Maybe you should read the rest of my comments in this post.
You mean enterprise features mostly developed by the community under the GPL?
Enterprise features like the update management server to keep a fleet of thousands of machines patched with only security updates. Infrastructure like geo-located mirrors of the update repositories (not volunteer mirrors like universities around the world mirroring kernel.org and centos.org and eclipse.org etc). Support service like on-call staff to pick up the phone whenever you call. Those things cost money to provide. If you know of a distribution which provides all that for free, please let me know. If you need that level of support, pay for it instead of trying to find a freebie around it.
Why shouldn’t they be free?
I assume you like to be paid for your work. You might be surprised to learn that revenues from that commercial support pay for the free stuff.
Red Hat is not owed our money just because they’re a business, they however do owe the community strict adherence to the GPL and if they’re not downright violating it here, they are most certainly trying to do an end-run around it.
I agree with you, and everyone else who thinks I need to be told this. Which is why I’ve been advocating in this thread for users to drop RedHat like I did 20ish years ago when they first replaced their free desktop with RedHat Enterprise. And further to move away from source-rebuild distributions because RedHat has clearly stated that they see these users as lost revenue and are taking these actions as a way to “claim” those customers by removing the options. And I certainly wouldn’t pay RedHat after shitting on at least the spirit of the GPL (and I’ll be happy if someone sues them successfully to set a precedent about the letter of the GPL).
It seems that you, and many other corpo-apologists, have been brainwashed into a commercial software mode of thinking where you get the basic software for free, and then pay for extra features. Your “price tiers” remark certainly indicates that you don’t really understand what open source software is about.
I’m so apologetic to these corporations that I’m literally commenting in here to stop buying from them! Such an apologist! When RedHat killed CentOS, I recommended at my office that we switch all CentOS usage to Ubuntu. When they announced this last move of closing the RHEL source to non-customers and the user agreements that they’ll terminate your contract if you distribute the sources, I recommended we don’t even consider a source rebuild distribution either, because I don’t want us to be caught with having to transition to another distribution if RedHat finds a way to kill off the source for UBI to non-customers (how Rocky is planning to stay compatible as a source-rebuild distribution). And it seems Canonical is killing their free distribution too, for organizations of more than 5, so I have to reconsider Ubuntu now (which sucks because WSL was really helping my case to use Ubuntu) Maybe now that Alma is moving away from the RHEL source rebuild model I can recommend Alma, maybe can get a WSL package of Alma. If the other distributions stop caring about RHEL compatibility, then RHEL will cease to be the de facto standard. And we can all rejoice. Seriously why would anyone want to sell a product they built on RHEL now. If they have to redistribute a library they got from RHEL, then they are faced with either being in violation of GPL or losing access to security updates from RHEL (meaning they’ll be exposing their own customers to security risks). It’s a legal lose-lose to be a RHEL customer now.
As for support infrastructure: nobody is expecting Red Hat to give tech support to AlmaLinux and RockyLinux users.
Fucking duh. I never implied that. I said if you’re trying to make use of enterprise features that cost money to provide, you should pay for them. I personally get by just fine with support from GitHub issues/discussions, Gitter/Slack channels, IRC, and Usenet.
Maybe you should read the rest of my comments in this post.
Enterprise features like the update management server to keep a fleet of thousands of machines patched with only security updates. Infrastructure like geo-located mirrors of the update repositories (not volunteer mirrors like universities around the world mirroring kernel.org and centos.org and eclipse.org etc). Support service like on-call staff to pick up the phone whenever you call. Those things cost money to provide. If you know of a distribution which provides all that for free, please let me know. If you need that level of support, pay for it instead of trying to find a freebie around it.
I assume you like to be paid for your work. You might be surprised to learn that revenues from that commercial support pay for the free stuff.
I agree with you, and everyone else who thinks I need to be told this. Which is why I’ve been advocating in this thread for users to drop RedHat like I did 20ish years ago when they first replaced their free desktop with RedHat Enterprise. And further to move away from source-rebuild distributions because RedHat has clearly stated that they see these users as lost revenue and are taking these actions as a way to “claim” those customers by removing the options. And I certainly wouldn’t pay RedHat after shitting on at least the spirit of the GPL (and I’ll be happy if someone sues them successfully to set a precedent about the letter of the GPL).
I’m so apologetic to these corporations that I’m literally commenting in here to stop buying from them! Such an apologist! When RedHat killed CentOS, I recommended at my office that we switch all CentOS usage to Ubuntu. When they announced this last move of closing the RHEL source to non-customers and the user agreements that they’ll terminate your contract if you distribute the sources, I recommended we don’t even consider a source rebuild distribution either, because I don’t want us to be caught with having to transition to another distribution if RedHat finds a way to kill off the source for UBI to non-customers (how Rocky is planning to stay compatible as a source-rebuild distribution). And it seems Canonical is killing their free distribution too, for organizations of more than 5, so I have to reconsider Ubuntu now (which sucks because WSL was really helping my case to use Ubuntu) Maybe now that Alma is moving away from the RHEL source rebuild model I can recommend Alma, maybe can get a WSL package of Alma. If the other distributions stop caring about RHEL compatibility, then RHEL will cease to be the de facto standard. And we can all rejoice. Seriously why would anyone want to sell a product they built on RHEL now. If they have to redistribute a library they got from RHEL, then they are faced with either being in violation of GPL or losing access to security updates from RHEL (meaning they’ll be exposing their own customers to security risks). It’s a legal lose-lose to be a RHEL customer now.
Fucking duh. I never implied that. I said if you’re trying to make use of enterprise features that cost money to provide, you should pay for them. I personally get by just fine with support from GitHub issues/discussions, Gitter/Slack channels, IRC, and Usenet.
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