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Rocky strikes back at Red Hat
- fredski42 3y agoAfaics the methods Rocky has found to get to RHEL’s sources might work technically but will violate Red Hat’s T&C. Just use Centos Stream to build your value and contribute back.
- dzsekijo 3y agoWell, but then Red Hat's T&C may be a violation of GPL. Red Hat bases its model on dwelling in the grey zone. So if Rocky aspires to be a Red Hat clone... they can adopt this bit, too :)
- fredski42 3y agoRed Hat’s T&C is not a violation of the GPL. That argument is done and dusted.
- geerlingguy 3y agoWhat? So far the consensus is "probably is compliant (minimally), but a good set of lawyers may be able to argue either way, depending on the jurisdiction"
- fredski42 3y agoAs I understand it (not a lawyer!): When you have a business relation with Red Hat (agreed to their T&C) and you choose to use the GPL-ed sources outside of the T&C you agreed, Red Hat has the right to terminate this business relation. The GPL-ed Sources you got during that business relation are under the terms of the GPL and thus it is within your rights after the business relation is terminated to use those sources anyway you like within the terms of the GPL. If you don’t like this arrangement, do not use RHEL.
- sudosysgen 3y agoThe GPL does not allow you to put further restrictions on the redistribution of sources. The termination of your business relationship can be argued to be a restriction. It's not settled.
- mustache_kimono 3y ago> The termination of your business relationship can be argued to be a restriction. It's not a very good argument. The GPL does not state nor does it imply a continuing duty to deliver you source code. You have a right to the source which corresponds to the binary you've been delivered. Period. If I release a new binary to which I hold full copyright, after having delivered GPL sources to you, and I wish to change the license of that software to fully proprietary, your rights are not restricted re: the GPL bits you've previously received. Why? Because you should still have the source to the binary you received from me that was licensed as GPL.
- fredski42 3y agoAlso, I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. The sources are available in CentOS Stream.
- mistrial9 3y agothe fuss is when this whole arrangement goes to an outside party for contract: companies that indemnify their partners; that have compliance requirements by law; that sign contracts to provide service that have strict clauses, all need the commitment of strong contracts with their OS supplier. Those kinds of customers are exactly RHEL customers, in many cases.
- RichardCA 3y agoI really think this is all due to the Rocky/NASA deal. Their sales team (IBM/RH) must have freaked out. If Rocky can put a deal like that together then so can Oracle. I felt bad for Mike McGrath when I read his apologetics. The technical guy playing as a pawn in a proxy battle between salespeople and lawyers.
- geerlingguy 3y agoThis is mostly true, but there's nuance to that which I believe doesn't make Stream a "fully GPL compliant target for RHEL sources". Some sources do not hit Stream in a way that makes it possible to rebuild a release of RHEL verbatim, and devs can and have reported issues with compiling against Stream for deployment to RHEL, especially for the latest versions, where Stream and RHEL are diverged for a time.
- tpush 3y agoThat's not the consensus and "minimal" compliance is not a thing.
- Qem 3y agoSoftware Freedom Conservancy lawyers apparently are skeptical: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
- tapoxi 3y agoSkeptical, but not skeptical enough to sue to seek an injunction? They have standing, they have full copyright ownership of many packages in RHEL.
- pjmlp 3y agoOr they could put in the work to create their own snowflake distribution, like thousands others on Distrowatch.
- masklinn 3y agoAh but then what of their business model of undercutting redhat on RHEL ?
- goolz 3y agoI mean, RHEL clearly does not care about the GPL. Couldn’t the same argument be made then about RHEL and their attempts to undercut all the devs who put in free time to make Linux?
- pjmlp 3y agoDevs that happen to compile their work with GCC, mostly sponsored by Red-Hat?
- goolz 3y agoYour argument is circular. And “mostly sponsored” is just another way of saying sponsored. Just because you sponsor something does not mean you own it. It does not really give you many rights as I understand. Because you are a sponsor, not an investor. You make the argument for GCC but that is a piece of GNU which I feel furthers my point. Cool, RHEL put some money into an already free and open piece of software… that makes them exempt from violating the GPL? edit: Stallman, any thoughts?
- pjmlp 3y agoMostly sponsored means where the contributors get they money from. They aren't violating the GPL as per legal point of view. Whatever morals people think should go beyond legal matters is wishful thinking. Anyone is also welcome to up their game and pay the projects Red-Hat is putting money on. Whose the first?
- MichaelMoser123 3y agowhy not use alpine instead?
- okasaki 3y agoBecause we've built up services, applications, and thousands of lines of ansible that only work on RHEL?
- stephen_g 3y agoI think the way this is going to play out is that a lot of that distro-specific code is going to have to be re-written. I’m lucky that my CentOS/Rocky exposure is not huge (maybe a dozen virtual machines) so it’s not a big deal for me to change. Of course, having had licensed RHEL machines and VMs in the past, this whole thing makes me much less likely to ever pay RedHat/IBM for them again… Definitely already time to look for alternatives. It is really quite a shame though, given the amount of Linux and related open source development RedHat developers did.
- housemusicfan 3y agoAt any point in building your entire business' infrastructure so it was dependent on RHEL, or more likely an ersatz clone, did you ever consider you might have to buy a license at some point? It's like building a diet exclusively based on eating the free samples at Costco then going "oh those evil bastards, I'll starve to death" when they take them away. Maybe use platform-agnostic architecture next time or don't build your house of cards on proprietary-adjacent distros.
- mort96 3y agoRed Hat never indicated that they had any trouble with CentOS, rather the opposite; their disposition towards it has always been very positive until recently. It would have been like using Ubuntu Server and worrying that Canonical might kill it off and force you to buy Ubuntu Pro; not completely out of the question, but also not something you would expect.
- geerlingguy 3y agoIn this war, there are no winners.
- brnt 3y agoThe only winning move, is not to build on the infrastructure of an adversarial party. Pour this energy into Debian LTS, people.
- tannhaeuser 3y agoBetter yet, build for POSIX and make sure your stuff also works on the BSDs.
- pjmlp 3y agoUNIX wars keep going on, they only got rebranded.
- mellosouls 3y agoSome prior heavy discussions here of the original move by Red Hat and responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36479882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36479882
- Krisjohn 3y agoWhy bother? The Venn diagram of people that need a bug-for-bug clone of RHEL and think that the proposed process is in any way appropriate is two seperate circles.
- not_your_vase 3y agoAre there really so many users who rely on 100% RHEL compatibility, and support for 10 years of the same ancient kernel? And all these users are companies who can't afford a license? Or universities who can't afford an education license? What are these users doing, that can't be done with good ol' Debian, or any other of the million distros? I'm genuinely interested in that.
- epolanski 3y agoThings are more complex when requirements and documents were drafted time ago. A requirement may specifically include all security updates asap for that software on that version and it is nobody's interest to change kernels (especially by who charges the clients for this routine constant work).
- iamwpj 3y agoWe have plenty of licensed RHEL, but in isolated environments the hurdle of connecting to a Satellite server or their subscription hub on the internet is too high -- at least with Rocky and the ilk available. For this set up, the licensing model doesn't match reality, at least not easily. Are we really going to build out compatible configuration management, monitoring, logging, etc? -- it's not a seamless transition. How much time do we have to put towards this? And yes -- there is software compatibility issues. Look at the OpenHPC software distribution, it's designed for SUSE or Enterprise Linux: https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/2.X https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/2.X
- not_your_vase 3y agoI guess testing with broken licensing terms is a valid usecase, thank you. But does that mean most of the uproar is caused by this root cause? This noise is actually coming from actual RHEL subscribers, who don't want to pay such throwaway systems (rightfully), and not from non-RHEL subscribers?
- lelanthran 3y ago> Are there really so many users who rely on 100% RHEL compatibility, and support for 10 years of the same ancient kernel? It's not unimaginable. Think systems which have been certified by some regulatory body. So, most of finance and banking, some of health, all of munitions and arms, many aviation systems, many industrial systems, etc. I worked in EMV and munitions, and a lot of the time it was simply cheaper to continue making the old system than it was to certify a whole new system. The fastest certification process I knew off took about 6 month. The longest took about 2 years. At those timescales it becomes expensive.
- ossusermivami 3y agoHonestly I don't think Rocky provides any values to the community but that may be just me a arch user on desktop and debian on server (switched from redhat).... but i don't think the issue is with them, the real issue is huge corporation like Oracle who are ought to destruct Redhat and I can understand where they are coming from... Rocky, Alma, they are casualty..
- throwawayyy9237 3y agoRegardless on where you stand about Red Hat's decision, I can't imagine any company relying on a distribution that's built from these methods (Rocky, I mean). Scraping source using dodgy methods almost sounds like "pirated" Linux.