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A lot of comments on this topic seem at odds with reality. If you accept that it takes a lot of effort to produce what Red Hat produces and you accept that you

by orf 3y ago

A lot of comments on this topic seem at odds with reality. If you accept that it takes a lot of effort to produce what Red Hat produces and you accept that you cannot buy food with a list of your open source contributions, then the people who work for Red Hat need to be compensated in some way. If your answer to this is that there is a big, distributed pool of people willing to do this work instead of Red Hat then you don’t believe that Red Hat adds value. But the question remains: who compensates those people? And this big distributed pool of people ready to do free work definitely doesn’t exist already. Well, it does, but it’s just Redhat. And they are rightfully changing that. It could be the companies they work for (like is done with the Linux Kernel), but that doesn’t exist and starting it is a pretty big undertaking. At the end of the day the comment in the post about the anger coming from people who “do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit” rings pretty true.

cyberpunk 3y ago
IBM make a sheadload of money, redhat also was doing absolutely fine on support sales (up 17% in 2022, according to 'el'google) -- if they are suddenly unable to pay their developers then, sure. I don't think anyone is particularly surprised, or will miss them much. It's just kinda sad to see what was a reasonably happy opensource success story end with a giant corporation shutting down some of their releases out of protectionism.
- orf 3y ago
  You’re not in their sales funnel and lots of things look healthy from the outside that actually are not.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    it seems to correlate more with the ibm acquisition
    - bonzini 3y ago
      People were expecting IBM to swallow Red Hat in 3 years. After 4 years some parts of RHEL have been opened (Fedora ELN, CentOS Stream) and some have been closed, overall I would call that a success even if IBM was behind this decision...
      - awill 3y ago
        You're listing CentOS Stream as a positive thing IBM created? No. That was their excuse for cancelling CentOS. If you remember, it was universally unpopular.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
It's interesting because if RHEL had no value add nobody would pay for it and nobody would be angry about this change. All of these angry posts are proof in a way that they are putting in valuable work.
- rektide 3y ago
  RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them. If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.
  - gnukid 3y ago
    Can't everyday people use CentOS Stream?
    - mikelward 3y ago
      Or Fedora.
      - hdaz0017 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - RichardCA 3y ago
        Last time I tried Fedora was FC35. I came back a few months later and tried to build a kernel module, I couldn't get the RPM's for kernel-devel and kernel-headers to line up correctly. It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.
    - 3y ago
smoldesu 3y ago
It's the other way around - if Red Hat wants to contribute to GPL software, they have to reconcile the legal realities of the situation with their business model. If it's not viable for them to contribute like this, then they shouldn't. They're binding themselves to the conditions of the GPL by contributing to it though, and shouldn't be granted exemption for being a business. If sharing their changes out of goodwill isn't their prerogative, maybe they should offer enterprise support to redistribution-optional systems like Minix instead.
kryptiskt 3y ago
Why did Red Hat's previous model stop working now, after 25 years of success? I'm not angry about what Red Hat is doing. I'm just puzzled and I suspect that its a very stupid move. What Red Hat is doing now will probably increase their license sales in the short term. But they will do so by cannibalizing the entire Red Hat-compatible ecosystem. All the "freeloaders" provide RHEL with most of its share in the distro market. Kill them off and it will become a technical backwater, all the small and medium users will go somewhere else and there will be no on-ramp for new customers (as Red Hat is too technically different from what they have). It can take a while, they might get RHEL for their old systems but they'll go SUSE/Debian/Ubuntu for new stuff. I'd say that they are literally doing what Travis CI and other companies have done in the past, they have no vision of growing their market anymore, now its all about cost cutting and squeezing the most out of their existing share while the music is playing. So no, I'm not angry about it, but on the other hand I can't see it as anything but a sign of irreversible decline.
- jabl 3y ago
  For a somewhat simplistic explanation, RHEL became very successful as a tool to replace proprietary RISC Unix servers (often running Oracle DB) with x86(-64) and Linux, offering a traditional "enterprise" support model those proprietary UNIX customers were used to. So what has changed? 1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there. 2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue. 3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu. While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.
  - 3y ago

by orf 3y ago

cyberpunk 3y ago

IBM make a sheadload of money, redhat also was doing absolutely fine on support sales (up 17% in 2022, according to 'el'google) -- if they are suddenly unable to pay their developers then, sure. I don't think anyone is particularly surprised, or will miss them much. It's just kinda sad to see what was a reasonably happy opensource success story end with a giant corporation shutting down some of their releases out of protectionism.

orf 3y ago
You’re not in their sales funnel and lots of things look healthy from the outside that actually are not.
- _cenw 3y ago
  it seems to correlate more with the ibm acquisition
  - bonzini 3y ago
    People were expecting IBM to swallow Red Hat in 3 years. After 4 years some parts of RHEL have been opened (Fedora ELN, CentOS Stream) and some have been closed, overall I would call that a success even if IBM was behind this decision...
    - awill 3y ago
      You're listing CentOS Stream as a positive thing IBM created? No. That was their excuse for cancelling CentOS. If you remember, it was universally unpopular.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

It's interesting because if RHEL had no value add nobody would pay for it and nobody would be angry about this change. All of these angry posts are proof in a way that they are putting in valuable work.

rektide 3y ago
RHEL was only used & adopted because everyday people could use it. Then when they had jobs at their enterprise, they could bring what they knew with them. If RHEL is only for paying people, as McGrath from the pulpit so expounds, most people are gonna leave. The value was having a community, a good path, that extended from open source to paid support. If McGrath blows up one end of the continuum, the other end will certainly wither collapse & die. This is a deathmark. People are upset to see a vibrant world shut off and thus shut down, whatever the value/greed/whatever of the situation. A pillar of Linux has left the chat.
- gnukid 3y ago
  Can't everyday people use CentOS Stream?
  - mikelward 3y ago
    Or Fedora.
    - hdaz0017 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - RichardCA 3y ago
      Last time I tried Fedora was FC35. I came back a few months later and tried to build a kernel module, I couldn't get the RPM's for kernel-devel and kernel-headers to line up correctly. It's exactly these kinds of fiddly details that get weaponized when you want to derail a distro. It's not easy or frictionless anymore.
  - 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago

It's the other way around - if Red Hat wants to contribute to GPL software, they have to reconcile the legal realities of the situation with their business model. If it's not viable for them to contribute like this, then they shouldn't. They're binding themselves to the conditions of the GPL by contributing to it though, and shouldn't be granted exemption for being a business. If sharing their changes out of goodwill isn't their prerogative, maybe they should offer enterprise support to redistribution-optional systems like Minix instead.

kryptiskt 3y ago

Why did Red Hat's previous model stop working now, after 25 years of success? I'm not angry about what Red Hat is doing. I'm just puzzled and I suspect that its a very stupid move. What Red Hat is doing now will probably increase their license sales in the short term. But they will do so by cannibalizing the entire Red Hat-compatible ecosystem. All the "freeloaders" provide RHEL with most of its share in the distro market. Kill them off and it will become a technical backwater, all the small and medium users will go somewhere else and there will be no on-ramp for new customers (as Red Hat is too technically different from what they have). It can take a while, they might get RHEL for their old systems but they'll go SUSE/Debian/Ubuntu for new stuff. I'd say that they are literally doing what Travis CI and other companies have done in the past, they have no vision of growing their market anymore, now its all about cost cutting and squeezing the most out of their existing share while the music is playing. So no, I'm not angry about it, but on the other hand I can't see it as anything but a sign of irreversible decline.

jabl 3y ago
For a somewhat simplistic explanation, RHEL became very successful as a tool to replace proprietary RISC Unix servers (often running Oracle DB) with x86(-64) and Linux, offering a traditional "enterprise" support model those proprietary UNIX customers were used to. So what has changed? 1. The above market is pretty much "saturated" in the sense there aren't many proprietary UNIX systems left to convert to x86+RHEL. So not much growth potential there. 2. Oracle has their own RHEL rebuild that they aggressively(?) market to Oracle customers. And I guess it makes sense if you have a server to run Oracle DB on, to also use the Oracle RHEL rebuild to avoid the situation where you have a problem and Oracle and Redhat point fingers at each other and nobody takes charge of solving the issue. 3. Cloud. Cloud is obviously big these days, and it seems for one or another reason cloud deployments often choose some other distro than RHEL, be it one of the free rebuilds (CentOS, Alma, Rocky, OEL), or something else entirely like Ubuntu. While I'm not privy to any RH internal info, it wouldn't surprise me if they're worried about the above trends continuing. Whether this recent change to make life for rebuilds a bit harder will materially affect anything, and if so how, remains to be seen.
- 3y ago