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!
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.
> RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.
I think that's what gp is saying: in the "enterprise" space, Solaris and HP-UX and Irix were kings. RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support, while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.
RedHat THINKS they're still doing that with Fedora/CentOS Stream, but everyone disagrees.
Agreed (as someone in the English-speaking world whose first Linux distribution was SUSE) - though even SUSE uses rpm, as does TurboLinux, so in a very real way, they are standing on the shoulders of Red Hat.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
I keep wondering whether it is even still true that RH drives those projects. Poettering left RH for MS a while back, AFAIK. Are NetworkManager, GNOME, and Wayland still heavily RH driven?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I wish there were legal consequences when companies lied about future prices of things or durations of support.
Notes and presentations from various HEPiX conferences around 2003/2004 will reveal the reaction to academic licence fees for RHEL, and the birth of Scientific Linux as an EL rebuild.
Remember these were/are publicly funded projects with budget time-lines.
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.
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)
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.
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.
They could also release just application source code and not the spec files for building the package. It's the spec files and the patches that's central in this conflict, not the actual source code, but people keep conflating the two.
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.
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.
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)
Short version: Red Hat ceased distributing RHEL sources directly to git.centos.org in a way that easily enabled Rocky, Alma and others to rebuild "bug-for-bug" compatible clones to RHEL releases.
Also, folks are realizing that Red Hat's subscription agreement allows it to terminate the subscription (and access to future source code) if someone redistributes code (including GPL'ed code) in a way that Red Hat doesn't like.
People who misunderstand the GPL are accusing Red Hat of violating it by not widely distributing RHEL source to everyone.
People who sort-of understand the GPL (or willfully misrepresent it) are accusing Red Hat of violating the GPL by "restricting" the ability to redistribute sources. IMO it is not, because customers have all their rights to the code they receive under the subscription prior to termination - they simply are blocked from later releases.
Red Hat has basically acknowledged that it "sees no value" in a free RHEL clone, and is under no obligation to make it easy for clones to exist - so it's not going to anymore. It prefers you use Stream or pay for RHEL or do something else.
> 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.
The situation is actually (c) - IBM RedHat is distributing the patches (and sources) as required by the GPL, but only to people who pay for their license. Re-distributing said patches or sources automatically invalidates your license, so if you exercise your GPL rights to re-distribute the GPL code you bought from IBM, you immediately lose both your support contract with them and any access to any future patches.
This has meant that many companies and projects who were historically using CentOS for free have found that they either have to pay IBM to move to RHEL, or to switch to another distro. Projects like Rocky and Alma which were trying to replace CentOS are now on rather shaky grounds (though they are trying to find additional ways of surviving).
Piggybacking off your comment to add some additional questions; I'm in a similar boat as you.
I've always been a user of the Debian and Arch worlds. The RHEL/Fedora/etc world has been this "other" part of Linux that I frankly haven't touched much, and haven't yet found a reason to.
One thing I'm not totally clear on is what specifically Red Hat offers that people pay for, i.e. what are the details of the "+ stability + patches" of what GP mentioned. Are there paid applications as well? Is paid support a large part of the business model? And so on and so on. I'm still just a little mystified by the RHEL business model, and every time I hear someone talk about it, it's literally vague one-word answers such as "stability," "patches," "support," "enterprise stuff," etc. Even the RHEL FAQ offers essentially just that.
I'm still not quite informed enough to be able to confidently lean one way or the other, but I have to say that I can't shake the feeling that RHEL's business model ultimately relies on exploiting their customers' desire to change their systems as little as possible, even if it means the customers eschew more modern systems that make obsolete the need for the kind of products and services RHEL provides. Or to put it another way, RHEL enables their customers to live with "the devil they know," and not adopt more modern best practices. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I get it, but also if that is indeed the case, it seems like a rickety foundation upon the already rickety foundation of trying to sell open source software that easily be unseated by, say, the nix model of doing things.
I don't know, I could be dead wrong, but starting from what I've seen most other tech companies do and mixing it with a dash of "the idea of paying for Linux seems insane to me"...in lieu of better information, I can't dismiss the above out of hand.
One benefit is if you pick a major version of RHEL or an LTS Ubuntu, you know that you’ll have 10+ years of consistent APIs and ABIs. If you stick to latest upstream distros, you can run into unexpected API incompatibilities causing bugs and breakage.
You're understanding of what RHEL is seems to be off. Basically the current pipeline is Fedora->CentOS Stream->RHEL or CentOS Stream -> Fedora, RHEL. The downstream from redhat distros (centos, rocky, alma) were just recompiling the same packages as rhel and claiming 1:1 bug compatibility, which is a claim that might not even be true. They were able to do this because RHEL used to publish the packages that made up the distro to the public, but now they are only doing that for their customers. Everything that exists inside RHEL is available through centOS stream, the issue for the clones is that there also exists some changes that have not been added to RHEL yet.
Ultimately, the issue is RedHat thinks people should be using centOS stream if they don't need enterprise support and a significant part of the community just want RHEL but free.
> the patches themselves should be released downstream as part of the GPL.
The GPL only says you must provide the source to your customers. Not to anyone else. It does not compel you to offer them the world, gratis, no, not if you don't want.
But your customers are free to provide said source to anyone for free. In practice, letting your customers have the source means letting everyone have 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.
My understanding is a bit different:
Red Hat submits patches upstream and also back-ports those patches into existing RHEL releases that have long-term support.
The upstream patches are still as open as ever, nothing has changed.
The back-ports into existing RHEL releases are what Red Hat is trying to make harder for people to consume outside of a Red Hat subscription (the free developer subscription and the paid support contracts).
I'm not making a judgement either way in this comment, just trying to help clarify my understanding.
I think the two main culprits for limiting RHEL sources are RHEL based cloud offerings including AWS Cloud for Compute and Rakuten Cloud for Telcos (Symphony)[1]. This is very similar case to the MongoDB situation when it finally decided to change the original open source license but instead Red Hat limits its source codes.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?"
< 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."
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.
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.
Readit News
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!
> 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.
I think that's what gp is saying: in the "enterprise" space, Solaris and HP-UX and Irix were kings. RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support, while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.
RedHat THINKS they're still doing that with Fedora/CentOS Stream, but everyone disagrees.
That's Switzerland (or if you're particularly pedantic: the Swiss Confederation) for those not brushed up on their Latin and Latin graphemes.
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.
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.
Or straight up bribery. An IBM exec in Poland pleaded guilty to bribing an government official to get a contract in 2012.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Publicly stating you will “do ill upon” a multinational corporation sounds a lot like a threat, and we don’t do that here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oracle then forked the distribution, and their presence far outweighs CentOS.
For those who would argue against this assertion, run the command "wsl.exe -l -o" inside a Microsoft Windows command prompt.
You will not find CentOS there, and you will not find Red Hat, but the coverage of Oracle Linux is quite thorough.
Red Hat has a long history of antagonism of their partners and users, and they have paid dearly for it.
Which is what this site and petition is about, at my first glance anyhow.
So I resent them. It's the resentment of personal loss, not some grand philosophical stance.
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.
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.
Go download the source for Darwin.. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu
Compile it. Install it on your MacBook. Tell us how well MacOS boots that kernel.
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.
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.
Edit: I guess people don’t like Ubuntu that much
In this climate, that is a solid philosophy
I wish there were legal consequences when companies lied about future prices of things or durations of support.
Notes and presentations from various HEPiX conferences around 2003/2004 will reveal the reaction to academic licence fees for RHEL, and the birth of Scientific Linux as an EL rebuild.
Remember these were/are publicly funded projects with budget time-lines.
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.
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)
Of course, there are good reasons to believe this violates the spirit of the GPL, but that's beside the point.
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.
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
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.
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)
Also, folks are realizing that Red Hat's subscription agreement allows it to terminate the subscription (and access to future source code) if someone redistributes code (including GPL'ed code) in a way that Red Hat doesn't like.
People who misunderstand the GPL are accusing Red Hat of violating it by not widely distributing RHEL source to everyone.
People who sort-of understand the GPL (or willfully misrepresent it) are accusing Red Hat of violating the GPL by "restricting" the ability to redistribute sources. IMO it is not, because customers have all their rights to the code they receive under the subscription prior to termination - they simply are blocked from later releases.
Red Hat has basically acknowledged that it "sees no value" in a free RHEL clone, and is under no obligation to make it easy for clones to exist - so it's not going to anymore. It prefers you use Stream or pay for RHEL or do something else.
I've been writing about this a lot on my blog, starting here: https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/24/red-hat-and-the-clon...
(Disclaimer: I'm a former employee of Red Hat, so I am potentially biased one way or another.)
The situation is actually (c) - IBM RedHat is distributing the patches (and sources) as required by the GPL, but only to people who pay for their license. Re-distributing said patches or sources automatically invalidates your license, so if you exercise your GPL rights to re-distribute the GPL code you bought from IBM, you immediately lose both your support contract with them and any access to any future patches.
This has meant that many companies and projects who were historically using CentOS for free have found that they either have to pay IBM to move to RHEL, or to switch to another distro. Projects like Rocky and Alma which were trying to replace CentOS are now on rather shaky grounds (though they are trying to find additional ways of surviving).
I've always been a user of the Debian and Arch worlds. The RHEL/Fedora/etc world has been this "other" part of Linux that I frankly haven't touched much, and haven't yet found a reason to.
One thing I'm not totally clear on is what specifically Red Hat offers that people pay for, i.e. what are the details of the "+ stability + patches" of what GP mentioned. Are there paid applications as well? Is paid support a large part of the business model? And so on and so on. I'm still just a little mystified by the RHEL business model, and every time I hear someone talk about it, it's literally vague one-word answers such as "stability," "patches," "support," "enterprise stuff," etc. Even the RHEL FAQ offers essentially just that.
I'm still not quite informed enough to be able to confidently lean one way or the other, but I have to say that I can't shake the feeling that RHEL's business model ultimately relies on exploiting their customers' desire to change their systems as little as possible, even if it means the customers eschew more modern systems that make obsolete the need for the kind of products and services RHEL provides. Or to put it another way, RHEL enables their customers to live with "the devil they know," and not adopt more modern best practices. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I get it, but also if that is indeed the case, it seems like a rickety foundation upon the already rickety foundation of trying to sell open source software that easily be unseated by, say, the nix model of doing things.
I don't know, I could be dead wrong, but starting from what I've seen most other tech companies do and mixing it with a dash of "the idea of paying for Linux seems insane to me"...in lieu of better information, I can't dismiss the above out of hand.
Ultimately, the issue is RedHat thinks people should be using centOS stream if they don't need enterprise support and a significant part of the community just want RHEL but free.
> the patches themselves should be released downstream as part of the GPL.
The GPL only says you must provide the source to your customers. Not to anyone else. It does not compel you to offer them the world, gratis, no, not if you don't want.
> 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.
My understanding is a bit different:
Red Hat submits patches upstream and also back-ports those patches into existing RHEL releases that have long-term support.
The upstream patches are still as open as ever, nothing has changed.
The back-ports into existing RHEL releases are what Red Hat is trying to make harder for people to consume outside of a Red Hat subscription (the free developer subscription and the paid support contracts).
I'm not making a judgement either way in this comment, just trying to help clarify my understanding.
That’s an interesting detail. Thanks!
[1]Has Rakuten made a Rocky-er road for Red Hat?
https://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/has-rakuten-made-a-rocky-er-r...
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.
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-clon...
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."