10 ms·

Red Hat Is Not Linux (2000)

143 points by lproven 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jsiepkes 3y ago
"Caldera is preferred by 127 petitioners" Well, I've got something to tell these 127 people from 2000 about SCO who have an issue with RedHat about some impending doom in 2003 [1] ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes
- jzb 3y ago
  To be fair, nobody saw that one coming. Caldera was fine, they had done some fun stuff with the installer (Tetris!) and they had a exotically named CEO (Ransom Love), but they were fine. Their heel turn happened after a management change. The whole debacle was stranger-than-fiction (at least at the time). The whole "we're SCO now, and we're evil" was just bonkers. The lesson that people should've taken from that, though, is that any company is just one management change away from major changes.
zzzeek 3y ago
the moral of the story is, nothing happened, RHEL was a great product, everyone was happy. Just like I think they will be when they realize CentOS Stream is still a viable product.
- jamesnorden 3y ago
  If you like beta-testing in production, maybe.
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    Why would you expect for profit business to do all the testing for you?
    - vetinari 3y ago
      Why would you expect doing free testing and contributions for a for profit business?
      - totallywrong 3y ago
        No one expects that. Use it or not. But don't demand the final product for free.
        vetinari 3y ago
        Who demands final product for free? The final product includes support; nobody is asking for that. There is no expectation for dedicated engineer time or solving their support cases. Nor is there any expectation of certifications or any other value-adds that RH provides. Afaik the cloners demand the access to sources and patches to what is being shipped, which is their right. They are GPL, and not Redhat's for most part.
        totallywrong 3y ago
        > Who demands final product for free? Just about everyone. The final product is RHEL in this context. > which is their right No, as per the GPL they only have to provide sources to paying customers.
        vetinari 3y ago
        > No, as per the GPL they only have to provide sources to paying customers. If they were providing binaries only to paying customers, that would be right. But they aren't. Anyone, who spins up RHEL VM in the cloud, uses UBI image or downloads it from the developer account has the same right. In all cases, RH cannot prevent anyone, who obtained the sources, from distributing them further; not even threatening with contract termination. That would be "further restrictions", which GPL explicitly forbids.
        jzb 3y ago
  - creatonez 3y ago
    Note that while CentOS Stream is continuously integrated (in a way that may not be suitable for production), each patch is still thoroughly tested, using roughly the same testing procedure as RHEL. So it's a mischaracterization to call it a beta test, but it's nevertheless not a production-grade stable platform for most purposes. It's a rather weird middle ground to be in, not one that I can think of any parallels for.
    - dralley 3y ago
      The release model for CentOS stream is basically the same as debian. If people are happy using debian in production, I don't see why CentOS stream would be fundamentally different.
  - totallywrong 3y ago
    Use Fedora Server. Or any other distro. The uproar for not having the exact same thing they provide for a fee (while still giving you extremely close options) is unjustified.
- jzb 3y ago
  CentOS Stream is at least as good as CentOS (probably better) was before Red Hat "acquired" it.[1] It's funny how rose-colored people's memories or suppositions about the past are. Basically - there's never been a bug-for-bug compatible RHEL clone that shipped quickly until Red Hat made it possible to do. Stream isn't a product, it's a project. And it should be a project. If Rocky or somebody else wants to add value and make it a product, they can do the work to do so. Rocky/CIQ, in particular, has made all kinds of noise about how Rocky is the "stable foundation you can build on and rely on for years to come." Well... Red Hat has decided to stop making it super-easy. It's a bummer that this hits users who were never potential revenue sources for Red Hat/RHEL, but I can just hear investors asking "why the ever-loving ** are you making it so easy for others to clone your biggest product?" [1] https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/07/03/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-iii-the-dawn-of-centos/ https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/07/03/red-hat-and-the-clon...
  - indymike 3y ago
    < I can just hear investors asking "why the ever-loving * are you making it so easy for others to clone your biggest product?" It is telling that no one in the meeting could actually answer that: "We still face formidable competition, and we do not believe our moat will hold for more than 12-18 months before whatever replaces us in the market emerges and begins rapidly eroding market share, resulting in dwindling profits and share prices. By allowing an unofficial free-tier -- a clone, as you say -- of our enterprise product, we keep developers from rapidly switching to Debian and it's derivatives. Once that happens, the hosting and enterprise data center markets will collapse irretrievably leaving us with only legacy customers who will leave, one server age-out at a time."
    - Nux 3y ago
      Precisely. It's pretty incredible. Even with CentOS they were losing ground to the competition, it's going to accelerate going forward.
habibur 3y ago
More purity fight even before that. Remember, when pre-compiled kernels started to get popular, it was seen as bad thing, as everyone was supposed to compile their own kernel which took into consideration of their hardware configuration for optimization.
- sgbeal 3y ago
  Ah, self-compiled kernels at least once a week. Those were the days... which i would not want to return to.
  - lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    The Gentoo way. The tradition lives on...somewhere...
    - djbusby 3y ago
      Gentoo has binary kernel (if you want it) - and of course other options for source, vanilla, etc.
      - pxc 3y ago
        NixOS and GuixSD, much younger distributions in the same broad source-based package management tradition as Gentoo, also make custom kernels super easy to integrate with their usual package management systems while providing convenient, pre-built options. I'm fine with generic kernel builds and that's what I usually use, but I don't think tweaking your kernel is as painful or manual today as the greybeards here remember.
        cesarb 3y ago
        > I'm fine with generic kernel builds and that's what I usually use, but I don't think tweaking your kernel is as painful or manual today as the greybeards here remember. Back then, we went into "make menuconfig", and meticulously reviewed every single configuration option, carefully tuning them to our bespoke hardware; it only took a few hours. Try doing that nowadays; there's simply way too many configuration options (each new device driver adds a couple, and even the kernel core has grown to hundreds of them). So yeah, I'd say fully tweaking your kernel is a more painful process today than in the past. (The same for packages; back then, we could open "dselect" and page through all the available packages in a single evening; nowadays, there's too many of them.)
superdug 3y ago
The problem is money. The solution is money. At the turn of the century the only ones paying for this linux thing we were all dedicating our lives to proliferating. Around this time solaris was teasing going open source and freebsd was on parity with linux. We had options then and we have options now. Redhat eventually relented, but here we are again. We've come a long way, now we're leaders and decision makers at our respective organizations. I've since abandoned redhat, I invite you to do the same.
ytjohn 3y ago
When I was young and optimistic, I was doing a bunch of side IT jobs. At one, a local insurance company needed to replace their Windows NT server. Instead of going with Windows 2000, I talked them into me setting up a RedHat Linux server running Samba. I had a few hiccups as the workstations weren't actually connected to a domain originally, but I eventually got them all going with AD login, roaming profiles, tape backups, etc. The big selling point was the open source nature, free updates forever. Less than six months later, Redhat announced that the were going to discontinue RedHat Linux and start releasing their new RedHat Enteprise Linux. This left me rather angry and embarrassed. It was definitely a turning point in my understanding of FOSS. It also made me a lifelong Debian/Debian derivative user. I've supported RHEL professionally, even getting RHCEs in it. RedHat has also contributed a lot to the open source community. But I've certainly never forgot that first pivot, so I'm not surprised with their recent decisions regarding RHEL's source code.
- jzb 3y ago
  I understand embarrassment, but anger might be misplaced. Red Hat was a newly public company trying to turn a profit. It identified its market and Red Hat Linux wasn't serving it, and the model they were pursuing with Red Hat Linux wasn't working. But I am a solid supporter of the "pay for RHEL or use Debian" philosophy. If you need promises about the future, pay for RHEL or use a project that doesn't have commercial motives. Debian is great and I wish more companies would standardize on it and support it. I'm not such a fan of the middle road of hoping that vendors will continue supplying things of value for free. It's especially ironic that an insurance vendor got burned by placing a bet on a free operating system with no assurances whatsoever. The RHEL subscription is insurance.
  - firesteelrain 3y ago
    Pay for RHEL or use Ubuntu Edit: I guess people don’t like Ubuntu that much
    - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
      Both Canonical and Ubuntu have their own share of problems, and they've been struggling to monetize Ubuntu for the past few years. Once you get burned by one commercial vendor (not once actually… it's the third time afaik), it's probably wise to use this opportunity for migrating to a more stable distribution where commercial interest doesn't have much influence, and which has never intentionally burned its users (since Debian developers are users too and are also doing it for themselves).
kar1181 3y ago
I started on RedHat and it has a special place in my heart - even now they still host the original distributions I cut my unix teeth on all the way back. But sadly times change. Get it, they want to make money, but doesn't change the sadness these recent moves have caused.
zokier 3y ago
Ultimately each (major) Linux distro is its own independent Operating System that is its own thing and will make its own decisions. Sure, they might share many, if not most, common components, but an distro is an example where the whole is more than its parts.
ramesh31 3y ago
>redhatisnotlinux.org runs Slackware Linux 7.1, Stronghold 2.3, PHP 4.0.0, and PostgresQL 7.0 An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  So shocking to see PostgreSQL in that list. MySQL was definitely what was in vogue at the time.
  - flashback2199 3y ago
    I remember that too, but I think I've heard that postgres was also popular in the linux/oss world at the time
ck2 3y ago
I'm still not over the end of CentOS That was so disappointing. Waiting to see which of the two alternatives shakes out. Dangerously past EOL on some servers, I just don't have to motivation to rebuild.
- ahoka 3y ago
  Alternatives? Are you not following the news? They are kaput. Dead in their infancy.
  - dralley 3y ago
    It seems like you aren't following the news. Both Rocky and Alma have announced they will proceed with a workaround.
- lproven 3y ago
  > which of the two alternatives There are not just 2 and never were. Oracle is, you know, quite big and fairly well known. https://www.oracle.com/linux/ https://www.oracle.com/linux/ It's also much older than either Alma or Rocky. So is Springdale Linux, formerly PUIAS Linux: https://springdale.math.ias.edu/ https://springdale.math.ias.edu/ EuroLinux is also a thing for the wider world, i.e. outside North America: https://en.euro-linux.com/eurolinux/what-is/ https://en.euro-linux.com/eurolinux/what-is/ In Japan there is Miracle Linux: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=miracle https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=miracle In China there is Euler OS: https://developer.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/euleros/index.html https://developer.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/euleros/index.h... There was also Inspur K-UX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX Both the latter were even officially UNIX™ certified. I am sure there are many more I don't know about.
  - ck2 3y ago
    Alma and Rocky were the only two real matching replacements and considering Alma is the only one with $1 Million/year on the tablet to guarantee survival until 2029, I'm not going through the drama of a small or unanchored product again so that might be the "winner".
krupan 3y ago
The anger and resentment towards Red Hat in the open source world had always made me sad. Red Hat made linux mainstream. Before Red Hat, big expensive commercial software (engineering tools, databases, simulation software, network services, all the big enterprisey things) all ran on and was officially supported on UNIX (and maybe Windows NT): HP-UX, Solaris, Irix. People were dabbling with Linux, crazy start ups were inventing crazy new things with it, but it wasn't until Red Hat basically mimicked the commercial UNIX model of stable releases, official safety and security certifications, support contracts, etc., that Linux went mainstream and UNIX (and NT) withered to almost nothing. Linux and all other open source code has flourished because of this! Red Hat has always been open source. They have followed the letter of the license and still do. Not only that, they make big money! And they have employed and still do employ many top tier open source developers who contribute open source code to a variety of projects. The money they make makes all of open source better! Their business model probably isn't for you, non-enterprisey do-it-yourself HN reader. But that's ok. There's absolutely no reason for you to be bitter or resentful about that because you have many other choices of Linux distribution available to you. All of which has been improved in some way by Red Hat. I actually wish more open source projects followed the Red Hat model. Corporations making big money using open source would actually be paying the developers of those open source projects! That would be amazing!
- dagmx 3y ago
  Imho it’s all just a purity test, coupled with so much of the tech community just loving drama. This is our equivalent to reality shows where there’s a celebrity train wreck. I agree with you, Red Hat are a huge contributor to open source. Their business model lets them make money and then they use that money to contribute to projects in the wild. To me, it’s a win win. I can understand why people would be upset with the changes. I don’t understand why they would be angry though. The choice of down stream repackage distros has always been at RH’s convenience. This has always been clear since the day CentOS was a thing, and Rocky/Alma after it. Their product model depended on the whims of another product.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    Ask yourself how many things RH has done for the community also directly contributed to their bottom line. Now combine that with its new business leaders that promise explicitly to pare back efforts that don't help or even hurt the bottom line. Would that make you happy with them? Sure, they aren't under an obligation to drive FOSS, but there is an obvious and notable change in direction here.
jt2190 3y ago
This issue has gotten a lot of attention on HN lately, but I'm still struggling to wrap my head around it. If anyone can clarify my understanding I'd appreciate it. My understanding is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be thought of as Fedora + stability + patches, and that the patches themselves should be released downstream as part of the GPL. What's now changed is that these patches are either (a) not distributed as required by the GPL, or (b) the patches are distributed, but in a way that is intentionally less useful, e.g. by having to get them via the Red Hat portal. This has made it more difficult for "repackagers" like CentOS, Rocky and Alma to keep their disros up to date. Assuming I have the above correct (and I may not), my suspicion is that Red Hat is looking at cloud providers who also have been repackaging, for example, Amazon Web Services' Amazon Linux has historically been RHEL repackaged and bundled with some aws tools. I'm not aware of AWS distributing their changes either. From this perspective, it looks like the AWS benefits from the stability + patches without paying RedHat for their development. (I'm also not aware of whether aws distributes the Amazon Linux sources and if so those are done in a way that is useful for the community... I'll do some further research on my own. edit: It looks like the Amazon Linux sources are here: https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux)
- dcow 3y ago
  Nothing in the GPL says sources must be available to anonymous unauthenticated users. RHEL just requires you to sign in to download the sources, which is making some maintainers grumpy. I don’t believe this is some grand scheme to make maintainers grumpy, they are just curmudgeons.
  - cesarb 3y ago
    > RHEL just requires you to sign in to download the sources, which is making some maintainers grumpy. From what I've read, what's actually making people grumpy is that signing in to download the sources, and later giving these sources to anyone else, could risk losing your RHEL account.
    - simiones 3y ago
asveikau 3y ago
People typically shorthand the most popular thing as inevitable. After Red Hat, Ubuntu was the one that people would think was all of Linux. This doesn't just happen in operating systems. I've talked to several people who seem to think AWS is literally the only way to run a server, and have it as their baseline assumption at all times.
bennyp101 3y ago
Must have been mid 90's, and I was in France with my parents who were doing up a run down house there, and we ended up in some shop and I stumbled upon a "Linux Pour Les Nuls" book which came with a RedHat disc - that was my first ever foray into Linux! I spent my summer holidays messing about on a laptop with it, and that pretty much cemented my joy it. So, whatever happens (and I have no idea as I'm not really paying much attention to it) but it was always my first!
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I'm assuming that's the French version of "Linux for Dummies", but it sounds like it might translate better as "for Nobodys"? Seems a bit more approachable.
gunapologist99 3y ago
GPL Version 2: "6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." (emphasis added) GPL Version 3: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License" (emphasis added)
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  And they don't - if you buy a license, you can download all of the sources for free. They simply refuse to do further business with you if you choose to excercise your right to distribute it further. Nothing in the letter of the GPL prevents me from refusing to do further business with you (including providing you access to future changes to the GPL software or its sources) if you choose to excercise any of the four freedoms. Of course, there are good reasons to believe this violates the spirit of the GPL, but that's beside the point.
- jzb 3y ago
  The question is whether Red Hat's subscriber agreement constitutes a restriction on exercising their GPL'ed rights. You get source to RHEL 8.5. You rebuild it (carefully removing Red Hat marks/logos to avoid being snagged for abusing the trademarks), and Red Hat says "ok, you're done. Go ahead and distribute that all you like, but we're cutting you off." Your rights are intact, but your subscription and access are severed. I've said this elsewhere: I don't think you or anybody really wants a GPL that can be used to force a business to continue its relationship with someone it doesn't want to do business with. What's to stop a company from claiming that their subscription was really terminated for redistributing code and not because they failed to pay their bill or maybe because they were abusive to Red Hat support folks? For that matter, what's to stop Red Hat or another company from removing that from their agreement but continuing to cancel subscriptions (or just refusing to renew) without stating cause? People who think that this GPL provision is going to force Red Hat to just open the floodgates again and continue pushing out exact RHEL release code are likely very, very mistaken. If Red Hat has decided to stick a spoke in the clones' wheels, it can simply release only GPL'ed code and stop releasing any non-GPL'ed code that doesn't require it. The current scenario with the code Red Hat releases to Stream is infinitely better in every way except if all you want to do is rebuild the "bug-for-bug" clones or consume them. As far as I'm concerned it more than meets Red Hat's minimum requirements to comply with the GPL and as a participant in open source. Unlike scores of open core companies, all of Red Hat's features and innovations are being released - the sole thing being held back is exact clones of its product.
zerocrates 3y ago
Nostalgic to have this take an unnecessary detour into the whole "GNU/Linux" nonsense.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
linuxhansl 3y ago
RedHat is still doing a lot of work in upstream open source projects, I want them to stay around and continue to do so. To do that they need to be commercially successful. Now, you can argue whether the recent moves are helpful to their bottomline or not (I think this is short-sighted and in the end will hurt them), but we need to acknowledge they are not charity, and also that we all are already benefiting from their money and their work.
eternityforest 3y ago
And this attitude is exactly why Linux is still 20 years behind everything else. Red Hat can't be Linux because Linux doesn't exist. Every install is different. There's no platform to target. No API levels or anything like that. The Linux idea of compatibility is "You can make it work, with a hammer, if you spend a half hour". I fully believe that it would be easier to add the missing bits to Android, to make it able to replace "Real Linux" even on servers, than to get Linux to a state that was fully ready for the Year of the Linux Desktop. I used to think it was being held back by big tech or something.... but as time goes on, I realize it's more about the fact that Steam doesn't work on my laptop and I will probably have to spend 20 minutes fixing it, and this is on Mint.

143 points by lproven 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

"Caldera is preferred by 127 petitioners" Well, I've got something to tell these 127 people from 2000 about SCO who have an issue with RedHat about some impending doom in 2003 [1] ;-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

jzb 3y ago
To be fair, nobody saw that one coming. Caldera was fine, they had done some fun stuff with the installer (Tetris!) and they had a exotically named CEO (Ransom Love), but they were fine. Their heel turn happened after a management change. The whole debacle was stranger-than-fiction (at least at the time). The whole "we're SCO now, and we're evil" was just bonkers. The lesson that people should've taken from that, though, is that any company is just one management change away from major changes.

zzzeek 3y ago

the moral of the story is, nothing happened, RHEL was a great product, everyone was happy. Just like I think they will be when they realize CentOS Stream is still a viable product.

jamesnorden 3y ago
If you like beta-testing in production, maybe.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  Why would you expect for profit business to do all the testing for you?
  - vetinari 3y ago
    Why would you expect doing free testing and contributions for a for profit business?
    - totallywrong 3y ago
      No one expects that. Use it or not. But don't demand the final product for free.
      - vetinari 3y ago
        Who demands final product for free? The final product includes support; nobody is asking for that. There is no expectation for dedicated engineer time or solving their support cases. Nor is there any expectation of certifications or any other value-adds that RH provides. Afaik the cloners demand the access to sources and patches to what is being shipped, which is their right. They are GPL, and not Redhat's for most part.
        totallywrong 3y ago
        > Who demands final product for free? Just about everyone. The final product is RHEL in this context. > which is their right No, as per the GPL they only have to provide sources to paying customers.
        vetinari 3y ago
        > No, as per the GPL they only have to provide sources to paying customers. If they were providing binaries only to paying customers, that would be right. But they aren't. Anyone, who spins up RHEL VM in the cloud, uses UBI image or downloads it from the developer account has the same right. In all cases, RH cannot prevent anyone, who obtained the sources, from distributing them further; not even threatening with contract termination. That would be "further restrictions", which GPL explicitly forbids.
        jzb 3y ago
- creatonez 3y ago
  Note that while CentOS Stream is continuously integrated (in a way that may not be suitable for production), each patch is still thoroughly tested, using roughly the same testing procedure as RHEL. So it's a mischaracterization to call it a beta test, but it's nevertheless not a production-grade stable platform for most purposes. It's a rather weird middle ground to be in, not one that I can think of any parallels for.
  - dralley 3y ago
    The release model for CentOS stream is basically the same as debian. If people are happy using debian in production, I don't see why CentOS stream would be fundamentally different.
- totallywrong 3y ago
  Use Fedora Server. Or any other distro. The uproar for not having the exact same thing they provide for a fee (while still giving you extremely close options) is unjustified.
jzb 3y ago
CentOS Stream is at least as good as CentOS (probably better) was before Red Hat "acquired" it.[1] It's funny how rose-colored people's memories or suppositions about the past are. Basically - there's never been a bug-for-bug compatible RHEL clone that shipped quickly until Red Hat made it possible to do. Stream isn't a product, it's a project. And it should be a project. If Rocky or somebody else wants to add value and make it a product, they can do the work to do so. Rocky/CIQ, in particular, has made all kinds of noise about how Rocky is the "stable foundation you can build on and rely on for years to come." Well... Red Hat has decided to stop making it super-easy. It's a bummer that this hits users who were never potential revenue sources for Red Hat/RHEL, but I can just hear investors asking "why the ever-loving ** are you making it so easy for others to clone your biggest product?" [1] https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/07/03/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-iii-the-dawn-of-centos/ https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/07/03/red-hat-and-the-clon...
- indymike 3y ago
  < I can just hear investors asking "why the ever-loving * are you making it so easy for others to clone your biggest product?" It is telling that no one in the meeting could actually answer that: "We still face formidable competition, and we do not believe our moat will hold for more than 12-18 months before whatever replaces us in the market emerges and begins rapidly eroding market share, resulting in dwindling profits and share prices. By allowing an unofficial free-tier -- a clone, as you say -- of our enterprise product, we keep developers from rapidly switching to Debian and it's derivatives. Once that happens, the hosting and enterprise data center markets will collapse irretrievably leaving us with only legacy customers who will leave, one server age-out at a time."
  - Nux 3y ago
    Precisely. It's pretty incredible. Even with CentOS they were losing ground to the competition, it's going to accelerate going forward.

habibur 3y ago

More purity fight even before that. Remember, when pre-compiled kernels started to get popular, it was seen as bad thing, as everyone was supposed to compile their own kernel which took into consideration of their hardware configuration for optimization.

sgbeal 3y ago
Ah, self-compiled kernels at least once a week. Those were the days... which i would not want to return to.
- lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  The Gentoo way. The tradition lives on...somewhere...
  - djbusby 3y ago
    Gentoo has binary kernel (if you want it) - and of course other options for source, vanilla, etc.
    - pxc 3y ago
      NixOS and GuixSD, much younger distributions in the same broad source-based package management tradition as Gentoo, also make custom kernels super easy to integrate with their usual package management systems while providing convenient, pre-built options. I'm fine with generic kernel builds and that's what I usually use, but I don't think tweaking your kernel is as painful or manual today as the greybeards here remember.
      - cesarb 3y ago
        > I'm fine with generic kernel builds and that's what I usually use, but I don't think tweaking your kernel is as painful or manual today as the greybeards here remember. Back then, we went into "make menuconfig", and meticulously reviewed every single configuration option, carefully tuning them to our bespoke hardware; it only took a few hours. Try doing that nowadays; there's simply way too many configuration options (each new device driver adds a couple, and even the kernel core has grown to hundreds of them). So yeah, I'd say fully tweaking your kernel is a more painful process today than in the past. (The same for packages; back then, we could open "dselect" and page through all the available packages in a single evening; nowadays, there's too many of them.)

superdug 3y ago

The problem is money. The solution is money. At the turn of the century the only ones paying for this linux thing we were all dedicating our lives to proliferating. Around this time solaris was teasing going open source and freebsd was on parity with linux. We had options then and we have options now. Redhat eventually relented, but here we are again. We've come a long way, now we're leaders and decision makers at our respective organizations. I've since abandoned redhat, I invite you to do the same.

ytjohn 3y ago

When I was young and optimistic, I was doing a bunch of side IT jobs. At one, a local insurance company needed to replace their Windows NT server. Instead of going with Windows 2000, I talked them into me setting up a RedHat Linux server running Samba. I had a few hiccups as the workstations weren't actually connected to a domain originally, but I eventually got them all going with AD login, roaming profiles, tape backups, etc. The big selling point was the open source nature, free updates forever. Less than six months later, Redhat announced that the were going to discontinue RedHat Linux and start releasing their new RedHat Enteprise Linux. This left me rather angry and embarrassed. It was definitely a turning point in my understanding of FOSS. It also made me a lifelong Debian/Debian derivative user. I've supported RHEL professionally, even getting RHCEs in it. RedHat has also contributed a lot to the open source community. But I've certainly never forgot that first pivot, so I'm not surprised with their recent decisions regarding RHEL's source code.

jzb 3y ago
I understand embarrassment, but anger might be misplaced. Red Hat was a newly public company trying to turn a profit. It identified its market and Red Hat Linux wasn't serving it, and the model they were pursuing with Red Hat Linux wasn't working. But I am a solid supporter of the "pay for RHEL or use Debian" philosophy. If you need promises about the future, pay for RHEL or use a project that doesn't have commercial motives. Debian is great and I wish more companies would standardize on it and support it. I'm not such a fan of the middle road of hoping that vendors will continue supplying things of value for free. It's especially ironic that an insurance vendor got burned by placing a bet on a free operating system with no assurances whatsoever. The RHEL subscription is insurance.
- firesteelrain 3y ago
  Pay for RHEL or use Ubuntu Edit: I guess people don’t like Ubuntu that much
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Both Canonical and Ubuntu have their own share of problems, and they've been struggling to monetize Ubuntu for the past few years. Once you get burned by one commercial vendor (not once actually… it's the third time afaik), it's probably wise to use this opportunity for migrating to a more stable distribution where commercial interest doesn't have much influence, and which has never intentionally burned its users (since Debian developers are users too and are also doing it for themselves).

kar1181 3y ago

I started on RedHat and it has a special place in my heart - even now they still host the original distributions I cut my unix teeth on all the way back. But sadly times change. Get it, they want to make money, but doesn't change the sadness these recent moves have caused.

zokier 3y ago

Ultimately each (major) Linux distro is its own independent Operating System that is its own thing and will make its own decisions. Sure, they might share many, if not most, common components, but an distro is an example where the whole is more than its parts.

ramesh31 3y ago

>redhatisnotlinux.org runs Slackware Linux 7.1, Stronghold 2.3, PHP 4.0.0, and PostgresQL 7.0 An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.

ComputerGuru 3y ago
So shocking to see PostgreSQL in that list. MySQL was definitely what was in vogue at the time.
- flashback2199 3y ago
  I remember that too, but I think I've heard that postgres was also popular in the linux/oss world at the time

ck2 3y ago

I'm still not over the end of CentOS That was so disappointing. Waiting to see which of the two alternatives shakes out. Dangerously past EOL on some servers, I just don't have to motivation to rebuild.

ahoka 3y ago
Alternatives? Are you not following the news? They are kaput. Dead in their infancy.
- dralley 3y ago
  It seems like you aren't following the news. Both Rocky and Alma have announced they will proceed with a workaround.
lproven 3y ago
> which of the two alternatives There are not just 2 and never were. Oracle is, you know, quite big and fairly well known. https://www.oracle.com/linux/ https://www.oracle.com/linux/ It's also much older than either Alma or Rocky. So is Springdale Linux, formerly PUIAS Linux: https://springdale.math.ias.edu/ https://springdale.math.ias.edu/ EuroLinux is also a thing for the wider world, i.e. outside North America: https://en.euro-linux.com/eurolinux/what-is/ https://en.euro-linux.com/eurolinux/what-is/ In Japan there is Miracle Linux: https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=miracle https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=miracle In China there is Euler OS: https://developer.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/euleros/index.html https://developer.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/euleros/index.h... There was also Inspur K-UX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX Both the latter were even officially UNIX™ certified. I am sure there are many more I don't know about.
- ck2 3y ago
  Alma and Rocky were the only two real matching replacements and considering Alma is the only one with $1 Million/year on the tablet to guarantee survival until 2029, I'm not going through the drama of a small or unanchored product again so that might be the "winner".

krupan 3y ago

The anger and resentment towards Red Hat in the open source world had always made me sad. Red Hat made linux mainstream. Before Red Hat, big expensive commercial software (engineering tools, databases, simulation software, network services, all the big enterprisey things) all ran on and was officially supported on UNIX (and maybe Windows NT): HP-UX, Solaris, Irix. People were dabbling with Linux, crazy start ups were inventing crazy new things with it, but it wasn't until Red Hat basically mimicked the commercial UNIX model of stable releases, official safety and security certifications, support contracts, etc., that Linux went mainstream and UNIX (and NT) withered to almost nothing. Linux and all other open source code has flourished because of this! Red Hat has always been open source. They have followed the letter of the license and still do. Not only that, they make big money! And they have employed and still do employ many top tier open source developers who contribute open source code to a variety of projects. The money they make makes all of open source better! Their business model probably isn't for you, non-enterprisey do-it-yourself HN reader. But that's ok. There's absolutely no reason for you to be bitter or resentful about that because you have many other choices of Linux distribution available to you. All of which has been improved in some way by Red Hat. I actually wish more open source projects followed the Red Hat model. Corporations making big money using open source would actually be paying the developers of those open source projects! That would be amazing!

dagmx 3y ago
Imho it’s all just a purity test, coupled with so much of the tech community just loving drama. This is our equivalent to reality shows where there’s a celebrity train wreck. I agree with you, Red Hat are a huge contributor to open source. Their business model lets them make money and then they use that money to contribute to projects in the wild. To me, it’s a win win. I can understand why people would be upset with the changes. I don’t understand why they would be angry though. The choice of down stream repackage distros has always been at RH’s convenience. This has always been clear since the day CentOS was a thing, and Rocky/Alma after it. Their product model depended on the whims of another product.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  Ask yourself how many things RH has done for the community also directly contributed to their bottom line. Now combine that with its new business leaders that promise explicitly to pare back efforts that don't help or even hurt the bottom line. Would that make you happy with them? Sure, they aren't under an obligation to drive FOSS, but there is an obvious and notable change in direction here.

jt2190 3y ago

This issue has gotten a lot of attention on HN lately, but I'm still struggling to wrap my head around it. If anyone can clarify my understanding I'd appreciate it. My understanding is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be thought of as Fedora + stability + patches, and that the patches themselves should be released downstream as part of the GPL. What's now changed is that these patches are either (a) not distributed as required by the GPL, or (b) the patches are distributed, but in a way that is intentionally less useful, e.g. by having to get them via the Red Hat portal. This has made it more difficult for "repackagers" like CentOS, Rocky and Alma to keep their disros up to date. Assuming I have the above correct (and I may not), my suspicion is that Red Hat is looking at cloud providers who also have been repackaging, for example, Amazon Web Services' Amazon Linux has historically been RHEL repackaged and bundled with some aws tools. I'm not aware of AWS distributing their changes either. From this perspective, it looks like the AWS benefits from the stability + patches without paying RedHat for their development. (I'm also not aware of whether aws distributes the Amazon Linux sources and if so those are done in a way that is useful for the community... I'll do some further research on my own. edit: It looks like the Amazon Linux sources are here: https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux https://github.com/amazonlinux/linux)

dcow 3y ago
Nothing in the GPL says sources must be available to anonymous unauthenticated users. RHEL just requires you to sign in to download the sources, which is making some maintainers grumpy. I don’t believe this is some grand scheme to make maintainers grumpy, they are just curmudgeons.
- cesarb 3y ago
  > RHEL just requires you to sign in to download the sources, which is making some maintainers grumpy. From what I've read, what's actually making people grumpy is that signing in to download the sources, and later giving these sources to anyone else, could risk losing your RHEL account.
  - simiones 3y ago

asveikau 3y ago

People typically shorthand the most popular thing as inevitable. After Red Hat, Ubuntu was the one that people would think was all of Linux. This doesn't just happen in operating systems. I've talked to several people who seem to think AWS is literally the only way to run a server, and have it as their baseline assumption at all times.

bennyp101 3y ago

Must have been mid 90's, and I was in France with my parents who were doing up a run down house there, and we ended up in some shop and I stumbled upon a "Linux Pour Les Nuls" book which came with a RedHat disc - that was my first ever foray into Linux! I spent my summer holidays messing about on a laptop with it, and that pretty much cemented my joy it. So, whatever happens (and I have no idea as I'm not really paying much attention to it) but it was always my first!

hotpotamus 3y ago
I'm assuming that's the French version of "Linux for Dummies", but it sounds like it might translate better as "for Nobodys"? Seems a bit more approachable.

gunapologist99 3y ago

GPL Version 2: "6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." (emphasis added) GPL Version 3: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License" (emphasis added)

tsimionescu 3y ago
And they don't - if you buy a license, you can download all of the sources for free. They simply refuse to do further business with you if you choose to excercise your right to distribute it further. Nothing in the letter of the GPL prevents me from refusing to do further business with you (including providing you access to future changes to the GPL software or its sources) if you choose to excercise any of the four freedoms. Of course, there are good reasons to believe this violates the spirit of the GPL, but that's beside the point.
jzb 3y ago
The question is whether Red Hat's subscriber agreement constitutes a restriction on exercising their GPL'ed rights. You get source to RHEL 8.5. You rebuild it (carefully removing Red Hat marks/logos to avoid being snagged for abusing the trademarks), and Red Hat says "ok, you're done. Go ahead and distribute that all you like, but we're cutting you off." Your rights are intact, but your subscription and access are severed. I've said this elsewhere: I don't think you or anybody really wants a GPL that can be used to force a business to continue its relationship with someone it doesn't want to do business with. What's to stop a company from claiming that their subscription was really terminated for redistributing code and not because they failed to pay their bill or maybe because they were abusive to Red Hat support folks? For that matter, what's to stop Red Hat or another company from removing that from their agreement but continuing to cancel subscriptions (or just refusing to renew) without stating cause? People who think that this GPL provision is going to force Red Hat to just open the floodgates again and continue pushing out exact RHEL release code are likely very, very mistaken. If Red Hat has decided to stick a spoke in the clones' wheels, it can simply release only GPL'ed code and stop releasing any non-GPL'ed code that doesn't require it. The current scenario with the code Red Hat releases to Stream is infinitely better in every way except if all you want to do is rebuild the "bug-for-bug" clones or consume them. As far as I'm concerned it more than meets Red Hat's minimum requirements to comply with the GPL and as a participant in open source. Unlike scores of open core companies, all of Red Hat's features and innovations are being released - the sole thing being held back is exact clones of its product.

zerocrates 3y ago

Nostalgic to have this take an unnecessary detour into the whole "GNU/Linux" nonsense.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

linuxhansl 3y ago

RedHat is still doing a lot of work in upstream open source projects, I want them to stay around and continue to do so. To do that they need to be commercially successful. Now, you can argue whether the recent moves are helpful to their bottomline or not (I think this is short-sighted and in the end will hurt them), but we need to acknowledge they are not charity, and also that we all are already benefiting from their money and their work.

eternityforest 3y ago

And this attitude is exactly why Linux is still 20 years behind everything else. Red Hat can't be Linux because Linux doesn't exist. Every install is different. There's no platform to target. No API levels or anything like that. The Linux idea of compatibility is "You can make it work, with a hammer, if you spend a half hour". I fully believe that it would be easier to add the missing bits to Android, to make it able to replace "Real Linux" even on servers, than to get Linux to a state that was fully ready for the Year of the Linux Desktop. I used to think it was being held back by big tech or something.... but as time goes on, I realize it's more about the fact that Steam doesn't work on my laptop and I will probably have to spend 20 minutes fixing it, and this is on Mint.