[HN Gopher] I was wrong - Jeff Geerling
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       I was wrong - Jeff Geerling
        
       Author : matricaria
       Score  : 44 points
       Date   : 2023-07-02 17:37 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
        
       | TimSchumann wrote:
       | Kudos to Jeff for being willing to issue a public correction like
       | this.
        
       | InvaderFizz wrote:
       | I'm personally happy about this whole situation. Not because I
       | agree with RH at all, but because it will accelerate the decline
       | of RHEL and the entire EL ecosystem and mean I have to support
       | those distros less in the future. (In a DevOps capacity, I'm not
       | a contributor.)
       | 
       | There is a lot of back and forth as to why RedHat is employing
       | this footgun now. It comes down to them feeling, in part, that
       | they are footing the development labor bill while rebuilders
       | (Oracle Linux, Rocky Linux, Alma Linux) reap the rewards and
       | undercut them on support contracts. The other part is enterprises
       | and SMB running thousands of CentOS/non-subscription EL variants
       | and having a token number of RHEL subscriptions to use for
       | support any time they get into trouble.
       | 
       | The real solution to the second problem is to explicitly forbid
       | it within the RHEL support contracts and enforce that. You are
       | either a RHEL shop or you are not. Make it a binary decision.
       | This weird tactic of trying to kill off the customer alternatives
       | is going to just kill off the EL ecosystem in the end. I know I
       | abandoned the EL ecosystem entirely when CentOS Stream became the
       | thing.
        
         | op00to wrote:
         | The second is not a concern at all. If there is an odor of
         | subscription abuse worth investigating, Red Hat's Subscription
         | Enforcment team will audit your systems. By signing the
         | enterprise agreement you give them permission to do so whenever
         | they want.
        
         | emptysongglass wrote:
         | I think Red Hat was fully in the right and that the internet
         | drama around their decision reeks of privilege. If you want the
         | sources, go get them, they're in Stream but Red Hat won't be
         | gift wrapping it for shops competing to offer support.
         | 
         | They've been, and continue to be, fantastic stewards of the
         | Linux ecosystem. I use many of their inventions today on my
         | Linux workstation and my experience would be decidedly worse
         | without. I am grateful for their continued pledge to OSS: it's
         | so much further ahead of any other big tech company with their
         | revenue, you'd think they were the loonies.
         | 
         | Most companies are doing a mix of OSS and closed source with
         | OSS the core that's dressed up in proprietary services you
         | can't do without. It's the Microsoft strategy, the Docker
         | strategy, the VMware strategy, and on and on and on until most
         | conference showfloors are ghastly apparitions of OSS fun with
         | the real party in their "special sauce".
         | 
         | When Red Hat buys a company's tech stack, they take the time to
         | open source all of its components.
         | 
         | We are truly living in the most insane times of privilege when
         | we blow up in the most petulant outrage for a company saying,
         | "here's the sources, _you_ prep it if you want to sell it ".
         | 
         | Rocky and AlmaLinux are not ethical paragons here, in the
         | least.
        
         | raincom wrote:
         | Redhat should have stopped rebuilders seven years ago, when
         | many large enterprises signed up site-wide contracts with
         | Oracle. Maybe, they want to keep the EL ecosystem grow, then
         | cut it off.
        
       | lowbloodsugar wrote:
       | >4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the
       | Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any
       | attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the
       | Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights
       | under this License.
       | 
       | I don't know the whole situation, but it sounds like RedHat has
       | created additional licensing terms for their GPL covered
       | software, which would fall foul of 4 above, meaning that RedHat
       | itself may not use any or distribute any of the GPL software it
       | currently distributes?
        
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       (page generated 2023-07-02 23:02 UTC)