[HN Gopher] Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
___________________________________________________________________
Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability
Author : 0xdeafbeef
Score : 282 points
Date : 2023-06-21 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| LordShredda wrote:
| NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally
| just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real
| bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech
| contracts
| anonymousiam wrote:
| The US Government has been sour on large contractors for almost
| 10 years now, but the quandary is how to prevent the small
| contractors they support from becoming the dinosaurs they hate?
| For a while OSC O/ATK was a darling, but NG gobbled them up.
| Same thing with Millennial (now Boeing). Space-X is probably
| too big for acquisition now, so they are on course to become
| just another dinosaur.
| jaclaz wrote:
| If the info in this thread is accurate, it is for 3 (three)
| workstations, I would call it a _tiny_ deal:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968
|
| Shouldn't be of relevance.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah this decision had to have been in discussion for 6
| months or more, maybe even 2 years back to the CentOS Stream
| decision. It didn't happen because a few days ago NASA bought
| support for 3 Rocky licenses
| rovr138 wrote:
| https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view
|
| links to "SATPC0031698 Tab 04 SOW.pdf"
|
| which has 2 line items,
|
| - CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual
| Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2023-May 31, 2024
|
| - CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual
| Subscription Service Period: June 1, 2024-May 31, 2025
|
| Quantity of 3 for each of them.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I believe NASA does use RHEL, I remember a story last year
| where they were moving some systems from SUSE to RHEL.
|
| My guess is that IBM was so difficult to deal with that they
| decided to move away from RHEL wherever they could. Perhaps
| getting the actual support they purchased was too much of a
| challenge.
|
| If IBM is pissed, they should take a good hard look in the
| mirror before they malign other distributions.
|
| https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-...
| jsiepkes wrote:
| Here are the meeting notes from the RockyLinux people on this
| subject: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/resf-rocky-linux-
| git-c.o-chan...
| sigg3 wrote:
| Now that is what I would call a shady meet. Parasites indeed
| and spirit too. I'm actively removing their stuff from wherever
| I can from now on.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| What's shady about it?
| markhahn wrote:
| very droll!
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| Will this prevent official legal derivatives of RHEL?
| bonzini wrote:
| No, the whole history of RHEL development remains available on
| GitLab. The change only affects git.centos.org.
| binary_ninja wrote:
| I would assume the people that actually develop those either
| already are RHEL customers or they would just pay a single
| subscription so they can download the code and keep it in sync
| ghaff wrote:
| There are no "official" derivatives of RHEL. (And that was true
| even after Red Hat acquired/acqui-hired CentOS).
| MattSteelblade wrote:
| I have edited my question from official to legal (at least
| from a US-perspective). Another commenter in this thread has
| stated that it would be against their TOS.
| louissan wrote:
| IBM not happy with NASA's decision?
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Amazon Linux 2023 (based on Fedora, rather than RH) suddenly
| doesn't look like such a stupid idea
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this
| is the right move:
|
| > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies
| set up to profit from others' contributions. Most recently in
| Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise "bug
| for bug compatibility" with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),
| while contributing nothing toward Red Hat's success. Indeed, the
| natural conclusion of these two RHEL clones' success would be to
| eliminate their host, leading to their own demise, which is why
| one person in the Linux space called them the "dirtbags" of open
| source.
|
| > If there are any real parasites, it's Oracle Linux.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux
|
| > Oracle Linux (abbreviated OL, formerly known as Oracle
| Enterprise Linux or OEL) is a Linux distribution packaged and
| freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU
| General Public License since late 2006.[4] _It is compiled from
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat
| branding with Oracle 's._
|
| I had no idea that Oracle Linux was essentially RHEL with %s/Red\
| Hat/Oracle/g and Oracle has a market cap of $330bn
| rrauenza wrote:
| Prusa has made a similar statement regarding their open source
| 3D printers. A lot of cheap knock offs leveraging their work
| ...
|
| https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...
| Shorel wrote:
| The complementary relationship is also true.
|
| RHEL became the enterprise Linux distribution because it was
| the one used and supported by Oracle, back then, when many
| companies still used Oracle as their database.
|
| I am talking about 15 years ago.
|
| Even nowadays at work, we all use Ubuntu in our workstations,
| but the servers run CentOS (another repackaging of RH).
|
| Without the support of Oracle, we all would be using SUSE in
| our servers, instead of a Red Hat based distro.
| ilyt wrote:
| We just use Debian for everything (sooo much less issues than
| with RHEL or Ubuntu ), but the RHEL bias is high in
| enterprise clients we support.
| rconti wrote:
| Paid for Oracle Linux, can confirm.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't really agree. RHEL is nothing special. Important for
| Enterprise and thus free availability is handy for people
| having an interest in becoming a sysadmin to learn it.
| Dogfooding work stuff is the only reason I'd consider using it
| or its derivatives at home. But I don't care even about that
| and my stuff all runs BSD :P
|
| But other distros are much better IMO.
|
| There's good reasons that a totally free distro like Debian is
| forked so much. It's just a really solid base. Software doesn't
| need to have a business model to be great.
|
| I'd be a lot sadder to see Debian disappear than RHEL and its
| derivatives.
| bonzini wrote:
| There is no single criterion by which you can decide which
| distro is better.
|
| All I know is anecdotes. RHEL 7 and Ubuntu 14.04 came out
| around the same time. Around May, upstream QEMU started
| getting bug reports from Canonical developers that you
| couldn't reset a virtual machine that had been created in
| 12.04 and migrated to 14.04 due to some firmware
| incompatibility.
|
| In RHEL we had started testing cross-version migration 6
| months in advance.
| totallywrong wrote:
| IIRC they even have a tool to "convert" a RHEL system into
| Oracle. And it's not just RHEL, they shamelessly distribute AWX
| (upstream for Ansible Tower, a product 100% made by RH from
| scratch) under a different name without contributing anything
| back. Oracle is truly a parasite of the open source ecosystem.
|
| The only outcome I see for these "business models" at Oracle,
| Rocky, Alma, etc. is increasingly less availability of software
| for us regular users. Say what you might about RH but you can't
| argue that they put out massive amounts of open source code out
| there for all to use. Or they did anyway.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| This is only true it RHEL was self contained OS Project with no
| Upstream sources itself...
|
| That is not the case, RHEL is not possible with out the wider
| ecosystem, and to say Rocky Linux is a "dirtbag" for repacking
| RHEL, would be like saying RedHat is a "dirtbag" for packaging
| any number of free software projects they consume into their
| product.
|
| It completely antithetical the free software movement for which
| Linux is Licensed
|
| However it is perfectly on brand of the "Open Source"
| corporatist movement that seems to be supplanting free software
| pietro72ohboy wrote:
| > However it is perfectly on brand of the "Open Source"
| corporatist movement that seems to be supplanting free
| software
|
| This has been happening on HN too. The vilification of GPL
| and AGPL as "not free in the truest sense of the word", the
| usage of RMS and his personal image to label the free
| software movement outdated/fanatical/toxic is a testament to
| how corporate rebranding efforts have succeeded in replacing
| free software with open-source -- software that is
| conveniently licensed so that corporations can bake it into
| their product without a single concern for the longevity or
| well-being of the developer or the software itself.
| johnny22 wrote:
| > , the usage of RMS and his personal image to label the
| free software movement outdated/fanatical/toxic
|
| What if i love and use the AGPL, but also won't involve
| myself with the FSF because I think they are runining the
| movement and also definitely want no direct association
| with RMS.
|
| I think RMS is an active harm to the cause of Free
| Software.
| reidrac wrote:
| I think you mean anti-copyleft.
|
| Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same,
| despite the philosophical differences. The issue here is
| against the copyleft (GPL and AGPL).
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same,
|
| No ... no they are not
|
| >>despite the philosophical differences.
|
| And those differences are HUGE and make them incompatible
| reidrac wrote:
| Well, go and check: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
| list.html
|
| Then see how many of those are OSI approved licences
| (thus open source).
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Free implies open source. Open source does not imply
| free.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Name an open source license that you don't consider free
| software, then. Note that "source available" (Business
| Software License, etc.) is not the same thing as "open
| source".
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Any non-copy left license is not free software.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Wrong according to the FSF:
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#apache2
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
| list.en.html#X11License
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#FreeBSD
| palata wrote:
| It's not about what you consider or not. The Free
| Software movement is very clear. It is about the freedom
| of the user: "I, the copyright owner of my own code,
| allow you to use my code as long as you let your users
| have (some kind of) access to my code in the product they
| buy".
|
| Really as an end user, I just don't understand who would
| be against the Free Software philosophy: either you don't
| care, or you want as much control as you can on what you
| buy, but why would you ever say: "I don't want those
| weird licenses that give me more access to the stuff I
| buy, I want the other ones that make it completely
| proprietary and inaccessible".
|
| Of course as a company, you want permissive licenses,
| such that you can use it for free, but keep it
| proprietary (because companies like to think that this
| one bugfix they made is very strategic IP).
| umanwizard wrote:
| Name a license that is open source but not free software.
| rout39574 wrote:
| Yes, anything the FSF blesses also qualifies as open
| source. Can you articulate what point you're trying to
| make, that this supports?
| umanwizard wrote:
| * * *
| ilyt wrote:
| Yes, not making it ridiculously easy for corporate to
| make money off someone's else work without giving
| anything back is a huge difference.
|
| I don't really get why people are _for_ non-copyleft
| licenses. LGPL is fine license.
| scj wrote:
| https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3
| umanwizard wrote:
| > no they are not
|
| Yes they are, according to people who use both terms. All
| "free software" licenses are also "open source" licenses
| and vice versa.
| palata wrote:
| Free Software is Open Source, but Open Source is not
| necessarily Free Software.
| jzb wrote:
| I'm not going to call Rocky or Alma "dirtbags" (does anybody
| use that phrase these days?) but comparing what Red Hat does
| to Rocky is misleading.
|
| RHEL Clones: Take finished source code, rebuild, test,
| release.
|
| RHEL: Work upstream to develop features / submit features
| upstream before inclusion in RHEL, maintain specific versions
| of upstream, test hundreds of upstreams together to make sure
| they can be shipped together as an operating system, develop
| "glue" software like Anaconda to install + manage the whole
| thing, take source, build, test, release, accept bugs, start
| over again for next minor release or major release as needed.
|
| And, of course, this elides all the certification work that
| makes RHEL an attractive enough project to rebuild in the
| first place because people want _very specifically_ a RHEL
| compatible distribution to run an application or applications
| on top of.
|
| What people get pissed at Red Hat about isn't that they don't
| get to access the source. They're pissed they don't get the
| convenience. Largely speaking, the people who get pissed
| aren't concerned about Free Software, either - they just want
| easy to run binaries. As I understand it "get binaries for
| free" is not mandated by the four freedoms. The source code
| is still out there for people to study, change, use, and
| redistribute. That seems entirely compatible with the free
| software ethos - but incompatible with the freeloader ethos.
| NegativeK wrote:
| Rocky and Alma are doing exactly what CentOS pre-Stream did
| for _six_ years. Now they're frustrated that their decision
| to kill the CentOS idea didn't stick?
|
| Red Hat might have the legal right to gate their product,
| but it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who
| knows how many people that publish it for free and then to
| put road blocks around their derivative.
|
| I don't really like reductionist blaming, but I feel
| basically forced to wonder what Red Hat would be doing if
| IBM wasn't involved.
| jzb wrote:
| "it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who
| knows how many people that publish it for free and then
| to put road blocks around their derivative"
|
| I'm always curious that people get angry at Red Hat
| profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry
| at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their
| business and pay nothing and contribute nothing.
|
| Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing
| that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to
| rebuild exactly its product.
|
| Seriously - for most purposes CentOS Stream is just fine
| if what you want is a distro that feels like RHEL. Its
| one drawback is that it's not a one-for-one clone of
| RHEL, which generally only really matters if you are
| using it to run your business. Which gets me back to -
| why are people so pissed at Red Hat but not all the
| organizations that make money using RHEL but don't pay
| towards its development?
| ilyt wrote:
| > Rocky and Alma are doing exactly what CentOS pre-Stream
| did for _six_ years. Now they're frustrated that their
| decision to kill the CentOS idea didn't stick?
|
| CentOS wasn't selling support contracts tho.
|
| Not that I think anything they are doing is in any way
| wrong mind you.
| SemioticStandrd wrote:
| To be fair, neither is Rocky.
| totallywrong wrote:
| Take a look at this [1] and tell me one company that
| comes close. RH has surely made questionable decisions,
| and yes that seems to be increasing since IBM. But the
| heat they get is precisely because people are used to
| have free lunch and then feel it's been taken away. I
| don't see AWS, Oracle, and others getting the same
| treatment for benefiting immensely from open source,
| without contributing much in return. Would you rather
| have an industry dominated by RH-like companies or the
| others?
|
| [1] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-
| office/c...
| stereolambda wrote:
| I don't dislike your sentiment and don't see Rocky Linux as
| dirtbags, but I think it is important for GPL that you have
| to[1] provide source only if you provide binaries (IANAL,
| lawyers correct me). So you should be able to have a business
| where you sell software and the people who buy receive the
| GPL'd source code (that they can then modify and share). You
| don't have to develop in public, or use version control
| programs: participate in the whole "GitHub culture".
|
| GPL tries to guarantee an environment for user freedom (not
| developer convenience, like permissive licenses). It has
| builtin protection against someone closing the source. It
| doesn't protect against some company pulling an Internet
| Explorer on you (i.e. providing a free equivalent) with your
| own code, because this doesn't directly concern user
| freedoms. You don't have to be actively helping them though.
|
| I think ultimately free-of-charge mirrors should exist, but I
| see good potentials in companies discovering business merits
| of GPL, and hopefully AGPL. We need more vigor for those,
| after getting lucky once with Linux. We cannot rely on good
| will of corporations (only enforced law works on them), so
| any sign of luring them into copyleft somehow is a good
| thing. This would be a long road, but who knows what could
| happen in the current "AI" chaos and regulation scares.
|
| [1] Of course only _have to_ assuming that you are not the
| original author and you 're building on someone else's code
| received under GPL.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > which is why one person in the Linux space called them the
| "dirtbags" of open source.
|
| That's funny, because that's how I tend to feel about Red Hat.
| chasil wrote:
| It has a few add-ons.
|
| The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs,
| extensive device support (that is removed from the stock
| kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always
| more current. There are several scenarios where it is very
| attractive.
|
| Oracle bought K-Splice several years ago, which was the first
| rebootless patch solution for Linux. It's only available with a
| premium license; Kernelcare is a lot cheaper.
|
| Supported Oracle Linux versions are also available for WSL1
| inside of Windows. C:\>wsl.exe -l -o The
| following is a list of valid distributions that can be
| installed. The default distribution is denoted by '*'.
| Install using 'wsl --install -d <Distro>'. NAME
| FRIENDLY NAME Ubuntu
| Ubuntu Debian Debian
| GNU/Linux kali-linux Kali
| Linux Rolling Ubuntu-18.04
| Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Ubuntu-20.04
| Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Ubuntu-22.04
| Ubuntu 22.04 LTS OracleLinux_7_9
| Oracle Linux 7.9 OracleLinux_8_7
| Oracle Linux 8.7 OracleLinux_9_1
| Oracle Linux 9.1 SUSE-Linux-Enterprise-Server-15-SP4
| SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP4 openSUSE-Leap-15.4
| openSUSE Leap 15.4 openSUSE-Tumbleweed
| openSUSE Tumbleweed
|
| Oracle Linux came into existence shortly after Red Hat bought
| JBoss. As Oracle had also bought BEA Weblogic (IIRC), this was
| not taken well.
| greedo wrote:
| OEL is dependent on RHEL for patches, so how can it be
| "always more current."?
| chasil wrote:
| The UEK is more dedicated to following long-term-release
| kernels. Oracle's re-wrap is known as the "Red Hat
| Compatible Kernel."
|
| v7-rhck-3.10.0-1160.92.1.0.1
|
| v7-uek-5.4.17-2136.320.7.1
|
| v8-rhck-4.18.0-477.13.1
|
| v8-uek-5.15.0-102.110.5
|
| v9-rhck-5.14.0-284.11.1
|
| v9-uek-5.15.0-102.110.5.1
|
| Kernel version 3.10 has always been stock rhel7's version,
| but the UEK has jumped through v4 to v5.
|
| Red Hat made a big deal about io_uring availability in v9,
| but I am guessing that it is available in v8's UEK.
|
| I will say that the Oracle database group's support for v9
| is very poor at this point; for some reason, they are
| holding to v8, and releasing few products for the newer
| platform.
| ilyt wrote:
| > The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs,
| extensive device support (that is removed from the stock
| kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always
| more current. There are several scenarios where it is very
| attractive.
|
| I'd never go for btrfs in anything enterprise.
|
| But it does annoy me how RHEL moves normal open source
| software to the separate repos that are available with extra
| support packages, it just makes managing it annoying
| chasil wrote:
| It also annoys me to great extents when Red Hat removes
| support for SAS raid cards that are perfectly usable.
|
| Oracle fixes that.
| [deleted]
| bubblethink wrote:
| >The comments there are insightful and actually make me think
| this is the right move
|
| They are not. Maybe this is how the YC/VC crowd sees
| everything. Dollar went in, two dollars come out. Two points:
|
| 1) RHEL is not an island. It uses (and contributes) upstream.
|
| 2) They undercut the spirit, if not the letter, of GPL by
| forbidding customers from releasing the sources. Don't want
| derivatives ? Don't use copyleft free software. Can't have your
| cake and use it too.
| znpy wrote:
| When Red Hat didn't yet provide free download and free hobbyist
| licensing for their SO CentOS is what allowed me to learn the
| RHEL way and learn enough to pay 560 euro to get RHCSA
| certified.
|
| I can see their problem with Oracle, but Rocky linux is
| probably bringing them business.
|
| If my job wouldn't mandate a specific distro, I would use Rocky
| Linux where the management doesn't want to pay for support, and
| RHEL whenever possible.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I know there move to CentOS Stream cost them my business,
| Since that announcement 2 years ago I have replaced all
| Licensed RHEL servers with Ubuntu Servers...
| StillBored wrote:
| Which is an odd choice when comparing RH and Canonical. The
| former has been almost religious about living to the open
| source ideals, going so far as open sourcing products they
| purchase, and making sure new products they create have
| opensource upstreams. I don't think the same can be said of
| Canonical which seems at every turn to in need of $ so they
| try desperate ploys to monetize new projects they work on
| by developing them in house and dropping releases, or
| trying to lock up markets and charge for features not
| available in the open source version.
|
| So, while they definitely aren't ideal, its hard to point
| to another company that does more across as much of the
| opensource ecosystem. Maybe google these days? But one
| needs only look at some of the google projects governance
| model to see the difference between RH and Google.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>The former has been almost religious about living to
| the open source ideals
|
| Pre-IBM sure... Post IBM hardly
|
| >>its hard to point to another company that does more
| across as much of the opensource ecosystem. Maybe google
| these days?
|
| Really, you think google is a good example of Open
| Source... wow how far we have come..
|
| Google worse than Microsoft when it comes to the EEE
| model
|
| You are correct Canonical is not ideal, but I find them
| to be more ethical and upfront than Post-IBM RedHat and
| for sure google
| fredski42 wrote:
| >> Post IBM hardly
|
| Can you put some substance on that statement?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The former has been almost religious about living to
| the open source ideals, going so far as open sourcing
| products they purchase, and making sure new products they
| create have opensource upstreams.
|
| We are having this conversation on an article about them
| doing their best to avoid sharing their source code in
| order to kill their downstreams.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Yeah... had it not been for CentOS, I would've never touched
| anything in the RHEL-side of things after I discovered Ubuntu
| in the 10/12 era.
|
| Because CentOS existed, I made sure most of my open source
| work would run just as well on all RHEL derivatives as it
| does on Debian.
|
| If Rocky didn't exist, I would quickly drop all my RHEL
| support because operating thousands of test machines and
| containers based on UBI and having to keep up with their
| licensing game would cost too much of my time.
|
| Rocky and Alma are the only reason devs like me still build
| anything for RHEL.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I'd have to check if it is still the case but RHEL has
| provided free developer licenses for RHEL for years
| (decades?).
|
| EDIT: checked and it still exist and allow usage of up to
| 16 physical or virtual nodes for development " to develop
| software (including open source software), perform
| prototyping or quality assurance testing and/or for
| demonstration purposes.
| g8oz wrote:
| And those conditions are exactly what the OP meant by a
| licensing game.
| [deleted]
| xyst wrote:
| Yup. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison.
|
| I avoid anything Oracle. Their licensing model is hell. Their
| products are usually terrible compared to competition. Cloud
| products are subpar. Products tend to require a support
| contract since it's proprietary dogshit.
|
| Some tidbits of Oracle and Larry Ellison (founder, CEO):
|
| - in the early days of Oracle DB, it was benchmarked and
| compared against other RDBMS and Oracle DB was found to have
| poor performance. Ellison and Oracle tried to get the professor
| fired and introduced language into their EULA preventing
| benchmarking [1,2]
|
| - then there is the growing list of controversies documented on
| Wikipedia [3]
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150313140846/https://starcount...
| (2015, archive.org)
|
| [2] https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/
|
| [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation
| brightball wrote:
| SQL Server did something similar too. There's a famous Reddit
| post that goes deep comparing it to PostgreSQL but can't name
| it for takedown reasons.
| olavgg wrote:
| The switch -> https://web.archive.org/web/20170808183612/ht
| tp://imgur.com/...
|
| The full article: https://web.archive.org/web/2019091912190
| 1/https://www.reddi...
| dizhn wrote:
| Takedown reasons?
| runjake wrote:
| Takedown == getting issued a scary cease-and-desist
| warning letter by high-paid lawyers.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| [dead]
| dijit wrote:
| Yet people are really happy to buy into Oracle because they
| have a free tier[0] (which, you probably should avoid
| anyway[1])
|
| Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is
| totally fine for production, despite decades the company who
| now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over
| minutia.
|
| It boggles my mind.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359
| ilyt wrote:
| My Oracle free tier VM got destroyed without any info with
| no prompt or anything.
|
| Then my account was put in such state where I _couldn 't
| even pay to upgrade it to paid one_
|
| > Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is
| totally fine for production, despite decades the company
| who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over
| minutia.
|
| Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man
| that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork ?
| dijit wrote:
| > Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man
| that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork
| ?
|
| Oh, that's easy. neither.
|
| I use postgres predominantly.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| It reminds me of the old saying.
|
| > Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM
|
| Nobody ever got fired for buying, Oracle or Microsoft or
| any big incumbent. The same could definitely not be said
| for choosing any free software.
|
| Ironically RHEL is IBM now.
| dijit wrote:
| I can imagine people being fired for going with Oracle.
|
| Fail to make your budget work 5 quarters in a row and see
| how long you last. ;)
|
| Or wait for a legal case to come up: someones getting
| fired, wether its you or a scapegoat you sacrifice.
| fariszr wrote:
| I mean you can just use it as a free VPS, have backups of
| everything and you should be fine
| disordinary wrote:
| Oracle is now in the keep customers locked in business rather
| than the get new customers business.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Also in terms of security, Oracle's "forks" are decades
| behind. They managed to make RedHat unsecure with their own
| dogshit changes.
|
| There are so many CVEs for Oracle specifically that are just
| bad default usernames and passwords, where they still dispute
| the CVE reports because it is "intended behaviour".
|
| So ridiculous...
| ilyt wrote:
| RHEL also introduced some.... interesting changes few
| times, like re-enabling ciphers removed from upstreams
| because their clients needed them for something.
|
| I remember our amazement on how we failed audit on having a
| cipher enabled in OpenSSH version that had that cipher
| removed in upstream...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Pretty sure oracle have made a habit of going after
| security researchers who use responsible disclosure
| pathways also.
| awill wrote:
| There's a huge difference between Rocky/Alma, and Oracle.
| Oracle actually tries to steal RHEL business. They offer
| support, which I think is ludicrous when they don't even build
| the product.
|
| Alma/Rocky aren't to my knowledge offering any support (and if
| they plan to, they shouldn't). Are customers cross-shopping
| RHEL with Alma? You either want support, and buy RHEL, or you
| don't, and you use something else (Alma/Rocky, or Debian/Ubuntu
| etc..)
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Rocky does offer support, but your comment about Oracle still
| stands. I believe Rocky works with Red Hat.
| awill wrote:
| Rocky can offer support on helping you install it. But they
| can't offer real support. They can't fix bugs or do any
| real work on RHEL beyond requesting that Red Hat accept a
| fix. If Red Hat declines, Rocky can't even ship their own
| fix.
| yetanotherloss wrote:
| I have no raw feelings towards organizations trying to keep
| themselves in business, but I'd be happier if it was literally
| anyone besides Oracle.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| Is not this something what Open Source exactly suppose to allow
| you to do ?
|
| I have no love for Oracle but I would imagine one of the
| reasons Oracle embraced RedHat Enterprise Linux early on was
| the fact they could fork it if it was in their interest - this
| was tremendous value for RedHat for a time and helped its
| establishment as leading Linux for Enterprise.
|
| Remember also what RedHat itself "stands on the shoulders of
| the giants" - there are a lot of packages which RedHat
| includes. Years ago when I worked at MySQL AB RedHat used to
| include MySQL packages, say they are covered by their
| "subscription" but have no revenue share with MySQL AB (as
| creators)
|
| Note I'm not complaining I'm saying this is exactly how things
| upposed to work - MySQL got great value from being Open Source
| and allowing Linux distributions to include it (and make money
| on it) freely.
| krylon wrote:
| I thought that was well known, it's not like they were
| secretive about it, in fact they openly advertised it. Their
| sales pitch, I think was, that many customers ran Oracle
| software on RHEL, and this way they would have a single
| provider of support for both the OS and the software running on
| it.
|
| Given Oracle's rather well-earned reputation, that does _not_
| sound like an attractive proposal to me, but there 's a chance
| orgs that are on the hook for anything Oracle already might not
| share that assessment.
|
| IIRC, Oracle's move to eat part of Red Hat's lunch was
| considered the reason Red Hat stopped making the kernel source
| available in the form of mainline tree + patches, thus making
| it less convenient for Oracle's staff to provide support at the
| same level of expertise as Red Hat, but I don't think anyone
| working at Red Hat has commented on this on the record.
| raincom wrote:
| When Oracle started offering support for the oracle db on
| RHEL, whenever there are performance issues and other issues,
| Oracle used to blame RHEL. So oracle DBAs are trained to go
| back Redhat for issues. Usually, these support issues bounce
| back and forth: Oracle blames Redhat, which says it's an
| oracle issue. In the mean time, oracle support folks just buy
| sweet time. Then came Oracle enterprise linux: oracle
| supporting the whole stack, OS and databases. Which
| enterprise customer doesn't want that. Not only that, many
| corporate customers of RHEL switched to Oracle Linux, as
| oracle charges way less for each installation.
| m463 wrote:
| Isn't redhat profiting from all the software upstream to
| themselves?
|
| I'm reminded of the definition of a linux distribution: a
| package manager and a source repository.
|
| (that said, unbreakable linux, yeah)
| zaphar wrote:
| Redhat contributes back to upstream in a lot of cases. I
| don't know if Rocky and co do or not but Redhat definitely
| does.
| m463 wrote:
| I'm not denying that important point.
|
| But imagine being a contributor to a package which redhat
| incorporates and using it via centos/rocky.
| fredski42 wrote:
| RedHat actually helps Rocky and co by basing RHEL on Centos
| Stream. Rocky and co can now file bugs on Centos Stream and
| have it fixed faster for their distribution. Before they
| could not do that. They had to report further upstream and
| had to wait until that landed in RHEL. Also RedHat is
| helped by these fixes. Only winners here.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| > Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma
| Linux both promise "bug for bug compatibility" with Red Hat
| Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red
| Hat's success.
|
| CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments,
| startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump on
| "real RH" when they got bigger. Alma Linux is the same. Rocky
| Linux does sell support, but even then it's still advertising
| RHEL.
| jzb wrote:
| CentOS was also huge towards allowing a lot of larger
| companies to just run CentOS in production instead of RHEL
| and avoid paying anything at all.
|
| However you may feel about Red Hat's actions, I'd trust that
| folks at Red Hat have done enough legwork to figure out that
| "CentOS as a loss leader for RHEL" wasn't working out the way
| people like to imagine it would.
|
| (Note: I am a former Red Hat employee, but I do not have and
| haven't had specific access to any data estimating what
| CentOS Linux was expected to add to or subtract from the
| bottom line. But I feel pretty sure that many deals won and
| lost have been examined, many customers spoken to, and
| numbers crunched to inform their actions.)
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| And I'm not sure I'd agree with their analysis, but they're
| clearly free to make the decision.
|
| If larger companies can run CentOS in production, they also
| can run Debian or any other distro without a support
| contract. They could even use a competing loss leader
| distro like OpenSuse Leap.
| jzb wrote:
| Yes, they could. But they (often) don't. The
| certification / training ecosystem that exists around
| RHEL has a lot value, even if a lot of folks like to
| handwave it away. The engineering that goes into RHEL and
| the very predictable lifecycle has a lot of value, too.
| I'm not going to say that Debian or SUSE aren't equally
| good, engineering-wise, but it seems like a lot of large
| companies have chosen RHEL clones over Debian. (Not all!
| I am sure plenty of companies do as you suggest with
| Debian.)
|
| Don't get me wrong - I think it'd be great if Debian
| became the standard, assuming that meant that companies
| helped develop Debian and poured resources into it as a
| commons. That'd be much better than depending on Red Hat
| to do all the work and then not paying for it.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Especially distributions such as Debian Stable LTS.
| fariszr wrote:
| i mean you can do that now with a RHEL dev licenses, you have
| up to 16 free servers
| ilyt wrote:
| > CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments,
| startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump
| on "real RH" when they got bigger.
|
| And it turned out near-nobody did so they turned it into
| stream so you could no longer have "same as RHEL" version.
| passterby wrote:
| [dead]
| ddaae2ggg444569 wrote:
| Yeah I really think people are way out over their skis if they
| think that Red Hat/IBM doesn't have at least a somewhat
| justifiable case to make here. You can still disagree, but at
| least you need to admit that you can understand why they would
| be pissed about something like Rocky. They do offer downloads
| of RHEL for free (or is that gone too?) for anybody not using
| it commercially, this isn't some poor student cloning RHEL
| because they couldn't afford it or anything like that.
| [deleted]
| Aaron2222 wrote:
| Regardless of your views of cloning a commercial Linux distro
| like that, alling Rocky Linux and Alma Linux 'dirtbags' misses
| the point of the entire reason they exist in the first place,
| RedHat discontinuing CentOS (and drastically shortening the
| support window on CentOS 8).
| reidrac wrote:
| Besides it isn't true they don't contribute. As you say, they
| are filling the gap left by CentOS, and that helps sustaining
| an ecosystem that benefits RHEL.
| freedomben wrote:
| who called them dirtbags? I've seen this mentioned a few
| times but I haven't seen any source for it
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| It's in one of the comments on the linked article, and was
| reposted in the top comment in the thread in which you're
| replying. It seems to be sourced originally from here:
|
| https://www.infoworld.com/article/3697733/chatgpt-s-
| parasiti...
| awill wrote:
| It's pretty obvious that Red Hat wasn't happy with Rocky and Alma
| so successfully taking over from CentOS.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to
| RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the
| stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when
| they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless
| packaging work.
|
| The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to
| create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language
| for describing packages, is based on text substitution which
| makes it tricky to write. [1] RPM builds don't do build-time
| sandboxing, so a package won't build consistently across machines
| without extreme care taken in both the package descriptions and
| the build environment. Even if the package itself builds and runs
| on the same machine, it isn't guaranteed to run on other machines
| too because it lacks a way to ensure reproducibility.
|
| [1]: For example, commenting out a macro might not work as
| expected because the expanded text might include a newline.
| klooney wrote:
| RHEL gives really good audit. They're very good with security
| updates, they support things for a very long time. And if you
| wander into Federal Government land, it's hard to use anything
| else.
| acatton wrote:
| > I wish this encourages companies to look for more
| alternatives to RHEL and its clones.
|
| The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any
| distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly
| with SELinux enabled.
|
| Setting up SELinux in any other distro is, in my experience, an
| uphill battle. You need to become an SELinux expert to do so.
|
| > The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to
| create RPM packages is showing its age.
|
| Most people don't really create RPM packages, they just install
| them. And in this area dnf[1] is cutting edge: file-level
| dependency solver, delta-package downloading, parallel
| downloading, ...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software)
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I have run SELinux on Fedora without too many issues. Of
| course, Fedora being rather closely related to RHEL that
| shouldn't be too surprising.
| acatton wrote:
| Fedora is to RHEL what Debian Sid is to Debian stable.
|
| Yes, it's not that simple, and there are some customization
| done. But Fedora is the playground for the next RHEL. I
| woudn't consider Fedora "an alternative" according to what
| the top-poster was describing.
| bubblethink wrote:
| >The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of
| any distro with its base and all its packages working
| seamlessly with SELinux enabled.
|
| Why is this a dealbreaker ? Ubuntu has apparmor which is
| similar. Maybe selinux is stricter/granular etc., but that's
| not a business level differentiator. Your company won't fail
| or succeed because of selinux.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Ugh but Ubuntu is still insisting on that snap nonsense.
| dralley wrote:
| > delta-package downloading
|
| RHEL has never used that, and Fedora has perennial
| discussions about killing it because the benefits rarely
| outweigh the costs anymore
| soraminazuki wrote:
| I was specifically talking about people using RHEL when they
| need latest versions of software. For that use case, RHEL is
| a poor choice. You absolutely need to create custom packages,
| because there are no preexisting packages.
|
| To reiterate:
|
| > There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes
| sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest
| versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work.
|
| DNF doesn't solve this specific problem.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Android, GrapheneOS, CalyxOS seem to use sandboxing and
| SELinux much more elegantly than the mass of systemd, podman,
| and flatpak we call Fedora Core OS Atomic Enterprise Linux,
| I.e. FCOAEL.
|
| Besides, Debian has AppArmor in use for various packages.
| KAMSPioneer wrote:
| This (SELinux) is why I started using RH-family OSs more and
| more, and one of a few reasons why I stick with it, even
| though Debian's minimalism is incredibly nice. I have a book
| (as yet unopened) on my desk about SELinux administration,
| but it's huge and CentOS, Fedora, RHEL, et al. Just Work
| (okay, with the occasional small tweak to policies or
| booleans).
| orev wrote:
| The "correct" way to build reproducible RPMS is to use the
| 'mock' system, which addresses the concerns about inconsistent
| build environments.
| danjoredd wrote:
| I just use Fedora. When I used Red Hat briefly, I didn't notice
| any major differences between the two except one is the "base"
| of Red Hat. I can get pretty much whatever I need through dnf
| or flatpak. I get that Red Hat has support, but otherwise for
| regular consumers like me I am not sure why I would go for a
| Red Hat clone when Fedora exists.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Red Hat is valuable for situations where you want to leave a
| computer running for 10+ years and not have to worry about
| updates breaking anything. If you are fine with doing a full
| OS update every 6 months and always want the latest and
| greatest features, you're not in the target market.
| dzsekijo wrote:
| What stops then someone to buy a RHEL subscription for the
| purposes of setting up an unofficial RHEL source mirror?
| bubblethink wrote:
| They will terminate your contract if they can trace it back to
| you. Their ToS prohibit this.
| PeterZaitsev wrote:
| I wonder if you're RedHat Subscriber and Customer and have access
| to the source what is the license ?
|
| In general though it is clear what RedHat does not seems to want
| to play Open Source game any more, at least when it comes to
| RHEL.
|
| Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open Source of
| convenience, where you have portions of your software Open Source
| when it helps your business, and not so much if it does not.
| axus wrote:
| I'm interested in how IBM will try to refuse selling to
| Alma/Rocky/Oracle. You'd think those guys would already have a
| paid Red Hat subscription. The lawsuits between Oracle and IBM
| will be epic.
| fariszr wrote:
| Most T&C have a clause allowing them to simply end any
| subscription without needing a clear reason. And I doubt
| rocky or almalinux want to start a cat and mouse game of
| opening accounts and these accounts getting banned by Red
| Hat.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| The specs themselves usually come from Fedora first, where they
| are MIT by default (per Contributor Agreement, at least). So RH
| can do anything they please as long as they acknowledge the
| authors (which is done trivially by not mucking with
| %changelog).
|
| Anything they please likely includes terminating your account
| if they sniff you using it to avoid the fees or enabling others
| to do so. If you are contemplating, say, using a Red Hat
| Individual Developer Access (or what they call it) to
| redistribute the sources, they have a provision in the terms
| you have to agree to just against such cases.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > Similar to Amazon/AWS RedHat seems to be moving to Open
| Source of convenience, where you have portions of your software
| Open Source when it helps your business, and not so much if it
| does not.
|
| I guess it's quite pragmatic from the short- and even medium-
| term perspective, although it likely may become well poisoning
| in the long term.
|
| There used to be an understanding that since Red Hat is making
| a lot of buck on the shoulders of contributors making FOSS
| available, they have an obligation of giving a considerable
| amount of goodwill in return. It looks like they are now
| pulling a Reddit, but making it a long game.
|
| I mean, right now it looks like they are protecting their
| business (you really want to get paid for having to backport
| fixes to some library which has been EOLed and forgotten by its
| upstream half a decade ago, and for all stability promises no
| vendor is giving!), but it's opening a way to shittier
| practices, if you get my drift.
| nezirus wrote:
| I am so pissed by this move, it is totally against the spirit of
| free software and GPL. Using additional contracts to subvert the
| free software licenses. You get to see the software, but you
| can't share it further. RedHat would not be here if someone
| behaved like this 25+ years ago.
|
| I would prefer a variant of GPL which strictly forbids this (imo
| it should already be forbidden, these are clearly additional
| restrictions). Let's put "GPL v2 or later" to good use...
| flyinghamster wrote:
| > Using additional contracts to subvert the free software
| licenses. You get to see the software, but you can't share it
| further.
|
| This wouldn't be the first time. The very origin of the DD-WRT
| router distro was a hard fork of SveaSoft's "if you share this,
| we cut off your access to updates" license.
|
| https://www.wi-fiplanet.com/the-dd-wrt-controversy/
| disordinary wrote:
| It's a challenging time for OpenSource at the moment.
| jake_morrison wrote:
| The problem is that RHEL is too expensive for people who don't
| need support. IBM is getting greedy and screwing up its pipeline.
|
| Our dedicated servers are about $100/month for pretty serious
| hardware (2 x 8-core CPUs, 64 GB RAM, 2 x 8TB HDD, 30TB
| transfer). Paying $349/year is a significant percentage of that.
| It is worse for smaller servers, and ludicrous for small virtual
| machines in the cloud.
|
| I would not mind throwing them a bone to have e.g. security
| updates at some reasonable cost. Their official repositories
| don't have enough packages, so I end up having to use 3rd-party
| repos for normal things, e.g. Postgres. Having a more full-
| featured repo of up-to-date software would be useful to me.
|
| I have been running CentOS 7, but when that is no longer
| supported, I will switch to something else like Ubuntu or Debian,
| whatever our hosting providers support. I am already using Debian
| or distroless for containers.
|
| And then RHEL will be completely irrelevant to me. Good job, IBM.
| bonzini wrote:
| Red Hat's model is to only ship what they know they can
| support. For the rest there's EPEL which is community managed.
|
| Canonical's model is to ship the kitchen sink and wing it in
| case a customer wants support on something that is in a sorry
| state.
|
| Different customers, different requirements.
| jacooper wrote:
| Thats not true with Ubuntu Pro, which includes support for
| way more packages than RHEL, 10 thousand to be exact, and is
| much cheaper with more features like included kernel
| Livepatching.
| bonzini wrote:
| I was referring exactly to Ubuntu Pro. They can support
| more packages for cheaper exactly because Red Hat won't
| ever have the same YOLO approach to support that Canonical
| has.
| jacooper wrote:
| Did you try their support before coming to such opinions?
| gtirloni wrote:
| I've been using Red Hat and Fedora since the early RH4 days when
| the video driver only supported monochrome for my GPU. I'm now
| going to start switching to something not controlled by a
| corporation. Yes, I'm not happy about it but it's necessary. The
| days of being naive about Linux are over.
|
| I still consider Fedora one of the best distros out there
| (bleeding edge and polished as much as possible) and I prefer to
| use the same-ish distro on my personal computers and on the
| servers but this is another nail in the RH-based distro coffin
| for me.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| If you like the glacial pace of Redhat you'll probably be happy
| with Debian stable.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Until today I preferred to use Fedora on desktops and
| RHEL/Rocky/CentOS on servers, so I'm already used to
| different paces of development.
|
| But it seems Debian unstable on desktops and Debian 12 stable
| on servers might work just fine. Truth be told, I only need a
| 5.x/6.x kernel with cgroups/namespaces/ebpf on my servers and
| flatpak on the desktops and I'm fine.
| tristan957 wrote:
| Fedora is pretty independent of Red Hat, especially since Red
| Hat fired the Fedora project lead.
| jzb wrote:
| Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat and many of its developers are
| employed by Red Hat. Much of the work in Fedora is done by
| Red Hat.
|
| Red Hat did not fire the FPL. They laid off the Fedora
| Program Manager, which is a different role entirely. I would
| still say that was a lousy decision, but the FPL is a very
| different role that goes back a very long time and AFAIK
| remains filled by Matthew Miller.
|
| I've seen the two roles conflated here and there so I figured
| it was worth correcting here so it doesn't continue to
| spread.
| tristan957 wrote:
| How many is many?
|
| Thanks for the correction on the title.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Grass Green; Sky Blue; Corporate entity that subversively pushed
| systemd into as many Linux distros as possible still engaging in
| user-hostile, FLOSS-hostile activity
| HideousKojima wrote:
| It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to
| republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out
| of spite to Centos competitors.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| I suspect that they would not then be a customer for very long
| afterward.
| tw04 wrote:
| >It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to
| republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger
| out of spite to Centos competitors.
|
| That is a violation of their terms of service and will result
| in a termination of your subscription unless I'm misreading it
| (section d):
|
| Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use
| of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the
| Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services
| includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services
| based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or
| applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units, (c)
| providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third
| parties, _(d) using Subscription Services in connection with
| any redistribution of Software_ or (e) using Subscription
| Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software
| products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such
| instance (collectively, "Unauthorized Subscription Services
| Uses").
|
| https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20...
| Vogtinator wrote:
| How does this not violate the GPL?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Why should it violate GPL?
|
| RHEL is obliged to provide source code for their GPL
| packages.
|
| You ask for source code, you'll get it.
|
| You distribute the source code, RH will terminate the
| contract with you because they don't want to see you as a
| customer anymore.
|
| They're free to do business with whoever they want, peeking
| people who will not distribute RH sources.
|
| Every party is in their right here. That's my
| understanding.
|
| Red Hat did that for many years. They maintain extended
| support branches for RHEL which provide fixes for very old
| software. Those fixes AFAIK were never "leaked" despite the
| fact that every customer could receive it. If it was as
| simple as crowd-funding single subscription and then
| publish all the sources, someone would do it and we would
| have CentOS Extended LTS.
| [deleted]
| matthews2 wrote:
| The GPL says I must give you access to the source along
| with the binaries, but it doesn't say I need to give you
| updates indefinitely.
| mroche wrote:
| It does not. As the other comment in this thread notes
| there are two agreements in play here: the open source
| license agreements and Red Hat's Enterprise Agreement.
| Under no circumstances can Red Hat prevent an entity from
| sharing their FOSS software, however they can absolutely
| view that action as a violation of the EA Contract, and
| terminate the subscription. This doesn't undo the action,
| but prevents further access to updates and sources.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| My Assumption would be Section 1.4 over rides in the case of
| Source Code which is governed by GPL and implicitly allows
| redistribution, that is the entire purpose of CopyLeft
|
| So the prohibition on "redistribution" in this context would
| be on the compiled binaries. i.e you could not pay for a
| subscription and then mirror the yum repos publicly.
| tw04 wrote:
| You're conflating your legal right to redistribute the
| software (they can't sue you) to your contractual right to
| redistribute (them terminating your support contract).
|
| They cannot sue you for redistributing the software, or
| claim damages because you did so. They can ABSOLUTELY tell
| you that your right to the subscription is terminated if
| you do so.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| I am not conflating anything, I am reading section 1.4 of
| the agreement which specifically 1.4 that says
|
| > Agreement establishes the rights and obligations
| associated with Subscription Services and is not intended
| to limit your rights to software code under the terms of
| an open source license
|
| So if the preceding section 1.2(F) and 1.2(G) do prohibit
| redistribution of SOURCE CODE, then it is in fact
| limiting your rights under to software code under the
| terms of an open source license.
|
| 1.2(F) and 1.2(G) would limit your right to distribute
| "software" generally defined a complied code, but not
| source code.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep you can redistribute it. But they can terminate your
| subscription so they don't have to give you the next round
| of updates. Basically a new "customer" would have to pop up
| and leak the sources each time there is an update to a
| package for a bug-for-bug RHEL clone to exist
| a2tech wrote:
| I don't understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat. I was
| under the impression they were profitable prior to the
| acquisition so I'm not sure why they're squeezing so hard and
| ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.
| Timon3 wrote:
| IBM is stuck in a cycle of constant re-invention, because they
| somehow manage to always re-invent themselves in ways that are
| even worse and more complicated for customers, which they try
| to fix by re-inventing themselves again. Even if they initially
| planned on leaving Red Hat alone, every re-invention is a
| chance for some executive to make the decision to squeeze a
| little tighter on existing customers. So the question shouldn't
| be "what game is IBM playing with Red Hat", but "how long until
| nothing usable is left". I'd say maybe 20 more re-inventions,
| or 1-2 years.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| I think you are being very pessimistic. All of their
| acquisitions are used to fund reinventions but due to their
| existing mainframe and other support contracts it makes a
| moat that people have a hard time crossing. I could see
| Oracle being merged or bought by IBM.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| > I could see Oracle being merged or bought by IBM.
|
| Their market caps are almost identical, and personally I'd
| say it'll be a cold day in hell before Oracle merges with,
| nevermind is acquired by, IBM.
| Timon3 wrote:
| I definitely am pessimistic, but that is probably due to my
| time working for them :) I can't remember any acquisition
| during my time there that didn't get significantly worse.
| Red Hat was the one hold-out, but this thread is example
| enough for me to know that nothing has changed since.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Yet they're still way older than most tech companies. I'd
| wager they will outlive 99.99% of those unicorn startups yet.
| taeric wrote:
| How much of that is lingering brand value, though? That and
| simple ties into existing and old industries.
|
| You are also comparing to startups? Which... yes, most
| things die. Sometimes, it is the old things that die. Often
| taking a lot of other younger things with them.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Immortality is a curse, not a blessing.
| Fordec wrote:
| The Lindy Effect.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
| pjmlp wrote:
| Many startups can only dream of being as long and influential
| as IBM is.
|
| Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000, was
| one of the reasons it actually took off.
| josefx wrote:
| > IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000
|
| That was quarter a century ago.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In fact, now they own most relevant projects.
| Timon3 wrote:
| > Many startups can only dream of being as long and
| influential as IBM is.
|
| Okay? Do you feel attacked because I wrote something
| negative about IBM? Not sure how that is relevant to my
| point.
|
| > Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000,
| was one of the reasons it actually took off.
|
| And that influences the motivations behind their current
| decisions how exactly?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Me attacked, not all.
|
| HN loves to hate Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and friends,
| without getting the point that many startups that go
| through HN programs never achieve half of what they
| produce.
| Timon3 wrote:
| What do startups have to do with IBMs business direction
| and processes? How does this relate to my point? Not
| every startup being successful somehow means that I
| shouldn't comment on IBMs recent business decisions?
| pjmlp wrote:
| A matter of perspective into actual influence into the
| capitalist US society.
| dizhn wrote:
| We seem to even be hating on RedHat now. (I was bummed
| about the Centos thing too). People on this thread are
| acting like Redhat doesn't even release any free
| software.
| ghaff wrote:
| I'd argue that IBM's contributions in that timeframe were
| more about about validating it from a large business
| perspective than about technical contributions (that tended
| to focus on large system performance which wasn't actually
| that important for Linux taking off).
| jamiesonbecker wrote:
| Yes, certifying DB2 for Linux (back in 1998,
| https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=db2+linux, scroll
| to bottom) was an absolutely earth-shattering event that
| announced that Linux had arrived. I think that event (and
| of course Oracle and Sybase a few months prior) really
| sounded the death knell for big-iron UNIX.
|
| But in 1999, IBM ported Linux to run on System 390
| (https://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=mainframe+linux)
| and I remember there was a story that some IBM scientist
| booted more than 30,000 Linux instances on a mainframe on
| his lunch break. This research led to the big SUSE
| partnership, as well as open-sourcing other enterprise-y
| software like JFS and putting a big devteam to make the
| kernel ready for real SMP (Linux didn't have
| efficient+mature SMP even into the early aughts, although
| a few companies had built some massive SMP boxes.)
| ghaff wrote:
| >Linux didn't have efficient+mature SMP even into the
| early aughts, although a few companies had built some
| massive SMP boxes
|
| Including IBM. (Forget when they did their big stackable
| X-series server.) A lot of the tech eventually became
| applicable to even super-mainstream dual-socket servers
| but I wonder how much money was largely wasted on
| building and trying to sell larger scale-up boxes.
|
| But, yeah, IBM was one of the big investors in OSDL (and
| their own Linux Technology Center) which had a lot of
| scale-up focus which made a lot of the legal claims of
| another 3-letter company pretty much misaligned with the
| timeline.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Well, that is playing what-ifs with IBM, Intel, Compaq
| and Oracle initial set of contributions in 2000.
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| "Large" wasn't a very big standard at the time.
|
| Linux's multiprocessor support was ...lackluster at
| best... prior to IBM contributing all the Sequent (Dynix)
| derived multiprocessing stuff. Hyperthreading/Multicore
| started to get "normal" even in consumer systems only a
| couple years later, so that injection was pretty
| critical.
|
| Likewise, a lot of Linux's development inertia and
| cultural acceptance came from being a cheap and
| consistent alternative to screwing around with the
| profusion of expensive and mutually incompatible
| proprietary Unixes in the Server and (as clusters co-
| evolved) HPC market.
|
| On the broader issue, the tension here is that IBM thinks
| the value proposition of RHEL is "Supported" and (I
| suspect) almost everyone else regards the value
| proposition of RHEL as "standard base." I think it's more
| likely that the "standard base" for srs bsns Linux in the
| markets where RHEL is the standard would rebase than IBM
| having any success trying to squeeze customers, and if
| that happens the value of "Owning RHEL" suddenly shrinks
| dramatically. Honestly, all it would take is the RHEL-
| likes like Alma and Rocky to agree on a coordination
| mechanism that isn't matching RHEL - could be through a
| major public interest like CERN, could be through an
| existing commercial interest like coordinating with
| Oracle (ew), could be via one of the several entities
| that does commercial support for RHEL-likes ... there are
| options.
|
| Oracle being a gigantic litigious parasite on society is
| a broader issue, and I understand regarding commercial
| RHEL-likes as more of a problem, but even they have been
| funding a lot of backport-to-LTS type work.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Linux's multiprocessor support was ...lackluster at
| best... prior to IBM contributing all the Sequent (Dynix)
| derived multiprocessing stuff. Hyperthreading/Multicore
| started to get "normal" even in consumer systems only a
| couple years later, so that injection was pretty
| critical.
|
| It was certainly needed over time but capabilities from
| things like RCU out of Sequent weren't that important in
| the 2000 timeframe. And a lot of IBM's contributions
| didn't come online until the v4 kernel.
|
| None of this is to minimize IBM's contributions to Linux
| over time but I'd argue pretty strongly that IBM's
| endorsement of Linux for enterprises in January 2000 is
| what really moved the needle in the short run.
|
| Here's what one of the people most directly involved told
| me a few years ago:
|
| "By the late 90s, it was clear that Linux was becoming
| more and more important. And we formed a major task force
| to see to what extent IBM should embrace Linux and this
| happened in 1999. And the task force came back and said,
| we absolutely should embrace Linux, that it was going to
| be an incredibly important part of computing, that we
| should embrace Linux across all of IBM's offerings. And
| that IBM should become a major supporter of Linux.
|
| "And I still remember very well in December of '99, I
| called Sam Palmisano, the head of IBM Systems Group. And
| I said, Sam, the task force recommends that we should
| embrace Linux. And Sam said, okay, Irving, we will do
| that. But you have to now come over and run an IBM Linux
| initiative. And I said to Sam, okay, we were pretty much
| done with our internet strategy. So I was no longer
| needed to run the Internet division And I said to Sam,
| when do you want to announce it? And Sam said, how about
| now? And I said Sam. It's the Christmas holidays. Maybe
| we should wait until the new year. And in the second week
| of January of 2000, we made a major announcement saying
| that IBM would embrace Linux across all of these
| offerings. And in fact, later that month in January of
| 2000, I gave a keynote at LinuxWorld, which was taking
| place in the Javits Center in New York City, about IBM's
| Linux initiative.
|
| "At some level, the rest is history."
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| I was mixing up where the big multiprocessor changes that
| went into the 2.5 series in that 2000-2005 era came from.
|
| I was thinking of the the basic kernel preemption stuff
| and sched_setaffinity syscall + userspace plumbing like
| taskset that is _extremely_ consequential on little
| multicore/SMT machines, but the prominent name on a lot
| of that was Robert Love and he was at MontaVista at the
| time.
|
| The Dynix parts that arrived via IBM were, as you say,
| mostly NUMA and RCU stuff based on Paul McKenney's work,
| which also went in in the same major overhaul during the
| 2.5 series but weren't quite so immediately consequential
| to smaller systems.
|
| I hadn't heard that anecdote, but that is a neat tale of
| IBM using their gravitas at the time to legitimize Linux.
| jabl wrote:
| SGI also did a lot of scalability work in that time
| frame, as part of their migration from MIPS+Irix to
| Itanium+Linux. In the end they got Linux working on IIRC
| up to 4096 processors.
| jamiesonbecker wrote:
| And who can forget "peace, love, Linux" ;)
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-gets-100000-fine-for-
| peace...
| ghaff wrote:
| Or the "prodigy" series of TV ads that were pitched for
| CEOs and Prime Ministers according to the then-head of
| IBM advertising.
| kermatt wrote:
| Many startups can only dream of being as long and
| influential as IBM _was_.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Champion in patents per year in tech, Red-Hat, 2nd major
| Java implementation, one of the few vendors in quantum
| computing.
|
| That alone looks quite alright for a dying company.
| StillBored wrote:
| Except roll the clock back a bit and your would have been
| talking about Lotus, Machine Learning, and Unix/PowerPC.
|
| And we see what IBM has done with leadership in those
| areas, as well as a long line of other areas where they
| somehow managed to turn themselves into a 3rd rate
| competitor despite being in the right place at the right
| time.
|
| So, you have to ask yourself, for example how its
| possible that people are falling over themselves to build
| a RISCv ecosystem from the ground up, when openpower has
| been around for a decade now, and IBMs been looking for
| partners there since the original AIM alliance.
| throwaway12245 wrote:
| IBM bought Lotus 1-2-3. Looks like the same playbook.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Yes.
|
| They bought it for Notes, Notes was good before IBM purchased
| it, rel 4 was pretty good. New Releases it got worse and
| worse. They finally dumped it I think two years ago and sold
| it to another company.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > I don't understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat.
|
| IBM is doing the thing IBM knows how to do, which is have their
| internal politics, honed over a century or so, dictate the
| customer experience.
| kermatt wrote:
| > I was under the impression they were profitable prior to the
| acquisition so I'm not sure why they're squeezing so hard and
| ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.
|
| Some growth metric that can't be realized quick enough through
| innovation (new products or services), so the only recourse is
| to cut costs or get more revenue from existing products without
| improving them.
| windexh8er wrote:
| > I don't understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat.
|
| And this is yet another part of the reason why I don't
| understand the big push for RedHat specific tooling. Podman
| comes up a lot. But, just like with everything RHEL it seems as
| though RedHat / IBM wants to be the Apple of Linux. I'm not a
| fan of that. I also don't believe IBM is a good steward of OSS
| based on how I've seen them try to sell it in the enterprise.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| > I don't understand the big push for RedHat specific tooling
|
| I'd wager it is driven by RH simply being "least worst" of
| the options which can be relied on to stick around long
| enough for enterprise users.
|
| Canonical are doing their best to screw the pooch with snap
| and similar nonsense, leaving the only other option being
| cobbling together a collection of tools from fly-by-night
| small projects - which might go full unicorn-wannabe and
| adopt an open-core SaaS model any second.
| mjevans wrote:
| Debian? Maybe SUSE?
|
| Offhand I don't know enterprise level support for any of
| them, but I expect 'support' solutions are offered for all
| of them, even if not first party as an outside source.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| SUSE is the other one I thought about mentioning - but I
| have only really seen it used with SAP.
|
| A big part of the problem is ISVs refusing to test their
| software on more than just RH - which is not in itself a
| totally unreasonable position - but it does now give IBM
| too much clout.
| adql wrote:
| The same game they play with their main customers, make sure
| they will have more and more problems leaving.
| passterby wrote:
| [dead]
| a_subsystem wrote:
| IBM is slowly ruining everything they produce. Their systems
| are incredibly secure because it's extremely difficult to even
| run them normally as an operator, much less hack in. The
| byzantine/circular documentation and downloads pages on their
| site are woefully inadequate in enabling developers. Web
| searches reveal little information if you have a problem, as
| not many people run these systems. You generally have to pay
| stunning amounts to 3rd party professionals to manage your
| platform for even what should be relatively simple things like
| patching (PTFs), OS updates, and language upgrades. They will
| balk if you tell them they have bugs in their systems unless
| you can produce code yourself pinpointing the problem. They
| aren't interested in working with schools/universities to train
| young people to create fresh workers knowledgeable on their
| systems. Seems like they are milking the company and coasting
| until it expires.
| [deleted]
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| When I think of ibm, I think of how my wife had to attend
| special training on how to get paid at her government job due
| to how unreliable and chaotic the phoenix payroll system is.
| How it's sometimes like a part time job sorting through it,
| and how they are all given time each month as needed to spend
| days on the phone trying to get somebody to manually fix
| issues that come up
|
| > By July 2018, Phoenix has caused pay problems to close to
| 80 percent of the federal government's 290,000 public
| servants through underpayments, over-payments, and non-
| payments.
|
| > Instead of saving $70 million a year as planned, the report
| said that the cost to taxpayers to fix Phoenix's problems
| could reach a total of $2.2 billion by 2023
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system
| a_subsystem wrote:
| Maybe it's still going through the turning into ashes part.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| IBM has known how to play vendor lock-in and death by a
| thousand related products since before computers could fetch
| instructions from memory, when most of the world still
| thought just shipping what their customers need was where
| it's at. (Evidently--if unfortunately for my worldview--that
| doesn't contradict there being a lot of very good engineers
| there.) They may be dying a slow death, I don't know for sure
| but I can imagine that, but just making their stuff worse for
| business reasons is not by itself a symptom of that--it's
| simply part of their normal lifecycle.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| I heard from a former employee at IBM that management has
| been offended the media used FAANG to describe big tech,
| because they are delusional and still think they are relevant
| enough to be big tech...
| krylon wrote:
| The slightly, but not too much, sad part is that if they
| had played their cards right, IBM could be a lot more
| relevant today than it is. Some aspects of their tech still
| are quite impressive and unmatched by offerings in the open
| systems space.
|
| But the profit margins on their mainframe business are
| (last I heard anything about it) _really_ juicy, and in
| today 's business world, that appears to incentivize IBM
| management to go for the low hanging fruit of milking that
| while effectively cannibalizing their own market in the
| long run.
| BossingAround wrote:
| I don't get what's the big deal--essentially the only thing being
| lost is a pointer to commit that marks the difference between
| RHEL X.Y and X.Y+1..?
| marwatk wrote:
| RedHat spends a lot of time back-porting security updates to
| older software (e.g. RHEL7). Stream is always only the latest
| RHEL version, I believe.
|
| The whole point of RHEL is the long term support (the back-
| porting), which is what they're going to stop publishing.
| trufas wrote:
| CentOS 7 is supported and will be EOL at the same time as
| RHEL 7.
|
| Stream does have major versions so you can continue to use
| CentOS Stream 8 and get backports. You only lose anything if
| you're tied to some minor version of EL for some reason.
| pavon wrote:
| RHEL X.Y isn't a simple snapshot of CentOS Stream X at a
| specific point. It is a fork of CentOS Stream, with cherry-
| picks and so on. The specific details of what patches made it
| into RHEL and when and how to create reproducible builds are
| now only being provided to customers.
|
| In the past, customers have been able to redistribute the RHEL
| repos freely. I assume that will remain the case as long as
| CentOS Stream is open source.
|
| Edit: Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if IBM put some content
| in the RHEL repo that is under restrictive licenses that
| couldn't be redistributed just to complicate things, but all
| the important parts will remain open source, due to close ties
| to CentOS Stream and Fedora. Rocky/Alma already have to replace
| trademarks, and this wouldn't be much different, but they would
| have to obtain access to the repos as customers themselves, or
| have another customer strip the bad stuff out before throwing
| it over the fence. We'll have to see how hostile they want to
| be about it.
| mroche wrote:
| > _In the past, customers have been able to redistribute the
| RHEL repos freely. I assume that will remain the case as long
| as CentOS Stream is open source._
|
| There's a duality here. Yes, by the nature of the
| distribution, GPL, and licensing general, Red Hat cannot stop
| or prevent a customer from distributing RHEL packages and
| software to third parties. However, Red Hat reserves the
| right to terminate any existing subscriptions a customer may
| have as a result of their package distributing. IIRC, the
| Enterprise Agreement makes it pretty clear the services and
| offerings provided by the subscription are for the customer
| and the customer only. Going outside of that violates the
| subscription's terms, not the softwares' licenses, therefore
| allowing Red Hat to end business with said customer.
|
| For those concerned about the final year of CentOS 7: it will
| not be touched. It will continue to see source exports to
| git.centos.org as there is no parallel CentOS Stream 7
| platform. Also, git.centos.org is not EOL either because it
| is used by other groups than Red Hat, like CentOS Special
| Interest Groups.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| > Red Hat cannot stop or prevent a customer from
| distributing RHEL packages and software to third parties.
| However, Red Hat reserves the right to terminate any
| existing subscriptions a customer may have as a result of
| their package distributing.
|
| IANAL, but not so sure about that. From GPLv3:
|
| > 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, and you may not initiate litigation
| (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit)
| alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making,
| using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program
| or any portion of it.
|
| That sounds like a further restriction.
| vamega wrote:
| I don't think it is a further restriction on the rights
| you have. Those rights extend to the code you have, they
| are only terminating the business relationship going
| forward.
|
| Not a lawyer, so maybe someone else more knowledgeable
| about the space will expand on this.
|
| I imagine that RH/IBM has had lawyers look into this
| before the policy was announced.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| Linux is GPLv2, not Linux GPLv3. V2 does have a similar
| line in it:
|
| > You may not impose any further restrictions on the
| recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
|
| But I expect we'd have to see litigation to determine how
| broadly that can be interpreted.
|
| Is applying a consequence as a result of an action the
| same as restricting that action?
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| > Is applying a consequence as a result of an action the
| same as restricting that action?
|
| I mean, I don't disagree this needs to be tested in court
| if it hasn't, but what alternative ways of restriction do
| you think this is referring to? Do you expect it to only
| apply to the distributor physically restraining the
| licensee when attempting to redistribute it? Even the
| examples given in the license such as imposing fees are
| applying a consequence.
| pavon wrote:
| Yeah this is really pushing a gray area. Looking at it
| one way Red Hat is not obligated to do business with
| anyone, and if they stop doing business with a customer
| that customer still has all the rights granted to them by
| licenses of software they have already received, so in
| that sense Red Hat hasn't restricted the customer's
| rights in that software.
|
| However, on the other hand refusing to do business with
| someone in retaliation for exercising the rights granted
| by the licenses smells a lot like a restriction.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if IBM put some content
| in the RHEL repo that is under restrictive licenses that
| couldn't be redistributed just to complicate things, but all
| the important parts will remain open source, due to close
| ties to CentOS Stream and Fedora.
|
| I'm not so sure. They're obligated to release the GPL'd code,
| which of course covers Linux itself, but they're under no
| such obligation for the non-GPL'd software they include.
|
| They could license their RHEL-specific backport patches for
| non-GPL'd software such that they could _not_ be
| redistributed, and if that code gets merged into CentOS
| Stream it could just be dual licensed from that port forward
| (so Stream could stay open but RHEL would be locked down).
| [deleted]
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Looks like this will be the end of the road for RHEL based
| distros for me... I love using AlmaLinux, always super stable and
| everything just works (at least for what I use it). I guess the
| next best option will be SUSE?
| glutee wrote:
| Isn't 'everything just works' because it is a rebuild of RHEL
| sources? I don't know how else it claims to have 1:1 ABI
| compatibility witb RHEL otherwise?
| voidz wrote:
| NixOS.
| t0astbread wrote:
| Just as a word of warning (because I can't tell if this is
| satire): NixOS does not provide the same experience as a
| typical Red Hat or Debian-derived distro. It's a vastly
| different paradigm where your system (including its
| configuration, packages, etc.) consists (almost) entirely of
| the output of a program you write in a functional language.
|
| I think it's phenomenal and worth a try (or multiple; I
| didn't get it the first or second time but now I wouldn't
| want to go back to something else). But if you go in
| expecting a traditional Linux distro, you will be
| disappointed/confused.
| lost_tourist wrote:
| debian stable
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| I suppose SUSE makes a lot of sense. Until some time ago SUSE
| Linux Enterprise Server and openSUSE were related, but not
| exactly the same. That changed with Leap 15.3, since which
| openSUSE is now based on the same packages as SLE.
|
| I've been personally using Tumbleweed on my personal devices
| and it's been great. I've not had a single issue with stability
| and almost always gotten extremely recent versions of software.
| deceptionatd wrote:
| I've also had great experiences with Tumbleweed for the most
| part, but be careful using ZFS, as it frequently breaks with
| updates. Probably not something most people use, but it does
| force me to run Leap on my home server.
| fariszr wrote:
| My main issue with SUSE is 3rd party support. For example
| docker doesn't have an official repo for openSUSE/SUSE, so
| you are stuck with their outdated version or Podman, which is
| also outdated.
| adql wrote:
| And the IBMization of Red Hat continues
| chasil wrote:
| If Red Hat chooses not to perform their duties under the GPL,
| then any holder of copyright can require Red Hat to remove the
| owner's source packages from the commercial distribution.
|
| Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the source
| only to those who download the binary releases. As there are
| several avenues for free downloads (developer, 16 free licenses
| for small business, etc.), the source will be available by that
| route.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| I doubt most RHEL packages use the GPL. They were publishing
| full source out of goodness of their hearts (or maybe to
| conquer more market share and then potentially convert some of
| that into sales if you're more cynical).
| chasil wrote:
| The kernel, the compiler, the C library, and the init system
| have more sway than various packages under BSD, MIT, or other
| licensing.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| But then I'm laughing in OpenSSL.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| It was more about the second part of your comment. Even if
| they're forced into providing source for the few essential
| system libraries (plus the kernel), I don't see what it
| gives you without the rest of the system (most of which is
| under pushover licenses because we can't learn from our
| mistakes).
| pavon wrote:
| > Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the
| source only to those who download the binary releases.
|
| The article states clearly that they are doing this, no need to
| speculate.
| axus wrote:
| Currently you need a Red Hat account to download an ISO
| image, but you don't need to be a customer. IBM/Red Hat's
| announcement says that you need to be a customer or partner
| to download the source, so one could be able to download
| binary but refused the source.
|
| I also wonder how it will go if AWS provides RHEL for a
| server, and you ask them for the source.
| dralley wrote:
| >Red Hat could minimally perform this duty by providing the
| source only to those who download the binary releases. As there
| are several avenues for free downloads (developer, 16 free
| licenses for small business, etc.), the source will be
| available by that route.
|
| If you read the original announcement, this is exactly the case
|
| "For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain
| available via the Red Hat Customer Portal."
|
| In theory nothing prevents Rocky and Alma from buying a
| license, downloading the sources, and rebuilding the packages
| from there. The terms of service restrict only redistribution
| of binaries, not sources, and the GPL dictates that those would
| remain available.
| bonzini wrote:
| Rocky and Alma will just use CentOS Stream distgit sources on
| GitLab, just like Facebook does for their internal rebuild.
| BossingAround wrote:
| CentOS Stream source code is available.
| chasil wrote:
| CentOS stream is not RHEL, and that is what will be needed by
| Rocky, Alma, and Oracle.
|
| I don't think it will be much more difficult to obtain.
| bonzini wrote:
| IIUC (I work for Red Hat but not on how sources are
| distributed), there is absolutely no change in practice.
|
| CentOS Stream RPM sources are stored in GitLab therefore
| the whole history is available including past minor
| releases of RHEL. The only change is that the repositories
| will not be mirrored to git.centos.org.
| mroche wrote:
| Some clarification is needed here.
|
| git.centos.org (g.c.o) has been the historical canonical
| local for RHEL sources that have been exported out of Red
| Hat. On any given package you would see several branches,
| one for each major release and other organizational
| artifacts (e.g. c7, c8, c9, etc). Initially CentOS Stream
| 9 was exported to g.c.o as it wasn't a true upstream in
| the full sense of the word, but with CentOS Stream 9 that
| changed. c9s is developed in full on GitLab, and now c8s
| as well, while the final RHEL sources for those packages
| are still output to the c8 and c9 branches on g.c.o.
|
| What changes here is that Red Hat will no longer be
| exporting the c8 and c9 content to _any_ git platform (c7
| will continue as exists until its EOL). Customers can
| access sources as needed via the Customer Portal and CDN
| repositories, but sources in git form will not be
| publicly available for those artifacts. Moving forward,
| only c8s and c9s sources will be available, and g.c.o
| will not see any updates for EL8 and EL9.
|
| While most (I'd estimate at least 95%) of the platform
| will match in terms of NEVRA between versions available
| in CentOS Stream and their RHEL counterparts, there are
| some packages that will not due to the way they are
| developed.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope
| the Linux Foundation weighs in, but it seems to have been bought
| by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and many other large corps.
|
| All the drama in Linux with Wayland, RHEL sponsored init,
| snap/flatpak and now IBM/RHEL has been causing me to seriously
| evaluate the BSDs. I have been doing that for a couple of years.
|
| I would be fully on OpenBSD now, but the hardware I have is one
| of those with 2 videos, integrated and Nvidia. And that system
| does NOT allow me to disable the Nvidia Chip.
|
| When using Nvidia, that chip is correctly ignored by OpenBSD, but
| it gets so hot I can almost fry an egg on it. I have some
| mitigations in place, but it still gets rather hot, CPU and disk
| stays normal.
|
| The same is true with NetBSD, I have not tried FreeBSD yet.
|
| This RHEL thing may be the last straw, I may bite the bullet and
| see if the heat causes failures and if so evaluate this:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292831
|
| FWIW, I did add paste, a full cleaning. And this was purchased
| used rather cheaply 2 years ago. It is 9 years old now.
|
| Why am I bothered by this ? This seems to be a weak first step of
| companies making Linux go proprietary. Already we need many
| proprietary blobs.
|
| And funny, NASA just signed a contract with Rocky and CERN went
| with AlmaLinux,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968
| Sunspark wrote:
| The BSD with the most support for Nvidia is the one you never
| tried. Arguably it's the only BSD that is best suited for a
| desktop user. Also has better wifi support as well.
|
| We all want to love BSD, and it does get love in proprietary
| spaces like Netflix, Playstation and Apple, but those companies
| have the resources to actually create the pieces they need and
| do not have an obligation to share it. (E.g. MacOS is literally
| a certified UNIX, but the GUI layers are private.)
|
| For non-corporate users, in some ways it is like what Debian
| faced when they realized they really did need to start
| including wifi firmware into the install media, because people
| were like, why doesn't this connect to the router? What's wrong
| with this? This is actually something that I've run into
| personally.
|
| At the end of the day though, BSD isn't realistic as a desktop.
| OpenBSD disables stuff for security reasons which harms
| performance, so it wouldn't be first choice as a desktop.
| NetBSD is what Open forked off of many years ago and I recall
| NetBSD as one of those "let's try to make it install on
| anything" show and tell pieces, but not something you'd really
| be using for anything. FreeBSD was the only one that was
| reasonably usable. Dragonfly is another fork (this time off
| FreeBSD).
|
| All of them have to port the Linux video drivers, Linux
| desktops, etc.
|
| It's actually somewhat unusual that Linux is the one that won
| the battle for resources, because corporations hate sharing and
| being open.
| jzb wrote:
| "I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope
| the Linux Foundation weighs in"
|
| I'm curious what role you think the LF plays here, or what
| they'd do to prevent Red Hat from "getting away" with doing
| something that is entirely within Red Hat's rights to do.
|
| The Linux Foundation is a trade organization. It was created
| from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and
| Free Standards Group. The OSDL was funded by several large
| corporations - including IBM, Intel, HP, Fujitsu and others.
|
| LF wasn't "bought" by IBM and others. It was literally created
| by them. Granted, Microsoft is a newcomer (relatively
| speaking). But the LF is and always has been a trade
| organization that supports the interest of companies that want
| to do business with open source.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > I hope the Linux Foundation weighs in
|
| The LF who fought attempts to hold VMware accountable for
| alleged GPL breaches?
| jacooper wrote:
| What drama with Wayland or flatpak? Its what the community has
| decided, every distro except Ubuntu has adopted flatpak. And
| Wayland is the default for both KDE and Gnome.
| LostLocalMan wrote:
| I wonder what the impact will be to amazon linux
| gtirloni wrote:
| Amazon Linux 2023 is based on Fedora so they probably saw this
| coming.
|
| https://docs.aws.amazon.com/linux/al2023/ug/relationship-to-...
| fariszr wrote:
| Something worth mentioning, is that RHEL has a free Developer
| subscription, which includes 16 free dedicated devices.
|
| The only issue is that many cloud providers don't have RHEL as an
| OS option, so you can't use it on your average cheap VPS.
|
| That assumes you trust them not to do another rug pull (CentOS 8)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-06-21 23:02 UTC)