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Let me preface this by saying, Jeff owes Red Hat nothing and he's free to stop "supporting" RHEL for any or no reason at all. That said, "grab a copy of Linux"

by jzb 3y ago

Let me preface this by saying, Jeff owes Red Hat nothing and he's free to stop "supporting" RHEL for any or no reason at all. That said, "grab a copy of Linux" seriously, gloriously, hilariously handwaves away so many things that Red Hat does to create a RHEL release. Red Hat pulls together hundreds or thousands of upstreams to create RHEL, participates in many of them, tests all that together, helps partners certify software against it, etc. etc. etc. It's true, Red Hat doesn't "own" the Linux kernel, but it's done a ton to help develop it over the years. But RHEL is not merely the kernel nor any single upstream. RHEL is a product that comprises thousands of packages all tested together and then released as a supported product. What Red Hat is trying to guard is not the source code to any single or even groups of projects. It's trying to preserve and capture the value it created from all those parts. Coincidentally, that value is what businesses, competitors, and the community are clamoring for and not the source code alone. They want that single point-in-time snapshot that everybody agrees on as a de facto standard because the overall community has never been able to agree on another workable standard that would allow targeting applications across the board. And that standard has a name, and it's RHEL. And it belongs to Red Hat. You can have all the pieces and assemble them yourselves if you like. But nobody is entitled to certify it as (officially or unofficially) RHEL except Red Hat. If that angers you, I heartily encourage folks to build Debian up as the standard we all certify against. Or start your own business that overtakes Red Hat and earns the place RHEL has today. Mark Shuttleworth took potshots at Red Hat's business model with RHEL for years, and it seems to me that they're doing a very similar thing now with Ubuntu Pro by holding back updates to packages after 5 years and charging for updates to the Universe and Main repos.

Pet_Ant 3y ago
I think the main thrust of all of this is to de-commodify Linux. To make RHEL really be in people's minds it's own operating system outside of Linux. It's hard to do when it's really just a ball of generic open source components. Hence, this hostile behaviour. They don't want to be Linux, they want to be RHEL and ask not about the man behind the curtain.
- jzb 3y ago
  Just the opposite, I think. Red Hat is fighting the idea that the operating system is a commodity, and demonstrating that the RHEL subscription does have value. Red Hat's competitors have tried really really hard to undermine RHEL as something of value. The cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide their own base Linux distros to run workloads on. They'd love to cut Red Hat out of the picture. Oracle wants to convince customers to give it all their money to run workloads, hence Oracle Linux -- that's based on RHEL. If RHEL were, as you say, "a ball of generic open source components" then you wouldn't see all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about making it harder for Alma and Rocky to claim "bug for bug" compatibility with RHEL. Nobody would care. Note that this has been going on for more than 20 years, and this isn't the first time. I've been writing about this on my blog, but we've seen this story before and the only thing that has changed are the names of the vendors / projects and the version numbers. (See: https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-ii-a-history-of-the-early-2000s-linux-landscape/ https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clon...)
  - parasubvert 3y ago
    Not the opposite. You're agreeing with the parent that Red Hat is viewing to de-commodify Linux. You just can't seem to see why this a bad thing. Red Hat does not have the interests of the community in mind any longer, which was inevitable when IBM purchased them.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      The parent comment is a bit confusing in that it says de-commoditizing Linux, which is one thing, but then talks about de-commoditizing RHEL. Yes, Red Hat wants to show that Linux can be treated as a commodity except when it can't; that the work on a distro can be separated into parts that can be shared with the community and parts that people are willing to pay for; that rebuilders are reducing the value of the latter and the only game-theoretical outcome is that no one will have the money to do this work. Without going into the discussion of whether that's correct or not, it's not a particularly new stance. It was the whole point of separating Fedora and RHEL in 2004.
freedomben 3y ago
I agree with most of what you said, but: > If that angers you, I heartily encourage folks to build Debian up as the standard we all certify against. Or start your own business that overtakes Red Hat and earns the place RHEL has today. This strikes me as a variation of the "if you don't like Apple or Google's rules, make your own phone" or "if you don't like Youtube's content policies, then start your own video company." It's not necessarily wrong, but it's wildly impractical. It certainly may come down to that, but it would be far better for everyone involved to reach some sort of happy medium point that doesn't result in mass duplication of effort and fragmentation. Before telling people to just fork the project if you don't like it, it would be great to address people's concerns as much as possible, and that can't happen unless people make their concerns known.
- jzb 3y ago
  It's also, as has been demonstrated, wildly impractical for Red Hat to continue exactly as before without others undermining its business. The thing is that everybody is only lobbying Red Hat to make concessions, but nobody's going after Oracle or Rocky or Alma or other clones to say "hey, cool it. Red Hat's trying to keep a business going here. You're undermining their business. If you keep this up, they're going to make it harder for everybody to use a free RHEL for non-business situations." The difference, too, is that I (probably) have a business relationship with Apple or Google if I'm complaining about their wares. When I complain about iOS or Android it's because I've purchased one of those phones (or want to) but it has a defect (in my opinion) or user-hostile anti-feature preventing me from getting the value I paid for. This isn't that. This largely seems to be people who are not paying for RHEL demanding Red Hat allow them to continue not paying for it but receive its value.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    They could also shrink down to a more manageable business unit... except IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, and you can't ever decrease revenues or the axe drops :(
    - jzb 3y ago
greendave 3y ago
> Red Hat pulls together hundreds or thousands of upstreams to create RHEL, participates in many of them, tests all that together, helps partners certify software against it, etc. etc. etc. > It's true, Red Hat doesn't "own" the Linux kernel, but it's done a ton to help develop it over the years. But RHEL is not merely the kernel nor any single upstream. RHEL is a product that comprises thousands of packages all tested together and then released as a supported product. > What Red Hat is trying to guard is not the source code to any single or even groups of projects. It's trying to preserve and capture the value it created from all those parts. Coincidentally, that value is what businesses, competitors, and the community are clamoring for and not the source code alone. That's a point that (unfortunately) seems to have been lost along the way. A big part of the reason why people use(d) CentOS was because of the confidence they had that it'd be stable, functional, receive timely security updates, etc. And the main reason that was true is the work RedHat put into RHEL. That said, it's not entirely a one-way street. The widespread use of CentOS meant much wider support for RHEL by open-source packages (and some closed source ones) than a locked down, limited availability RHEL would have had. I know of places that use RHEL because CentOS is widely available, and of places that would never bother to support RHEL if it weren't for the availability and (near) ubiquity of CentOS.

by jzb 3y ago

Pet_Ant 3y ago

I think the main thrust of all of this is to de-commodify Linux. To make RHEL really be in people's minds it's own operating system outside of Linux. It's hard to do when it's really just a ball of generic open source components. Hence, this hostile behaviour. They don't want to be Linux, they want to be RHEL and ask not about the man behind the curtain.

jzb 3y ago
Just the opposite, I think. Red Hat is fighting the idea that the operating system is a commodity, and demonstrating that the RHEL subscription does have value. Red Hat's competitors have tried really really hard to undermine RHEL as something of value. The cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide their own base Linux distros to run workloads on. They'd love to cut Red Hat out of the picture. Oracle wants to convince customers to give it all their money to run workloads, hence Oracle Linux -- that's based on RHEL. If RHEL were, as you say, "a ball of generic open source components" then you wouldn't see all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about making it harder for Alma and Rocky to claim "bug for bug" compatibility with RHEL. Nobody would care. Note that this has been going on for more than 20 years, and this isn't the first time. I've been writing about this on my blog, but we've seen this story before and the only thing that has changed are the names of the vendors / projects and the version numbers. (See: https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-ii-a-history-of-the-early-2000s-linux-landscape/ https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clon...)
- parasubvert 3y ago
  Not the opposite. You're agreeing with the parent that Red Hat is viewing to de-commodify Linux. You just can't seem to see why this a bad thing. Red Hat does not have the interests of the community in mind any longer, which was inevitable when IBM purchased them.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    The parent comment is a bit confusing in that it says de-commoditizing Linux, which is one thing, but then talks about de-commoditizing RHEL. Yes, Red Hat wants to show that Linux can be treated as a commodity except when it can't; that the work on a distro can be separated into parts that can be shared with the community and parts that people are willing to pay for; that rebuilders are reducing the value of the latter and the only game-theoretical outcome is that no one will have the money to do this work. Without going into the discussion of whether that's correct or not, it's not a particularly new stance. It was the whole point of separating Fedora and RHEL in 2004.

freedomben 3y ago

I agree with most of what you said, but: > If that angers you, I heartily encourage folks to build Debian up as the standard we all certify against. Or start your own business that overtakes Red Hat and earns the place RHEL has today. This strikes me as a variation of the "if you don't like Apple or Google's rules, make your own phone" or "if you don't like Youtube's content policies, then start your own video company." It's not necessarily wrong, but it's wildly impractical. It certainly may come down to that, but it would be far better for everyone involved to reach some sort of happy medium point that doesn't result in mass duplication of effort and fragmentation. Before telling people to just fork the project if you don't like it, it would be great to address people's concerns as much as possible, and that can't happen unless people make their concerns known.

jzb 3y ago
It's also, as has been demonstrated, wildly impractical for Red Hat to continue exactly as before without others undermining its business. The thing is that everybody is only lobbying Red Hat to make concessions, but nobody's going after Oracle or Rocky or Alma or other clones to say "hey, cool it. Red Hat's trying to keep a business going here. You're undermining their business. If you keep this up, they're going to make it harder for everybody to use a free RHEL for non-business situations." The difference, too, is that I (probably) have a business relationship with Apple or Google if I'm complaining about their wares. When I complain about iOS or Android it's because I've purchased one of those phones (or want to) but it has a defect (in my opinion) or user-hostile anti-feature preventing me from getting the value I paid for. This isn't that. This largely seems to be people who are not paying for RHEL demanding Red Hat allow them to continue not paying for it but receive its value.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  They could also shrink down to a more manageable business unit... except IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, and you can't ever decrease revenues or the axe drops :(
  - jzb 3y ago

greendave 3y ago

> Red Hat pulls together hundreds or thousands of upstreams to create RHEL, participates in many of them, tests all that together, helps partners certify software against it, etc. etc. etc. > It's true, Red Hat doesn't "own" the Linux kernel, but it's done a ton to help develop it over the years. But RHEL is not merely the kernel nor any single upstream. RHEL is a product that comprises thousands of packages all tested together and then released as a supported product. > What Red Hat is trying to guard is not the source code to any single or even groups of projects. It's trying to preserve and capture the value it created from all those parts. Coincidentally, that value is what businesses, competitors, and the community are clamoring for and not the source code alone. That's a point that (unfortunately) seems to have been lost along the way. A big part of the reason why people use(d) CentOS was because of the confidence they had that it'd be stable, functional, receive timely security updates, etc. And the main reason that was true is the work RedHat put into RHEL. That said, it's not entirely a one-way street. The widespread use of CentOS meant much wider support for RHEL by open-source packages (and some closed source ones) than a locked down, limited availability RHEL would have had. I know of places that use RHEL because CentOS is widely available, and of places that would never bother to support RHEL if it weren't for the availability and (near) ubiquity of CentOS.