4 ms·

Wow, another blog post on the same two changes everyone else has been talking about for two weeks, rehashing the exact same arguments. I genuinely cannot think

Wow, another blog post on the same two changes everyone else has been talking about for two weeks, rehashing the exact same arguments. I genuinely cannot think of a company that contributes more to open-source projects than Red Hat. They to do this through hiring hundreds of talented engineers and adhering to an incredibly generous upstream-first policy, where most of the work they do gets made available for everyone else. No matter what Linux distribution you use, you are running a huge amount of code written by Red Hat. Unfortunately, because we don’t live in a utopia, they need to be able to pay their engineers to do this work, and clones that simply redistribute their packages pose a serious threat to their ability to do this. Previously, Red Hat went out of their way to make the exact RHEL sources available to these clones. Now, Red Hat is still publishing all the code they write through Stream, but they do not have a specific repo for the exact RHEL patch set. I don’t see how this isn’t completely reasonable. If you led a company making a product, and were responsible for thousands of employees, and some other company simply took that product and repackaged it, released it for free, while (in the case of Rocky and Oracle) running ads to compete with you in the process, are you telling me you would go out of your way to publish the exact patchsets to a special repository to make it as easy as possible for them to do this?

tm-guimaraes 3y ago
Yes. It would be giving customers insurance. customers made redhat huge. Free software with many vendors is insurance. Redhat was known to go the distance for customers, which also got some critics from some mantainers, but as a customer, what more could I want than that? They deliver, and give me the guarantee that if I’m not happy i can go to Rocky or Oracle and see if they are any better. Do you think you could get better customer focus than a company like this? But now this changes things. People are seeing this as “gpl rights” or “free loaders”, but it’s more like a social network shitting on its users because its market is set. Or any other company trying to get bigger lock in rather than providing better products/service. This is the typical big mistake of seeing uses without revenue and having the hubris to believe those are dollars lost.
- bimblesticks 3y ago
  RH presumably has access to far more detailed statistics on usage and adoption of CentOS and RHEL than we do. Many of the execs at RH have been at the company for decades, and so will have been observing these statistics over the years and through various transition periods. I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.
  - tm-guimaraes 3y ago
    > I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. No contempt whatsoever, this decision of theirs is very well aligned with most companies do. Also, it's not that I'm seeing and they don't, it's just the whole "lost revenue" fallacy from piracy or clones or wtv, that I don't like. Just like I actually detest the whole "capture users" lingo usually used nowadays. > I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing. I'm inclined to believe that, like any other big corp, some exec, board member, or any kind of higher up, just saw Oracle and Rocky ads, saw their own usage and wtv metric they had for freeloaders, and wanted to get money back, or not bleed to other vendors, specially something like Oracle. Again, no matter how much statistics they have on Clone Adoption, the impact on ecosystem on a whole is unmeasurable. It's a big ecosystem system, and such big change has side effects. They most likelt won't matter in this decade, and because so much shit will change till the next one, we will never be able to tell for sure if this was well worth it. What is undeniable truth is that customers are worth off. And I don't think Redhat was at an existential risk the way they were operating. Capitalism works as long as company actually care about the customers. Limiting who can service a customer is not good for the customers. That's all.

tm-guimaraes 3y ago

Yes. It would be giving customers insurance. customers made redhat huge. Free software with many vendors is insurance. Redhat was known to go the distance for customers, which also got some critics from some mantainers, but as a customer, what more could I want than that? They deliver, and give me the guarantee that if I’m not happy i can go to Rocky or Oracle and see if they are any better. Do you think you could get better customer focus than a company like this? But now this changes things. People are seeing this as “gpl rights” or “free loaders”, but it’s more like a social network shitting on its users because its market is set. Or any other company trying to get bigger lock in rather than providing better products/service. This is the typical big mistake of seeing uses without revenue and having the hubris to believe those are dollars lost.

bimblesticks 3y ago
RH presumably has access to far more detailed statistics on usage and adoption of CentOS and RHEL than we do. Many of the execs at RH have been at the company for decades, and so will have been observing these statistics over the years and through various transition periods. I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.
- tm-guimaraes 3y ago
  > I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. No contempt whatsoever, this decision of theirs is very well aligned with most companies do. Also, it's not that I'm seeing and they don't, it's just the whole "lost revenue" fallacy from piracy or clones or wtv, that I don't like. Just like I actually detest the whole "capture users" lingo usually used nowadays. > I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing. I'm inclined to believe that, like any other big corp, some exec, board member, or any kind of higher up, just saw Oracle and Rocky ads, saw their own usage and wtv metric they had for freeloaders, and wanted to get money back, or not bleed to other vendors, specially something like Oracle. Again, no matter how much statistics they have on Clone Adoption, the impact on ecosystem on a whole is unmeasurable. It's a big ecosystem system, and such big change has side effects. They most likelt won't matter in this decade, and because so much shit will change till the next one, we will never be able to tell for sure if this was well worth it. What is undeniable truth is that customers are worth off. And I don't think Redhat was at an existential risk the way they were operating. Capitalism works as long as company actually care about the customers. Limiting who can service a customer is not good for the customers. That's all.