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I think Red Hat was fully in the right and that the internet drama around their decision reeks of privilege. If you want the sources, go get them, they're in St

I think Red Hat was fully in the right and that the internet drama around their decision reeks of privilege. If you want the sources, go get them, they're in Stream but Red Hat won't be gift wrapping it for shops competing to offer support. They've been, and continue to be, fantastic stewards of the Linux ecosystem. I use many of their inventions today on my Linux workstation and my experience would be decidedly worse without. I am grateful for their continued pledge to OSS: it's so much further ahead of any other big tech company with their revenue, you'd think they were the loonies. Most companies are doing a mix of OSS and closed source with OSS the core that's dressed up in proprietary services you can't do without. It's the Microsoft strategy, the Docker strategy, the VMware strategy, and on and on and on until most conference showfloors are ghastly apparitions of OSS fun with the real party in their "special sauce". When Red Hat buys a company's tech stack, they take the time to open source all of its components. We are truly living in the most insane times of privilege when we blow up in the most petulant outrage for a company saying, "here's the sources, you prep it if you want to sell it". Rocky and AlmaLinux are not ethical paragons here, in the least.

geerlingguy 3y ago
> I think Red Hat was fully in the right I think the reason for the initial uproar was this[1]: Q: Will the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux continue to appear on git.centos.org? A: Yes, the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to be published on git.centos.org. Nothing will change about how the source code is published. This change is only related to the binaries the CentOS Project is building and how they are published. They struck that answer and replaced it with: A: June 2023 Update: CentOS Stream is now the location for public RHEL source code, sources will no longer be published to git.centos.org. The problem is for any downstream users (not just the 'freeloaders' or 'license abusers'), the main reason they remained in the RHEL ecosystem after the great CentOS to Stream migration was because free clones (Rocky and Alma) appeared in the wake of that decision. Timing is important here. Companies and individuals were working on migration from CentOS 7 to 8 when CentOS 8 was killed off 2 years into a planned 10 year cycle. Then once companies and individuals started migrating from Rocky/Alma 8 to Rocky/Alma 9, in the middle of the next 10 year support cycle of offering git.centos.org code dumps, Red Hat rugpulled the second time in as many release cycles. Red Hat is within their rights, but I don't think they are 'in the right' either in the way they announced the change, or in the timing. And IMO in the way they are treating the response ("we do so much good, so it's okay for us to have a EULA which is against the spirit of FOSS/GPL"). Also, the discourse started getting weird when there were implications by Red Hat leadership someone did something so bad to trigger this sudden change, yet nobody will say who it was. I admittedly don't know much about the Rocky/Alma situation, but it would be great if instead of vague accusations, someone would speak up because right now, for downstream users, it is annoying to have Red Hat imply one of these two orgs (maybe both?) is doing something nefarious, but to not know which one. [1] https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/ https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  > Also, the discourse started getting weird when there were implications by Red Hat leadership someone did something so bad to trigger this sudden change, yet nobody will say who it was. No company is gonna open itself up to libel lawsuits by naming a company that did something “bad” when they didn’t even need to state the fact that something bad happened in the first place. Don’t expect Red Hat to name a company here.
JohnFen 3y ago
> They've been, and continue to be, fantastic stewards of the Linux ecosystem. I disagree with this. I view them as one of the main factors in what I see as the ongoing degradation of the Linux ecosystem. But reasonable people can differ -- I suppose your stance probably depends on what you value in Linux.

geerlingguy 3y ago

> I think Red Hat was fully in the right I think the reason for the initial uproar was this[1]: Q: Will the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux continue to appear on git.centos.org? A: Yes, the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to be published on git.centos.org. Nothing will change about how the source code is published. This change is only related to the binaries the CentOS Project is building and how they are published. They struck that answer and replaced it with: A: June 2023 Update: CentOS Stream is now the location for public RHEL source code, sources will no longer be published to git.centos.org. The problem is for any downstream users (not just the 'freeloaders' or 'license abusers'), the main reason they remained in the RHEL ecosystem after the great CentOS to Stream migration was because free clones (Rocky and Alma) appeared in the wake of that decision. Timing is important here. Companies and individuals were working on migration from CentOS 7 to 8 when CentOS 8 was killed off 2 years into a planned 10 year cycle. Then once companies and individuals started migrating from Rocky/Alma 8 to Rocky/Alma 9, in the middle of the next 10 year support cycle of offering git.centos.org code dumps, Red Hat rugpulled the second time in as many release cycles. Red Hat is within their rights, but I don't think they are 'in the right' either in the way they announced the change, or in the timing. And IMO in the way they are treating the response ("we do so much good, so it's okay for us to have a EULA which is against the spirit of FOSS/GPL"). Also, the discourse started getting weird when there were implications by Red Hat leadership someone did something so bad to trigger this sudden change, yet nobody will say who it was. I admittedly don't know much about the Rocky/Alma situation, but it would be great if instead of vague accusations, someone would speak up because right now, for downstream users, it is annoying to have Red Hat imply one of these two orgs (maybe both?) is doing something nefarious, but to not know which one. [1] https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/ https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/

rhaway84773 3y ago
> Also, the discourse started getting weird when there were implications by Red Hat leadership someone did something so bad to trigger this sudden change, yet nobody will say who it was. No company is gonna open itself up to libel lawsuits by naming a company that did something “bad” when they didn’t even need to state the fact that something bad happened in the first place. Don’t expect Red Hat to name a company here.

JohnFen 3y ago

> They've been, and continue to be, fantastic stewards of the Linux ecosystem. I disagree with this. I view them as one of the main factors in what I see as the ongoing degradation of the Linux ecosystem. But reasonable people can differ -- I suppose your stance probably depends on what you value in Linux.