6 ms·

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

91 points by samizdis 3y ago

mort96 3y ago
> It's not Red Hat's fault, I blame IBM for the company's recent Linux code licensing changes and all the misery it unleashed. Even if we were to agree 100% that nobody at Red Hat wants to do this and it's all IBM's fault, surely we can fault Red Hat for selling to IBM in the first place? I mean, everyone and their dog predicted the decay of Red Hat once the acquisition was announced. Surely the fact that they still went through with it, and therefore these all-too-predictable consequences, is on Red Hat?
- RunningDroid 3y ago
  I'm not familiar with the details, but I'd expect that the people who arranged the sale no longer work at Red Hat.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    Jim Whitehurst, who was Red Hat's CEO through the deal planning, resigned from IBM 2 years and 1 day after the acquisition was finalized.
    - pridkett 3y ago
      …and Whitehurst was pretty explicit that he left because the board gave the CEO job to Arvind Krishna[0]. He also forfeited a large stock award when he did that. [0] https://wraltechwire.com/2021/07/07/whitehurst-stepping-down-from-ibm-wants-to-be-a-ceo-again/ https://wraltechwire.com/2021/07/07/whitehurst-stepping-down...
- op00to 3y ago
  You can’t just ignore a very good offer to sell your public company. Shareholders will have your head. Jim had to take Ginny’s offer to the Board, and they decided to sell. That’s life in the big city.
  - mort96 3y ago
    I don't understand what you're saying. I said it's on Red Hat that they decided to sell to IBM. I didn't say that the CEO personally made that decision, the board of directors is obviously the part of the company which has the final say in such decisions.
    - veidr 3y ago
      I don't think you two are disagreeing. op00to is just pointing out that being a public company (like taking VC money) has consequences that can't be avoided. Those consequences include being acquired, if the offer is good enough. Everybody knew that IBM buying Red Hat was the end of the Red Hat that had existed up to that point. But accepting the buyout wasn't the decision; the decision was to go public in the first place. Which, of course, was Red Hat's decision. So everybody is correct.
yawaramin 3y ago
'Red Hat's open source rot' = they are no longer giving non-customers the RHEL sources for free, something that is completely within their right under the GPL, but it means I no longer benefit from those great free security and other patches republished by the rebuilders after stripping out the RHEL trademarks, so it's inconvenient for me.
- xt00 3y ago
  (paragraphized/reduced verbosity) RedHat has been trying to figure out how to both benefit from open source and also avoid helping others at the same time.. if you think of RedHat the OS as a combination of the linux kernel (worked on by many companies and individuals well beyond RedHat), tons of packages in userspace (of the millions of lines of code in these packages, probably a very very small fraction are from RedHat -- sure yes some important, some less important). Examining the fact that RedHat in principle does some huge amount of testing of the packages and puts them all together -- lets think about that-- do they really? in many cases the upstream package maintainer(s) probably do most of that. So are they going to go build a ton of test vectors for each package and "test" them all .. I highly doubt that.. likely they have a set of tests that they do to try to hit a set of important things that "should work" and if a package happens to cause that to fail, then they roll it back. In the case that RH pushes a patch to the package maintainer -- does that mean they effectively "own" that software and people that want that updated version are trying to get stuff for "free"? From the beginning people have questioned whether they should be able to hold back patches from other people -- in reality, they can try, but they also can't stop people from doing that same patch "somehow".. so effectively unless people can copyright a new patch to open source software and prevent others from doing that same patch, then they have no recourse. Redhat should just lean really hard into the "support" side of things, and whatever margin exists with that, then fine. Sure, does it piss you off that other companies are making money off of your hard work, yes it does, but look at basically all of the other people who were ahead of you who you are also apparently ripping off RedHat..
  - yawaramin 3y ago
    Jeez dude, ever heard of paragraphs? So...which is it? Is Red Hat not really doing all that much work? Which means that people should be happy to use CentOS Stream, which is the free and open source upstream of RHEL? Or are they actually doing some valuable work? In which case they are justified in charging money and providing source code only to their customers, under the provisions of the GPL? Before replying, please go ahead and read up on the GPL and especially the parts where they confirm that it's completely OK to charge money for the software as long as you provide users the source code on request.
rhatexer 3y ago
I can say for certain that this started even before IBM took over Red Hat. All these decisions have been driven by Red Hat sales team in co-ordination with the upper management. They experimented with these ideas with the entrerprise edition of JBoss Application server (later called WildFly). There was a lot of internal friction when that happened and yet they moved ahead with similar decisions as what is repeated with RHEL today.
Woodi 3y ago
> It's not Red Hat's fault Autor, pleas... There is no RedHat anymore. There is only blob with tentacles not feeded and cut off when dry. And name is collected - absolutely no surprise when suddenly "RedHat" will start to sell dolls...
grahamm 3y ago
Why am I not surprised.
- yawaramin 3y ago
  Most likely confirmation bias.
iruoy 3y ago
You should probably just use to Debian/Ubuntu or something if you're starting fresh. The future is unclear for the RHEL/CentOS clones
- m463 3y ago
  Ubuntu still has some problems. lots of (almost) uninstallable packages that auto-install updates, advertise (motd) and phone home.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  Why is SUSE so seldom talked about? I don't know much about the distro except it has been around a long time, has professional support, supposedly is popular in Europe, and isn't it an RPM distro? Is there any downside to its fully free spins?
  - leetnewb 3y ago
    I can't speak for SUSE's corporate use, but I use opensuse on my laptop, server, router, and vps. Very nice distribution. That's not to say that there aren't sources/moments of friction and/or concern between the corporate and community, but it comes with the territory I guess.
  - norgie 3y ago
    I use OpenSUSE a lot for both desktop and servers, and it’s great. The biggest downside though is that it probably has the least friendly and helpful community of any Linux or BSD distro I’ve ever used. Questions on their forums are frequently met with hostility and derision, mostly from one particularly active user
    - agracey 3y ago
      Would you please report that user (if you haven’t already) to the OpenSUSE moderators? This is very much not the community we are trying to build!
    - allarm 3y ago

91 points by samizdis 3y ago

> It's not Red Hat's fault, I blame IBM for the company's recent Linux code licensing changes and all the misery it unleashed. Even if we were to agree 100% that nobody at Red Hat wants to do this and it's all IBM's fault, surely we can fault Red Hat for selling to IBM in the first place? I mean, everyone and their dog predicted the decay of Red Hat once the acquisition was announced. Surely the fact that they still went through with it, and therefore these all-too-predictable consequences, is on Red Hat?

RunningDroid 3y ago
I'm not familiar with the details, but I'd expect that the people who arranged the sale no longer work at Red Hat.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  Jim Whitehurst, who was Red Hat's CEO through the deal planning, resigned from IBM 2 years and 1 day after the acquisition was finalized.
  - pridkett 3y ago
    …and Whitehurst was pretty explicit that he left because the board gave the CEO job to Arvind Krishna[0]. He also forfeited a large stock award when he did that. [0] https://wraltechwire.com/2021/07/07/whitehurst-stepping-down-from-ibm-wants-to-be-a-ceo-again/ https://wraltechwire.com/2021/07/07/whitehurst-stepping-down...
op00to 3y ago
You can’t just ignore a very good offer to sell your public company. Shareholders will have your head. Jim had to take Ginny’s offer to the Board, and they decided to sell. That’s life in the big city.
- mort96 3y ago
  I don't understand what you're saying. I said it's on Red Hat that they decided to sell to IBM. I didn't say that the CEO personally made that decision, the board of directors is obviously the part of the company which has the final say in such decisions.
  - veidr 3y ago
    I don't think you two are disagreeing. op00to is just pointing out that being a public company (like taking VC money) has consequences that can't be avoided. Those consequences include being acquired, if the offer is good enough. Everybody knew that IBM buying Red Hat was the end of the Red Hat that had existed up to that point. But accepting the buyout wasn't the decision; the decision was to go public in the first place. Which, of course, was Red Hat's decision. So everybody is correct.

yawaramin 3y ago

'Red Hat's open source rot' = they are no longer giving non-customers the RHEL sources for free, something that is completely within their right under the GPL, but it means I no longer benefit from those great free security and other patches republished by the rebuilders after stripping out the RHEL trademarks, so it's inconvenient for me.

xt00 3y ago
(paragraphized/reduced verbosity) RedHat has been trying to figure out how to both benefit from open source and also avoid helping others at the same time.. if you think of RedHat the OS as a combination of the linux kernel (worked on by many companies and individuals well beyond RedHat), tons of packages in userspace (of the millions of lines of code in these packages, probably a very very small fraction are from RedHat -- sure yes some important, some less important). Examining the fact that RedHat in principle does some huge amount of testing of the packages and puts them all together -- lets think about that-- do they really? in many cases the upstream package maintainer(s) probably do most of that. So are they going to go build a ton of test vectors for each package and "test" them all .. I highly doubt that.. likely they have a set of tests that they do to try to hit a set of important things that "should work" and if a package happens to cause that to fail, then they roll it back. In the case that RH pushes a patch to the package maintainer -- does that mean they effectively "own" that software and people that want that updated version are trying to get stuff for "free"? From the beginning people have questioned whether they should be able to hold back patches from other people -- in reality, they can try, but they also can't stop people from doing that same patch "somehow".. so effectively unless people can copyright a new patch to open source software and prevent others from doing that same patch, then they have no recourse. Redhat should just lean really hard into the "support" side of things, and whatever margin exists with that, then fine. Sure, does it piss you off that other companies are making money off of your hard work, yes it does, but look at basically all of the other people who were ahead of you who you are also apparently ripping off RedHat..
- yawaramin 3y ago
  Jeez dude, ever heard of paragraphs? So...which is it? Is Red Hat not really doing all that much work? Which means that people should be happy to use CentOS Stream, which is the free and open source upstream of RHEL? Or are they actually doing some valuable work? In which case they are justified in charging money and providing source code only to their customers, under the provisions of the GPL? Before replying, please go ahead and read up on the GPL and especially the parts where they confirm that it's completely OK to charge money for the software as long as you provide users the source code on request.

rhatexer 3y ago

I can say for certain that this started even before IBM took over Red Hat. All these decisions have been driven by Red Hat sales team in co-ordination with the upper management. They experimented with these ideas with the entrerprise edition of JBoss Application server (later called WildFly). There was a lot of internal friction when that happened and yet they moved ahead with similar decisions as what is repeated with RHEL today.

Woodi 3y ago

> It's not Red Hat's fault Autor, pleas... There is no RedHat anymore. There is only blob with tentacles not feeded and cut off when dry. And name is collected - absolutely no surprise when suddenly "RedHat" will start to sell dolls...

grahamm 3y ago

Why am I not surprised.

yawaramin 3y ago
Most likely confirmation bias.

iruoy 3y ago

You should probably just use to Debian/Ubuntu or something if you're starting fresh. The future is unclear for the RHEL/CentOS clones

m463 3y ago
Ubuntu still has some problems. lots of (almost) uninstallable packages that auto-install updates, advertise (motd) and phone home.
unethical_ban 3y ago
Why is SUSE so seldom talked about? I don't know much about the distro except it has been around a long time, has professional support, supposedly is popular in Europe, and isn't it an RPM distro? Is there any downside to its fully free spins?
- leetnewb 3y ago
  I can't speak for SUSE's corporate use, but I use opensuse on my laptop, server, router, and vps. Very nice distribution. That's not to say that there aren't sources/moments of friction and/or concern between the corporate and community, but it comes with the territory I guess.
- norgie 3y ago
  I use OpenSUSE a lot for both desktop and servers, and it’s great. The biggest downside though is that it probably has the least friendly and helpful community of any Linux or BSD distro I’ve ever used. Questions on their forums are frequently met with hostility and derision, mostly from one particularly active user
  - agracey 3y ago
    Would you please report that user (if you haven’t already) to the OpenSUSE moderators? This is very much not the community we are trying to build!
  - allarm 3y ago