEL.
  - ndiddy 3y ago
    A CentOS Stream release only gets updates as long as its equivalent RHEL release is in its "full support" period. In practice, this means that the support duration is cut from 10 years to 5 years. Additionally, CentOS Stream updates often lag behind RHEL updates. This is because Red Hat won't commit an embargoed security update to CentOS Stream until after it ships in RHEL, so the developers responsible for the update will sometimes forget to commit it to CentOS Stream until a week or two after it's shipped. You end up in a weird position where you get most updates faster than RHEL users, but you often have to wait to get critical security updates. I would be wary about using a system like this in production.
ikiris 3y ago
How much is red hat paying kernel developers not directly on its payroll again? They're the freeloaders.
awill 3y ago
The term freeloading is stupid. There are customers who genuinely don't need and don't want support. And there are customers who do need support and should pay for it. It's that simple. Don't bundle them together as all freeloaders.
- Crabber 3y ago
  Redhat offers self-supported versions though, for half the price.
taylodl 3y ago
> Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. For example, back in the day it may have to be mailed to you via floppy diskette or CD's so you would be charged for the media and for the time for someone to put that together. Walnut Creek used to sell CD bundles of all source code for something like $20 back in the day and you'd get several CD's of source and all the make files needed to build it.
- reaperman 3y ago
  >You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license. GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. GPLv3: You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee. > GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. RedHat is getting around this by saying "If you ask for it, we'll give you the source code for a high fee. If the source code we give you gets released to others, that's totally fine! We'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever, if it does." GPLv3 has some language that very arguably might prevent this, but CentOS is licensed under GPLv2 and no one has found a clause which makes this behavior obviously improper, yet.
  - 743cnq2fmgauzzw 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - 743cnq2fmgauzzw 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - tremon 3y ago
    From GPLv2, section 6: > Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever" not sound like a retaliatory restriction on the recipients' exercise of their rights?

LexiMax 3y ago

> As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine. This cannot be stressed enough. If we are unhappy with this outcome, maybe we should be taking another look at the licenses we choose when we release our work to the world.

vbezhenar 3y ago

License situation is still unclear to me. GPL explicitly does not allow to forbid further redistribution. RedHat does that. I'm not a lawyer, but from a layman PoV this seems sketchy.

nolist_policy 3y ago
I'm not going to analyze if this is illegal or not (I don't think it is). It has been discussed elsewhere already. But even if it where illegal, the only people in a position to sue would be the contributors of the upstream projects that get packaged into RHEL. And I don't see anyone having the appetite for that. I contribute a lot to QEMU and there I'm practically working side-by-side with redhat devs. They contribute so much (maintainership, code review, testing infrastructure and much more), suing them wouldn't occur to me in the slightest.
- _cenw 3y ago
  Don't think of it as suing your coworkers, think of it as suing your coworkers corporporate overlords?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    I think you're missing GP's point (or possibly I am but I don't think so). They aren't saying they are buddies and so they wouldn't want to sue. They are saying "Red Hat pays a lot of people to work on this, possibly to the point where the project would be dead without them. They're not just packaging up somebody else's code and shipping it" I adamantly agree with GP. There are important projects that wouldn't exist without Red Hat, or if they did they would pale in comparison to the proprietary solutions and wouldn't be seriously used. Qemu/KVM is a big one. Without Red Hat's investment, it would all be VMware and anyone wanting to (seriously)_virtualize on Linux would be using VMware.
microtonal 3y ago
IANAL, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat does have to give you the source code. They only have to provide the source code to customers to which they distribute the binaries. Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. AFAIK, the current kerfuffle is about providing RHEL source packages through git.centos.org. They currently only provide RHEL through a subscription and they fulfill the GPL if they offer their RHEL subscribers the source code.
- error503 3y ago
  >Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. The fact that the subscription agreement does not allow this is exactly what we're discussing here.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    The GPL does not say that they are obligated to sell you the next version. The entire point of the GPL is to let you own the software you have bought and, examine, learn and change. The rule Red Hat have brought in is that if you exercise that right then they don't want to continue selling their software to you. That is totally within their rights, it's not like they are suing you for illegal distribution.
  - houseofzeus 3y ago
    It doesn't prevent you redistributing what you have already been given (binaries or source), it does however allow Red Hat to not give you future iterations.
    - error503 3y ago
      They can't prevent you, because that would violate the GPL. However I'd say getting your subscription revoked as a penalty means it is not 'allowed'. The intent of the GPL to allow distribution to third parties seems pretty clear, and a company refusing to deal with you after you exercised a right explicitly granted by the licence definitely seems like a 'dick move', despite being legal.

TedDoesntTalk 3y ago

> a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community So what? There is no obligation to contribute back in any way.

microtonal 3y ago
Which is exactly what I said. The license does not require you to contribute back. The license also does not require Red Hat to give you the source code, unless they distribute the binaries to you (through their subscription service).
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  The difference is that RedHat changed the status quo. Perhaps not illegal but worthy of complaint and contempt.

freedomben 3y ago

Don't underestimate the impact that even someone using CentOS and not contributing back can still have. It's still a person or group of people learning the Red Hat way. Lots of people (myself included) started on CentOS, and later bought RHEL when the need came up because I was already super familiar with RHEL because of my years on CentOS. Increasing proliferation of usage is a huge factor in driving growth.

evan1107 3y ago
Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?
- freedomben 3y ago
  It comes close, but doesn't fill the niche because according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream should not be used in production. People do and for the most part they have no issues, but as long as the maintainers themselves are telling people not to run it in production, I would never recommend somebody to use it for serious workloads. And if you can't use it for serious workloads, then you should invest your time into a different ecosystem that can be used for serious workloads.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    According to Red Hat, CentOS Linux should not have been used in production either.
  - symlinkk 3y ago
    If you’re running something in production you’re almost certainly making money off of it, so maybe you should send some of that money to RedHat for licenses?
    - 3y ago

Pet_Ant 3y ago

> That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me. I'll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL's value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform's dominance is contributing value.

jzb 3y ago
"CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard" Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride. Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray with CentOS that involved some long gaps between updates, a whole kerfuffle about a founder disappearing and the domain ownership being in question... CentOS, as a project independent of Red Hat, existed for about 10 years. This included several long periods of slow updates to minor versions and long waits for major versions of RHEL. (e.g. it took almost 3 months for CentOS to push out 5.6 after RHEL 5.6, and even longer to get CentOS 6 out of RHEL 6). Before Red Hat took over CentOS a chief point of criticism was that CentOS took too long to update and the core group wouldn't let new folks in to contribute. (See: https://lwn.net/Articles/435744/ https://lwn.net/Articles/435744/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190402181426/http://www.linux-mag.com/id/8608/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190402181426/http://www.linux-...) Now, users have Stream which is pretty much everything you'd have wanted except the ability to claim that it's exactly specific RHEL release. In my book a major improvement, unless what I want is the ability to get support for RHEL from vendors without actually paying for RHEL.
- ndiddy 3y ago
  A CentOS Stream release only gets updates as long as its equivalent RHEL release is in its "full support" period. In practice, this means that the support duration is cut from 10 years to 5 years. Additionally, CentOS Stream updates often lag behind RHEL updates. This is because Red Hat won't commit an embargoed security update to CentOS Stream until after it ships in RHEL, so the developers responsible for the update will sometimes forget to commit it to CentOS Stream until a week or two after it's shipped. You end up in a weird position where you get most updates faster than RHEL users, but you often have to wait to get critical security updates. I would be wary about using a system like this in production.

ikiris 3y ago

How much is red hat paying kernel developers not directly on its payroll again? They're the freeloaders.

awill 3y ago

The term freeloading is stupid. There are customers who genuinely don't need and don't want support. And there are customers who do need support and should pay for it. It's that simple. Don't bundle them together as all freeloaders.

Crabber 3y ago
Redhat offers self-supported versions though, for half the price.

taylodl 3y ago

> Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. For example, back in the day it may have to be mailed to you via floppy diskette or CD's so you would be charged for the media and for the time for someone to put that together. Walnut Creek used to sell CD bundles of all source code for something like $20 back in the day and you'd get several CD's of source and all the make files needed to build it.

reaperman 3y ago
>You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license. GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee. GPLv3: You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee. > GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. RedHat is getting around this by saying "If you ask for it, we'll give you the source code for a high fee. If the source code we give you gets released to others, that's totally fine! We'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever, if it does." GPLv3 has some language that very arguably might prevent this, but CentOS is licensed under GPLv2 and no one has found a clause which makes this behavior obviously improper, yet.
- 743cnq2fmgauzzw 3y ago
  [flagged]
- 743cnq2fmgauzzw 3y ago
  [flagged]
- tremon 3y ago
  From GPLv2, section 6: > Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever" not sound like a retaliatory restriction on the recipients' exercise of their rights?