mackca (u/mackca) - Readit News

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

bubblethink · 3 years ago

It's the upstream source, not the source used to build RHEL. RHEL is downstream of CentOS stream. Much like linux kernel's source is available, it does not help you much.

mackca · 3 years ago

According to Red Hat it is. If you don't believe them you can get a Developer subscription to get a RHEL ISO to compare with a CentOS Stream ISO. I imagine a lot of people, myself included, would be interested in the analysis of that.

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

bubblethink · 3 years ago

No. CentOS stream is irrelevant here. RHEL customers cannot meaningfully distribute the sources of RHEL. This has been the issue since the beginning, it's just that RH has tightened the knobs progressively over the years.

mackca · 3 years ago

RHEL source according to Red Hat is CentOS Stream. If the source of RHEL is CentOS Stream then how is it irrelevant? Red Hat cannot deprive you of your right to sources and to redistribute them under the GPL. But Red Hat can also determine who they want to do business with.

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

bubblethink · 3 years ago

There is no extra effort here. The binary comes from the source. You don't have immaculate conception for RHEL. RHEL uses the source, and use to provide a link to the said source. Now they don't. And nobody is even asking RH to post sources publicly. People will happily take that burden off of them. They don't have to post the source, they can let their customers do so, but they forbid their customers. So this argument fails.

mackca · 3 years ago

RHEL source according to Red Hat is CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream is publicly available. Red Hat cannot deprive you of your right to sources and to redistribute them under the GPL. But Red Hat can also determine who they want to do business with.

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

geerlingguy · 3 years ago

That's what I mean. Not putting up a EULA dam. They don't have to build CentOS or assist anyone, but they can't block the code from flowing downhill.

mackca · 3 years ago

According to Red Hat the source of RHEL is publicly available on CentOS Stream Gitlab, without a EULA.

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

Brian_K_White · 3 years ago

Nope. Centos Steam is merely upstream of RHEL. GPL stipulates that when you give someone else a binary, you also give them the source to that binary, not something similar.

mackca · 3 years ago

Isn't that the whole issue here? Customers and people with Developer licenses can get the exact RHEL binaries "behind the paywall". And even then if something is upstream does that not mean that the same code flows down stream?

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

cesarb · 3 years ago

> It's a debranded clone that by definition cannot even have a single bugfix that isn't in RHEL.

Not necessarily. They could easily have an optional repository for "bugfixes that aren't in RHEL". Those who want bug-for-bug compatibility with RHEL for some reason could simply not enable that repository.

mackca · 3 years ago

That repo would undercut the entire purpose of Rocky, which in their wiki state

> Rocky Linux is a community enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux. [1]

[1] https://wiki.rockylinux.org/

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

toyg · 3 years ago

Note that they're actually doing more work now (checking for contractual entitlements, playing whack-a-mole with rebuilders, trying to reassure ecosystem partners, etc etc) than they did before.

mackca · 3 years ago

> playing whack-a-mole with rebuilders Are they playing whack-a-mole? Or was this one change that people are arguing (and Red Hat's lawyers seem to think) is within their rights under the GPL ? It will be whack-a-mole if Red Hat tries to stop supporting VPS instances or stop updating UBI, both of a 1% chance of going away.

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

geerlingguy · 3 years ago

I wrote this a couple days ago, sums it up: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/gplv2-red-hat-and-you

tl;dr - GPLv2 requires no restriction on free/paid recipients of binaries to also freely redistribute source code. Red Hat EULA says your subscription will be canceled if you redistribute the source code. Is that a restriction?

A couple OSS laywers I spoke to said no. Common sense says it feels an awful lot like intimidation to effectively keep their product proprietary (what Fortune 500 company would like to have their Red Hat servers all go dead because some employee downloaded sources and uploaded them somewhere?)

mackca · 3 years ago

I am amazed that multiple OSS lawyers gave you the same answer and you still don't believe them.

> (what Fortune 500 company would like to have their Red Hat servers all go dead because some employee downloaded sources and uploaded them somewhere?)

What does this mean? Are you implying that RHEL has some sort of kill switch per customer embedded in it's source code that someone could exploit? I am not following this train of thought at all.

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

geerlingguy · 3 years ago

Part of the open source social contract is downstreaming too. You can't just take, promise to give back, and then hoard what you've built.

mackca · 3 years ago

downstreaming ? How is the open source social contract anymore than making source code available?

mackca commented on Keeping Open Source Open rockylinux.org/news/keepi... · Posted by u/deafcalculus

geerlingguy · 3 years ago

The damage is corporations could now determine whether they classify downstream use of open source code as "valuable" or "not valuable", and determine (according to their own rubrics) whether to effectively end the open source gravy train in their own ecosystem, or be a member of the open source community and share alike.

Despite every attempt by Red Hat employees to call out CentOS Stream as being "Red Hat sources", it is not. If they wish to participate in the open source ecosystem, they can't coerce customers (paid or not) into a particular (very proprietary) usage pattern with their software. No matter how many tens/hundreds/thousands of employees they hire to code for open source projects.

mackca · 3 years ago

So Red Hat is saying that CentOS Stream is how RHEL is built, you are saying it is not. Can you show the difference in packages from CentOS Stream and RHEL? Rocky says they pull packages from CentOS Stream, and with their project goal remaining 1:1 binary compatibility then that must be the case.