I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?
Red Hat announced that they are no longer providing updates to the downstream repo at git.centos.org and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back, essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".
To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the future.
This move by RH is not proprietary per se but it does indicate that they are growing hostile towards open source as a whole because it is affecting their business model, and since they were acquired by IBM, now they only really care about the revenue RHEL generates.
> essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".
I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro.
Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream.
On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats move, and I'm kinda on their side. Why is it that we're unhappy with Red Hat wanting to be paid for their work. You're getting all the open source benefits, if you don't like RHEL, or Red Hat that's fine, you can still benefit from their work, but you might want to pick a different distribution.
And I can see the point, people are upset that Red Hat would like to get pay and yet they expect to be able to profit from a SaaS platform they build on CentOS or Rocky Linux. For some unknown reason, Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.
> I've started to see 2023 as the Year of Freeloader Ousting
I'm ... oddly actually not opposed.
Things being "free" has distorted a lot of markets and ossified them--even in open source (See: GitHub, for example).
If things actually cost something, people can get paid to do them. In addition, things that cost real money don't have the same pressure to go for giant network effects in the hopes to get a lock-in monopoly. It also sidesteps the advertising pathologies.
> Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.
no, this is not the issue. The issue is that there is a megacorporation behind Red Hat which claimed they wouldn't affect any RH decisions and RH would be the good ol' Red Hat we always knew. And they have shown this to be false.
As you said it yourself, Red Hat has a legacy of contributing to open source and this recent move to somehow paywall access to the updated git repo is literally going against their own legacy.
As I see it, very little is actually moving "behind a paywall" (not trying be demening, just lacking a better term). Is systemd moving behind a paywall, no. Neither is Podman, Ansible, kernel patches, X11 patches and pretty much everything. It will all be available in CentOS stream and Fedora or upstreamed... But that's not what people want, they want RHEL, they just don't want the cost. Red Hats contributions was never about what went into RHEL, it is about what they upstream and maintain for the benefit of all distributions, which is a lot more than many believe.
The only thing you cannot get, without a subscription, is the source RPMs and the bit of tooling they need to build RHEL for their customers.
For what I've been hearing, and reading, this is a Red Hat decision, not an IBM decision. If we trust that or not, well... Still I'm not seeing how their contribution to open source isn't intact.
> and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back
Yet when commercial entities take code and don't contribute back, it is “just how things work”.
While I appreciate that RedHat has been a good player overall compared to many others, this comes across as the kid at school happy to throw icy snowballs at everyone else moaning because they got hit by return fire. How unfair of the open source world using open source licenses the same way the commercial world does.
They contributed because it's in their best interest, and they also took down a route with Systemd that went against the philosophy of nix systems. If we're not careful we'll end up losing control of Linux or large parts of it to profit seeking corporations that don't have the free and open software movement on their agenda at all.
I didn't at all say they had been perfect community members…
Also, they didn't exactly force systemd on everybody. Must as you might not like it (I'm not its biggest fan, but mainly due to being old and familiar with what came before). Other options are still commonly available if it offends you overly.
They chose a business model built on open source, and now they don't like it because they can't suck enough profit from it. Maybe they should just build their own proprietary operating system from scratch.
> […] essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".
Thereby creating an eco-system of RH-based systems that people learn about and get familiar with, so when it comes to going into production the natural default is to just purchase the official RHEL for those systems.
I think RH/IBM are being short-sited on how useful the free eco-system is.
This gets stated a lot, but I don't think it's actually true and RH has stated they don't see an actual benefit from this. Plus, they already have that ecosystem that isn't just free-version of RHEL with CentOS Stream and Fedora.
Note that the last paragraph is a supposition that is not rooted in reality. Red Hat is still doing upstream first development and is still mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision).
Even if that was the intended meaning, it's quite an extrapolation that Red Hat is "growing hostile towards open source as a whole", especially since people say that of Red Hat roughly every two years.
They abandoned CentOS, created CentOS Stream which has its own set of issues, mostly you need to send an email to the actual package maintainer to remind them to update the package. And now the package sources are held behind a subscription portal.
This is being hostile towards open source. And as someone else pointed out, the reason we're mad at Red Hat is because they were built because of the open source community, but now they've shown that since their acquisition by IBM, their goals have profoundly changed - they are now seeking to be more profitable, if it's by IBM's orders or not, we can only speculate, but there is a correlation here and it's not just a coincidence.
No, that's not being hostile towards open source. It's being indifferent towards people who want all your beer to be free.
Red Hat is contributing upstream of RHEL in three different ways (actual upstream, Fedora, CentOS Stream). Asking for even more is nothing but entitlement.
> there is a correlation here and it's not just a coincidence.
There is obviously a time correlation, but whether it's a coincidence or not you cannot know.
And the correlation becomes a lot more murky if you consider that Red Hae was allegedly causing lock-in or being hostile towards open source when Lennart started systemd (and for multiple other episodes in the systemd saga), when they stopped distributing the broken out patches of the RHEL kernel, when they acqui-hired CentOS, etc. And also people gave Red Hat 3 years of life when IBM announced the acquisition. Perhaps y'all need to tune your crystal ball...
> Red Hat is contributing upstream of RHEL in three different ways (actual upstream, Fedora, CentOS Stream). Asking for even more is nothing but entitlement.
I heard that a lot of RHEL packages are actually built from Fedora repos, which are maintained by voluntary contributors. Did Red Hat ask those maintainers if they are okay with providing the source for their RPMs behind a paywall? They didn't, and some Fedora maintainers even orphaned their packages as result of this change.
Like someone said, when big companies use free software and give nothing back, business as usual, but when it's the other way around suddenly it's unbelievable that people are taking products for free and not giving a single cent back to those same companies that exploit FLOSS!
I don't understand how can someone back Red Hat and find it totally okay that a company that was built on open source and essentially became what it is today because of the open source community that it created, is now giving a huge middle finger to that same community that made them what they are today.
> I heard that a lot of RHEL packages are actually built from Fedora repos, which are maintained by voluntary contributors
Most RHEL packages are at least co-maintained by paid Red Hat employees. Bring numbers please.
> is now giving a huge middle finger to that same community that made them what they are today
Oh, give me a break. Stop hiding behind open source and just admit that you want the free beer. You want all the beer to be free more precisely. While Red Hat is not only contributing a lot back to the community, probably more than any other company in existence, it's giving away not one but two distros.
They're completely within their rights as stated by the GPL to do this.
They're also placing themselves into a niche; not sure if they care. Aside from production RHEL installs using the clones and not making them money, they're also trying to prevent people from running their distro for free to learn it. That will raise the price of RHEL admins, certified or not. And maybe reduce even paid installs.
That's their problem IMO. What I really don't like them for is supporting Poettering. Only yesterday I had to disable parts of systemd because it insisted on using dhcp on a network card I wanted a static IP on.
