7 ms·

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 commerc

by 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.
  - dagmx 3y ago
    That’s pure speculation and conjecture though without any specifics. What notable change has their been to their contributions has their been? Please point to some reduction or drop in quality. Without a concrete talking point, the statement is so empty that I could say the same about any distro, for example Ubuntu or Suse which also have commercial components to their businesses
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      I'm just going based on their direct comments: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour... "There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder." These comments are explicitly about a focus on doing the things that directly drive revenue. Their actions correlate with their stated direction. We can debate whether the direction is right or wrong for them (I'm explictly not making a judgment here), but the direction and intent are clear.
      - dagmx 3y ago
        That’s conflating things. Red Hat still continue to contribute to open source projects. Whether they are effectively maintaining components for another distro is besides the point. That does not make their direction or intent clear with regards to open source contributions
parasubvert 3y ago
The Red Hat is now IBM. And IBM is the quintessential big evil corporation with a hundred years of dirty business practices, far beyond anything Microsoft or Apple has done. Red Hat itself was mostly fine. I've competed against them and fought against their FUD. They're an enterprise software vendor no different from Oracle in this regard. But besides the sales and marketing knife fights necessitating unsavory tactics (everyone's does it), it was a mostly ethical decent business. That said, as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. For this reason, I never want to do business with them or Red Hat unless I absolutely must.
- postmodest 3y ago
  > as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor Amen. IBM doesn't believe their customers are "developers" or "sysadmins"; they believe their customers are C-levels who will always come back. They miss the point that C-levels rotate out as previous devs and sysops rise up. That's how they lost the mainframe market, and the desktop market, and now the minicomputer market that they clawed back with RHEL. The cloud they already lost.
- badpun 3y ago
  > IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. Or straight up bribery. An IBM exec in Poland pleaded guilty to bribing an government official to get a contract in 2012.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    "referral agent fees" or "lead generation"
ExoticPearTree 3y ago
I think that things started to go downhill when RedHat decided to kill CentOS and invented the CentOS Stream; the killed that. My guess is IBM and some RedHat people decided to be greedier than than they should and by shutting down access to the RH repositories somehow they think they can squeeze as many companies as possible to pay for Linux. Terrible how good things are ruined by greed.
- lproven 3y ago
  [OP here] I disagree. I think the mistake was bringing CentOS in house: legitimising a free version of their own cash cow. It is virtually Rule No. 1 of business: don't compete with yourself. If you are selling something expensive, don't later start to offer an unrestricted free version too.
  - gunapologist99 3y ago
    AFAICT, that's why they "bought" CentOS: to embrace-extend-extinguish it. There was no mistake about it.
    - lproven 3y ago
      In hindsight, that does look plausible. However I'm not sure that the timeframe supports it. The company acquired the CentOS organisation in 2014, and it didn't kill off the free Linux distro until 2020. That's a pretty big gap.
      - 2b3a51 3y ago
        And the decision to withdraw CentOS 8 was taken quite suddenly, part way through the advertised 10 year lifetime of EL8. And the free RHEL development licence offer wasn't ready to go the day of the announcement - there was a delay of some months. I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.
        3y ago
lproven 3y ago
[OP here] > Red Hat made linux mainstream. 1. In the English-speaking world, mainly meaning North America. For instance, SUSE is just as old, and brought Linux to the mainstream in Mitteleuropa. Not just in "DACH" (the German speaking world: Deutschland, Austria, Confœderatio Helvetica), but also for instance it was the first Czech-language distro. I worked for SUSE in Prague for 4 years, and it is still big in that part of the world. Conectiva brought it to LatAm. TurboLinux to Japan. Etc., etc. 2. FSVO "mainstream" -- Red Hat Linux (note, not RHEL) was not really very useful as a desktop OS. I ran it, I used it, but trying to install something as complex as a desktop using raw RPM with no dependency management was nightmarish. That's where Mandrake came from: Red Hat refused to bundle KDE because Qt wasn't 100% GPL, so Mandrake ported KDE to RHL and bundled them. Caldera was even earlier, and OpenLinux 1.0 with KDE was the first desktop distro I tried that was polished enough to make my primary OS for a while. RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.
- switch007 3y ago
  > Confœderatio Helvetica That's Switzerland (or if you're particularly pedantic: the Swiss Confederation) for those not brushed up on their Latin and Latin graphemes.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    A name chosen largely as it's not in any one of the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. A political compromise.
    - switch007 3y ago
      Well, it’s clearly biased towards Italian and French ;)
  - lproven 3y ago
    I was explaining what DACH stood for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_German_speakers#German-speaking_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G... TBH I didn't even consider that anyone might not know where Helvetia was, but you're right, I should have mentioned that.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> Red Hat has always been open source. They have followed the letter of the license and still do. It is very much an open question whether they comply with the GPL by imposing additional restrictions on a license which states that you may not add restrictions.
- spamatica 3y ago
  It has always been OK to restrict distribution of source to your customers. From the GPL: "For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received." The operative word being recipients. Redhat may be the devil incarnate now that they apparently are a part of IBM... Though as far as this distribution change I don't see the problem.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    That's not the problem. The problem is that if you are a customer who receives the source code and then gives it to somebody else - an action with the GPL explicitly allows and says you can't restrict - then Red Hat will terminate your contract, which sure looks like a restriction to me.
    - krupan 3y ago
      It's crappy and evil, but it's a restriction on their service/support contract, not on the GPL code.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        I'm sure that's their claim, but I can also tell you that I wouldn't want to tell a judge that such retaliation wasn't intended to prevent (one might even say, limit) exercise of the GPL.
      - traverseda 3y ago
        If they put in their support contract "sure you can distribute the code but you'll have to pay a $10_000 for each line of code you distribute" then is that adding restrictions to the GPL code? Why is that OK but losing a very expensive support contract not? Does it get better if it's a month to month support contract? To me this seems like a pretty clear cut case of adding restrictions to GPL code and risking getting those licenses taken away. It will be interesting to see if they face any real repercussions though.
traverseda 3y ago
https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement >the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. What red hat is doing is commodotizing their complement, it's nothing more than that. One big example is that I would rather be using an OpenRC init system, but because redhat throws their weight around I need to use a systemd-based distro at work, to work on embedded systems (can't use ~~chroots~~ systemd-nspawn unless the host is also running systemd). By throwing all this shit out for free they're able to destroy any sort of organic competition that might arise. Honestly I wouldn't even be mad, except a big chunk of it enterprise-ey shit and introduce major security issues just from how they're architected. There's good and bad, but the problem is they make it very hard to just take the good and leave the bad. They bundle things together, like the decision to make Gnome depend on systemd, or the way networkd can't really be seperated from systemd, or renaming gummiboot to systemd-boot. They also don't do a good job of disclosing what open source projects they have de-facto control over, and you're likely to find a lot of redhat employees in key positions in projects you didn't realize had anything to do with redhat.
kwanbix 3y ago
If they are so Open Source, what is this BS that they are pulling out now that you cannot get the source code unless you are a paying customer, and if you are a paying customer you get terminated if you share the code? Or am I missing something?
- happymellon 3y ago
  > you cannot get the source code unless you are a paying customer That's literally the GPL. > if you are a paying customer you get terminated if you share the code And that's shit, but also the problem with tethering yourself to a single vendor. They don't have to do business with you. There are plenty of other RPM enterprise vendors, switch to SUSE.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
VancouverMan 3y ago
> 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! I have to question that. Nearly all of my worst experiences when using Linux have involved software that they or their developers have, to the best of my knowledge, been significantly involved with creating. I'm thinking of software like systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, GNOME 3, and Wayland, for example. I've wasted far too much of my time dealing with unnecessary, silly, and inexcusable problems involving such software. What makes it even worse is that despite me trying to avoid their ecosystem, their software has unfortunately still made it into other major distros, including Debian.
- robmusial 3y ago
  If PulseAudio, Wayland, etc are all some of the worst software then how does it keep ending up in distros like Debian? If there are better alternatives why would they willingly adopt it?
  - dralley 3y ago
    Part of the reason PulseAudio got a bad rap is because of bad audio drivers (and sometimes bad hardware), because they refused to work around those bugs at the "wrong" layer of the stack. After a few painful years though, the bugs got fixed in the "right" places, and that's part of why Pipewire (also developed by Red Hat) was able to come along and replace it so quickly. And thankfully Pipewire addresses a lot of the actually legitimate issues with PulseAudio
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      dont know much about linux audio -- what are the problmes?
      - dralley 3y ago
        https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#why-not-just-improve-pulseaudio-instead https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...
ninth_ant 3y ago
You don't need to have anger or resentment towards Red Hat to agree with the principle that Red Hat is not Linux, or want to encourage developers to not limit their "linux app" or hardware products to only support Red Hat. Which is what this site and petition is about, at my first glance anyhow.
ROTMetro 3y ago
How do you think Redhat got in the door? People like me and my friends way back in the day staying late and porting our product over on our own time and convincing management to make it an offering. People like us who were our client's pet neckbeards convincing them it was ok to go with our Linux offering. No one buys Redhat without an application to run on top of it. That's how they cracked large market industries. Not on their own, but from good will from neckbeards who found it fun to spend their weeknights on a skunk works port on a frankenputer we hacked together (corporate was happy to stay with just offering SCO). The Redhat that this last week has been on an anti-neckbeard crusade saying 'we aren't the distro for your type' to those of us who got them in the market is what is disappointing. It's like you help your friend become part of your larger friends group and then they ghost you when they don't need you anymore and are 'too cool' for you. So yeah, fuck off Redhat. They can do whatever they want, but they won't be getting any good will, and the petty anarchist in me will take advantage of any situations that come up to do ill upon them if it has a low personal cost.
- krupan 3y ago
  I'm afraid you are missing my point completely. Because they found a way to make money off of open source, us neckbeards have been able to continue using open source for the rest of our careers, and it just keeps getting better and better! And we don't have to hide in the basement of the skunk works anymore! And we have literally hundreds of Linux distros to chose from now! It's totally fine if you don't like RHEL at all, it really isn't for you. But the money it makes off of the suits totally benefits us neckbeards, because open source is awesome like that!
- op00to 3y ago
  Please consider rereading what you wrote. You seem to have a lot of anger which is unhealthy but also adds nothing to the conversation. I’m sure you’d appreciate that invective does nothing to improve the signal to noise. Publicly stating you will “do ill upon” a multinational corporation sounds a lot like a threat, and we don’t do that here.
tannhaeuser 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 all ran on UNIX: HP-UX, Solaris, Irix. Now we have just fscking Linux, no apps, and RH is even closing it down. There you have your reasons. Open source my ass - that you can't even redistribute; it's just a big scam. Update: fortunately there's still Mac OS.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Update: fortunately there's still Mac OS. Go download the source for Darwin.. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu Compile it. Install it on your MacBook. Tell us how well MacOS boots that kernel.
JohnFen 3y ago
My resentment toward Red Hat is really about the impact they've had on other distributions. Red Hat has a very specific vision of how they want Linux to be, and are successful in convincing other distros of adopting it. It's a vision I personally hate, so in my view, Red Hat is ruining Linux for me. So I resent them. It's the resentment of personal loss, not some grand philosophical stance.

by krupan 3y ago

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.
- dagmx 3y ago
  That’s pure speculation and conjecture though without any specifics. What notable change has their been to their contributions has their been? Please point to some reduction or drop in quality. Without a concrete talking point, the statement is so empty that I could say the same about any distro, for example Ubuntu or Suse which also have commercial components to their businesses
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    I'm just going based on their direct comments: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour... "There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder." These comments are explicitly about a focus on doing the things that directly drive revenue. Their actions correlate with their stated direction. We can debate whether the direction is right or wrong for them (I'm explictly not making a judgment here), but the direction and intent are clear.
    - dagmx 3y ago
      That’s conflating things. Red Hat still continue to contribute to open source projects. Whether they are effectively maintaining components for another distro is besides the point. That does not make their direction or intent clear with regards to open source contributions

parasubvert 3y ago

The Red Hat is now IBM. And IBM is the quintessential big evil corporation with a hundred years of dirty business practices, far beyond anything Microsoft or Apple has done. Red Hat itself was mostly fine. I've competed against them and fought against their FUD. They're an enterprise software vendor no different from Oracle in this regard. But besides the sales and marketing knife fights necessitating unsavory tactics (everyone's does it), it was a mostly ethical decent business. That said, as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. For this reason, I never want to do business with them or Red Hat unless I absolutely must.

postmodest 3y ago
> as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor Amen. IBM doesn't believe their customers are "developers" or "sysadmins"; they believe their customers are C-levels who will always come back. They miss the point that C-levels rotate out as previous devs and sysops rise up. That's how they lost the mainframe market, and the desktop market, and now the minicomputer market that they clawed back with RHEL. The cloud they already lost.
badpun 3y ago
> IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. Or straight up bribery. An IBM exec in Poland pleaded guilty to bribing an government official to get a contract in 2012.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  "referral agent fees" or "lead generation"

ExoticPearTree 3y ago

I think that things started to go downhill when RedHat decided to kill CentOS and invented the CentOS Stream; the killed that. My guess is IBM and some RedHat people decided to be greedier than than they should and by shutting down access to the RH repositories somehow they think they can squeeze as many companies as possible to pay for Linux. Terrible how good things are ruined by greed.

lproven 3y ago
[OP here] I disagree. I think the mistake was bringing CentOS in house: legitimising a free version of their own cash cow. It is virtually Rule No. 1 of business: don't compete with yourself. If you are selling something expensive, don't later start to offer an unrestricted free version too.
- gunapologist99 3y ago
  AFAICT, that's why they "bought" CentOS: to embrace-extend-extinguish it. There was no mistake about it.
  - lproven 3y ago
    In hindsight, that does look plausible. However I'm not sure that the timeframe supports it. The company acquired the CentOS organisation in 2014, and it didn't kill off the free Linux distro until 2020. That's a pretty big gap.
    - 2b3a51 3y ago
      And the decision to withdraw CentOS 8 was taken quite suddenly, part way through the advertised 10 year lifetime of EL8. And the free RHEL development licence offer wasn't ready to go the day of the announcement - there was a delay of some months. I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.
      - 3y ago

lproven 3y ago

[OP here] > Red Hat made linux mainstream. 1. In the English-speaking world, mainly meaning North America. For instance, SUSE is just as old, and brought Linux to the mainstream in Mitteleuropa. Not just in "DACH" (the German speaking world: Deutschland, Austria, Confœderatio Helvetica), but also for instance it was the first Czech-language distro. I worked for SUSE in Prague for 4 years, and it is still big in that part of the world. Conectiva brought it to LatAm. TurboLinux to Japan. Etc., etc. 2. FSVO "mainstream" -- Red Hat Linux (note, not RHEL) was not really very useful as a desktop OS. I ran it, I used it, but trying to install something as complex as a desktop using raw RPM with no dependency management was nightmarish. That's where Mandrake came from: Red Hat refused to bundle KDE because Qt wasn't 100% GPL, so Mandrake ported KDE to RHL and bundled them. Caldera was even earlier, and OpenLinux 1.0 with KDE was the first desktop distro I tried that was polished enough to make my primary OS for a while. RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.

switch007 3y ago
> Confœderatio Helvetica That's Switzerland (or if you're particularly pedantic: the Swiss Confederation) for those not brushed up on their Latin and Latin graphemes.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  A name chosen largely as it's not in any one of the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian, and Romansh. A political compromise.
  - switch007 3y ago
    Well, it’s clearly biased towards Italian and French ;)
- lproven 3y ago
  I was explaining what DACH stood for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_German_speakers#German-speaking_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G... TBH I didn't even consider that anyone might not know where Helvetia was, but you're right, I should have mentioned that.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

> Red Hat has always been open source. They have followed the letter of the license and still do. It is very much an open question whether they comply with the GPL by imposing additional restrictions on a license which states that you may not add restrictions.

spamatica 3y ago
It has always been OK to restrict distribution of source to your customers. From the GPL: "For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received." The operative word being recipients. Redhat may be the devil incarnate now that they apparently are a part of IBM... Though as far as this distribution change I don't see the problem.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  That's not the problem. The problem is that if you are a customer who receives the source code and then gives it to somebody else - an action with the GPL explicitly allows and says you can't restrict - then Red Hat will terminate your contract, which sure looks like a restriction to me.
  - krupan 3y ago
    It's crappy and evil, but it's a restriction on their service/support contract, not on the GPL code.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      I'm sure that's their claim, but I can also tell you that I wouldn't want to tell a judge that such retaliation wasn't intended to prevent (one might even say, limit) exercise of the GPL.
    - traverseda 3y ago
      If they put in their support contract "sure you can distribute the code but you'll have to pay a $10_000 for each line of code you distribute" then is that adding restrictions to the GPL code? Why is that OK but losing a very expensive support contract not? Does it get better if it's a month to month support contract? To me this seems like a pretty clear cut case of adding restrictions to GPL code and risking getting those licenses taken away. It will be interesting to see if they face any real repercussions though.

traverseda 3y ago

https://gwern.net/complement https://gwern.net/complement >the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist. What red hat is doing is commodotizing their complement, it's nothing more than that. One big example is that I would rather be using an OpenRC init system, but because redhat throws their weight around I need to use a systemd-based distro at work, to work on embedded systems (can't use ~~chroots~~ systemd-nspawn unless the host is also running systemd). By throwing all this shit out for free they're able to destroy any sort of organic competition that might arise. Honestly I wouldn't even be mad, except a big chunk of it enterprise-ey shit and introduce major security issues just from how they're architected. There's good and bad, but the problem is they make it very hard to just take the good and leave the bad. They bundle things together, like the decision to make Gnome depend on systemd, or the way networkd can't really be seperated from systemd, or renaming gummiboot to systemd-boot. They also don't do a good job of disclosing what open source projects they have de-facto control over, and you're likely to find a lot of redhat employees in key positions in projects you didn't realize had anything to do with redhat.

kwanbix 3y ago

If they are so Open Source, what is this BS that they are pulling out now that you cannot get the source code unless you are a paying customer, and if you are a paying customer you get terminated if you share the code? Or am I missing something?

happymellon 3y ago
> you cannot get the source code unless you are a paying customer That's literally the GPL. > if you are a paying customer you get terminated if you share the code And that's shit, but also the problem with tethering yourself to a single vendor. They don't have to do business with you. There are plenty of other RPM enterprise vendors, switch to SUSE.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

VancouverMan 3y ago

> 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! I have to question that. Nearly all of my worst experiences when using Linux have involved software that they or their developers have, to the best of my knowledge, been significantly involved with creating. I'm thinking of software like systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, GNOME 3, and Wayland, for example. I've wasted far too much of my time dealing with unnecessary, silly, and inexcusable problems involving such software. What makes it even worse is that despite me trying to avoid their ecosystem, their software has unfortunately still made it into other major distros, including Debian.

robmusial 3y ago
If PulseAudio, Wayland, etc are all some of the worst software then how does it keep ending up in distros like Debian? If there are better alternatives why would they willingly adopt it?
- dralley 3y ago
  Part of the reason PulseAudio got a bad rap is because of bad audio drivers (and sometimes bad hardware), because they refused to work around those bugs at the "wrong" layer of the stack. After a few painful years though, the bugs got fixed in the "right" places, and that's part of why Pipewire (also developed by Red Hat) was able to come along and replace it so quickly. And thankfully Pipewire addresses a lot of the actually legitimate issues with PulseAudio
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    dont know much about linux audio -- what are the problmes?
    - dralley 3y ago
      https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ#why-not-just-improve-pulseaudio-instead https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/wikis/FAQ...

ninth_ant 3y ago

You don't need to have anger or resentment towards Red Hat to agree with the principle that Red Hat is not Linux, or want to encourage developers to not limit their "linux app" or hardware products to only support Red Hat. Which is what this site and petition is about, at my first glance anyhow.

ROTMetro 3y ago

How do you think Redhat got in the door? People like me and my friends way back in the day staying late and porting our product over on our own time and convincing management to make it an offering. People like us who were our client's pet neckbeards convincing them it was ok to go with our Linux offering. No one buys Redhat without an application to run on top of it. That's how they cracked large market industries. Not on their own, but from good will from neckbeards who found it fun to spend their weeknights on a skunk works port on a frankenputer we hacked together (corporate was happy to stay with just offering SCO). The Redhat that this last week has been on an anti-neckbeard crusade saying 'we aren't the distro for your type' to those of us who got them in the market is what is disappointing. It's like you help your friend become part of your larger friends group and then they ghost you when they don't need you anymore and are 'too cool' for you. So yeah, fuck off Redhat. They can do whatever they want, but they won't be getting any good will, and the petty anarchist in me will take advantage of any situations that come up to do ill upon them if it has a low personal cost.

krupan 3y ago
I'm afraid you are missing my point completely. Because they found a way to make money off of open source, us neckbeards have been able to continue using open source for the rest of our careers, and it just keeps getting better and better! And we don't have to hide in the basement of the skunk works anymore! And we have literally hundreds of Linux distros to chose from now! It's totally fine if you don't like RHEL at all, it really isn't for you. But the money it makes off of the suits totally benefits us neckbeards, because open source is awesome like that!
op00to 3y ago
Please consider rereading what you wrote. You seem to have a lot of anger which is unhealthy but also adds nothing to the conversation. I’m sure you’d appreciate that invective does nothing to improve the signal to noise. Publicly stating you will “do ill upon” a multinational corporation sounds a lot like a threat, and we don’t do that here.

tannhaeuser 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 all ran on UNIX: HP-UX, Solaris, Irix. Now we have just fscking Linux, no apps, and RH is even closing it down. There you have your reasons. Open source my ass - that you can't even redistribute; it's just a big scam. Update: fortunately there's still Mac OS.

FireBeyond 3y ago
> Update: fortunately there's still Mac OS. Go download the source for Darwin.. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu Compile it. Install it on your MacBook. Tell us how well MacOS boots that kernel.

JohnFen 3y ago

My resentment toward Red Hat is really about the impact they've had on other distributions. Red Hat has a very specific vision of how they want Linux to be, and are successful in convincing other distros of adopting it. It's a vision I personally hate, so in my view, Red Hat is ruining Linux for me. So I resent them. It's the resentment of personal loss, not some grand philosophical stance.