> Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.
A bunch of the software in the customer portal is GPL, which says:
"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."
Red Hat can't impose restrictions on rights granted by GPL. But they are well within their rights to terminate business relationships with partners who chose to re-publish sources.
I don't know what the current situation is but Grsecurity operated under a similar arrangement back in the day.
It's not a violation, because every RHEL user is a customer, which has access to the source code.
They can't sue you for redistribution, but they can ban your account for breaking their T&C.
And then you can sue for "imposing further restrictions", though.
(Not that fighting a legal battle with IBM is something you can realistically do without losing your business, of course. But legally, I think one would have grounds to.)
> We cannot speak to Red Hat’s intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like they have a similar relationship to Red Hat that I do: tons of great folks who still work there and weren't burned by the IBM acquisition... but officially it doesn't seem like community downstreams that filled in the role CentOS used to play have a good relationship with Red Hat.
Otherwise this change (which some people are saying is fine, just poorly communicated) would've been announced with time for the community to adapt to it, rather than being announced in a blog post a week or two after the technical/process change was made!
Exactly right on the lack of notice. What happens to people relying on Alma/Rocky? They're possibly screwed.
Of course, RHEL (or others) could say that if you're depending on a free product, you're to blame. That's where I would disagree a bit. Many of these really large customers could just have easily chosen Debian, or something else. They simply don't need and don't want to pay for support. With Alma/Rocky, they had a perfect option, a no-support, free EL distro. RHEL did not lose these customers to Alma/Rocky. Those customers would have just chosen a different free distro.
This response reads like the responses third-party reddit client developers gave when the API changes were announced. "What's going to happen? We don't know but we have a great working relationship with reddit and they said it SHOULD be fine..." and we all know how that turned out.
Except reddit actually controls all of the keys to castle in that example, whereas in this one IBM controls very little.
They also lack the ability to whack-a-mole people legally sharing source code with distro maintainers. Their only way out is to close-source all of RHEL, which, good luck re-writing all that GPL code... not gonna happen. Not to mention, even if they did, they'd end up in a compatibility nightmare, where they're constantly fixing packages when GNU diverges from what they've done internally, or package maintainers intentionally making it difficult to run their packages on RHEL-OS, which will absolutely happen given the amount of bad blood they'd create from all that.
This move is clearly to make it more difficult for Oracle, and I'd imagine they'll keep playing nice with everyone else because it's in their best interests to do so.
Due to the discontinuation of Centos 8 and these manufactured obstacles faced by RHEL derivatives, I am strongly considering migrating our systems to Debian.
Go for it. I hope lots of people switch to Debian and help support its development. If RHEL isn't compelling enough to pay for, then Debian is great and available for free and that community isn't trying to make a profit. So IMO everybody wins in that scenario.
If you are paying for RHEL and are willing to switch on principle, then tell your sales rep that, too. If enough RHEL customers drop RHEL for this reason, that'll have an impact.
But if your business is using a RHEL clone because you want what RHEL provides, but for free, then consider paying for RHEL. Or go ahead and switch to Debian and see if the costs associated with switching and staying on top of a community driven distro outweigh what you save not paying for RHEL.
I think those that were using CentOS for stability would do well to switch to Debian Stable. It will give more users and testers to the Debian project, which can only help to grow the Linux community (as scattered as it may be). I know there were a lot of sysadmins that used CentOS because they understood the system enough not to need support from Red Hat and RHEL.
Do it. Even if it's somewhat painful now, seems like it'll be much cheaper long term. This is the second major surprise we're seeing from Red Hat's side over the last couple of years. It's quite likely you'll have to migrate somewhere soon anyway (for the second time in as many years), and it might as well be a community-supported distribution that has never pulled any similar tricks over its multi-decade lifetime (as it is not dominated by any single corporate entity, or really any corporate entities at all).
FreeBSD is another solid server OS if you don't need anything that specifically requires Linux.
> Under the current support model, each major version’s stable branch is explicitly supported for 5 years, while each individual point release is only supported for three months after the next point release.
It's also easier to upgrade between FreeBSD major releases than RHEL and clones.
I have already seen a ton of vendors that once only has RHEL certifications for their software switch to having RHEL and Debian or Ubuntu Certifications for deployment
Clearly the enterprise market is moving, as once in the US every vendor would mainly only support RHEL, now I am seeing most support both RHEL and Debian\Ubuntu
I thought that a key value of a RHEL subscription is the support.
E.g. that if you hit a bug with the kernel, GNOME, Ceph, OpenShift, libvirt, or any such software, you get priority (and phone) support from the company that employs many developers of said software, and they are paid to fix your bugs more quickly.
Since I have not had a RHEL subscription myself: Is this accurate in practice?
Having been stuck on RHEL when I worked for the DoD I'm shocked there are still people out there who willingly choose to be in that ecosystem, and to a certain extent I've always been surprised that Fedora is widely popular and well maintained. Like I understand that it is a true statement that people like it, but what was their progression that landed them there I just don't get it. OpenSuse is even more mysterious in that way.
And I say this as someone whose first distro was CentOS. That died long ago. Were there actually people who didn't migrate to Ubuntu/Debian who went from CentOS to [other stuff]? It just blows my mind
Though now I'm on arch sooo... there are many paths I suppose
Linus Torvalds uses Fedora for his personal dev environment which alone speaks volumes about it. I tend to bounce around and mix up my personal dev machine distro every few months but have enjoyed Fedora when I've used it. Arch is great for AUR.
I'm still currently using CentOS 7 in my homelab, but since EOL is next year I'm now starting to plan the next iteration that I'll use in both hardware and software.
Plenty of businesses and individual were looking for exactly what CentOS (and to some degree, RH) offered - namely stability over the long term. Lots of ecosystems and infrastructure out there still based on RHEL/CentOS, and I'm predicting it will take a decade before we see a major downtrend.
I will say though that anyone who isn't watching this whole thing unfold and planning to move to other systems as a result is probably in for a rude awakening at some point.
The last bare metal server that I maintained was a CentOS 7 machine (~2 years ago). Everything now is in the cloud and is currently a CentOS variant/fork/whatever in AWS Linux2. I've been in the Fedora/CentOS pipeline since around the time dirt was invented. The only other server that I've spent any time on is FreeBSD. Of course my daily driver OS X systems were based on BSD as well. I did a debian box once, but I've never used Ubuntu.
Just because it makes no sense to you does not mean it does not for lots of other people. The reasons for that are probably as varied as the users themselves.
Fedora is excellent for workstations - not for servers. It's just not stable enough, and the update/upgrade cadence is too fast and short-lived.
I've used Fedora on my personal workstations forever it seems. But, spend enough time in linux-land and you'll find out there's two very different ways of doing things. There's the Debian Way, and the Red Hat Way. You tend to want to know one really well, even if you can "get by" on the other. (yes, other ways do exist - but they are much more niche)
So, if my servers go Debian (and/or derivatives), so will my personal workstations.
I think this entire action is done BECAUSE of Oracle and Alma is just betting that Oracle is invested enough to take on the fight that Alma can't and will use them as a wedge.
While IBM/RH is unlikely to outright name Oracle as the reason I think it's clear they are the basically the only big player selling support contracts for what is essentially RHEL and undercutting them.
The real question is: is Alma/Rocky (and the prior CentOS) RHEL compatible, or is RHEL compatible with them? I assume it's the latter because Alma/Rocky are a great proposition for prototyping, and RHEL can be dragged in later for compliance.
Red Hat are eliminating a user vector/funnel here.
When RHEL compatibility is mentioned, I always wonder which kind. ABI for system libs, default packages and patches, kernel symbols and structs, selinux policies ? And if "all of the above" then what room for improvement via forks is there ?
Readit News
A bunch of the software in the customer portal is GPL, which says:
"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."
I don't know what the current situation is but Grsecurity operated under a similar arrangement back in the day.
Weren't they violating the GPL too? https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c...
BTW, how could Red Hat identify the person who "leak" the source in the internet?
(Not that fighting a legal battle with IBM is something you can realistically do without losing your business, of course. But legally, I think one would have grounds to.)
Deleted Comment
> We cannot speak to Red Hat’s intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like they have a similar relationship to Red Hat that I do: tons of great folks who still work there and weren't burned by the IBM acquisition... but officially it doesn't seem like community downstreams that filled in the role CentOS used to play have a good relationship with Red Hat.
Otherwise this change (which some people are saying is fine, just poorly communicated) would've been announced with time for the community to adapt to it, rather than being announced in a blog post a week or two after the technical/process change was made!
Of course, RHEL (or others) could say that if you're depending on a free product, you're to blame. That's where I would disagree a bit. Many of these really large customers could just have easily chosen Debian, or something else. They simply don't need and don't want to pay for support. With Alma/Rocky, they had a perfect option, a no-support, free EL distro. RHEL did not lose these customers to Alma/Rocky. Those customers would have just chosen a different free distro.
This is downhill for RHEL
It has been since IBM's acquisition ans we can't even say we're suprised. Capitalism greed destroying something that was perfectly profitable already…
They also lack the ability to whack-a-mole people legally sharing source code with distro maintainers. Their only way out is to close-source all of RHEL, which, good luck re-writing all that GPL code... not gonna happen. Not to mention, even if they did, they'd end up in a compatibility nightmare, where they're constantly fixing packages when GNU diverges from what they've done internally, or package maintainers intentionally making it difficult to run their packages on RHEL-OS, which will absolutely happen given the amount of bad blood they'd create from all that.
This move is clearly to make it more difficult for Oracle, and I'd imagine they'll keep playing nice with everyone else because it's in their best interests to do so.
If you are paying for RHEL and are willing to switch on principle, then tell your sales rep that, too. If enough RHEL customers drop RHEL for this reason, that'll have an impact.
But if your business is using a RHEL clone because you want what RHEL provides, but for free, then consider paying for RHEL. Or go ahead and switch to Debian and see if the costs associated with switching and staying on top of a community driven distro outweigh what you save not paying for RHEL.
https://www.debian.org/intro/help
> Under the current support model, each major version’s stable branch is explicitly supported for 5 years, while each individual point release is only supported for three months after the next point release.
It's also easier to upgrade between FreeBSD major releases than RHEL and clones.
https://www.freebsd.org/security/
Clearly the enterprise market is moving, as once in the US every vendor would mainly only support RHEL, now I am seeing most support both RHEL and Debian\Ubuntu
For the first time in my life, I'm considering Debian (and derivatives) for my systems.
Rocky and Alma might be able to survive the changes, this time. What happens when IBM doesn't squeeze enough revenue out of RH? More changes?
E.g. that if you hit a bug with the kernel, GNOME, Ceph, OpenShift, libvirt, or any such software, you get priority (and phone) support from the company that employs many developers of said software, and they are paid to fix your bugs more quickly.
Since I have not had a RHEL subscription myself: Is this accurate in practice?
Deleted Comment
And I say this as someone whose first distro was CentOS. That died long ago. Were there actually people who didn't migrate to Ubuntu/Debian who went from CentOS to [other stuff]? It just blows my mind
Though now I'm on arch sooo... there are many paths I suppose
Plenty of businesses and individual were looking for exactly what CentOS (and to some degree, RH) offered - namely stability over the long term. Lots of ecosystems and infrastructure out there still based on RHEL/CentOS, and I'm predicting it will take a decade before we see a major downtrend.
I will say though that anyone who isn't watching this whole thing unfold and planning to move to other systems as a result is probably in for a rude awakening at some point.
Just because it makes no sense to you does not mean it does not for lots of other people. The reasons for that are probably as varied as the users themselves.
Deleted Comment
I've used Fedora on my personal workstations forever it seems. But, spend enough time in linux-land and you'll find out there's two very different ways of doing things. There's the Debian Way, and the Red Hat Way. You tend to want to know one really well, even if you can "get by" on the other. (yes, other ways do exist - but they are much more niche)
So, if my servers go Debian (and/or derivatives), so will my personal workstations.
Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 - June 2023 (296 comments)
Does this mean that Oracle has an arrangement with RedHat/IBM that won't be disrupted by this change?
While IBM/RH is unlikely to outright name Oracle as the reason I think it's clear they are the basically the only big player selling support contracts for what is essentially RHEL and undercutting them.
Red Hat are eliminating a user vector/funnel here.