An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
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I can’t believe how many people fundamentally misunderstand the spirit behind the GPL.
It helps to consider “the software” as a single snapshot in time, with the GPL’s intention that the consumer may make their own fixes, rebuild, and redistribute. Check.
Remember: “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.” Selling open source software has always been explicitly allowed, as long as you make the source available to those who receive it. Check.
What the GPL does NOT provide is guaranteed access to maintenance and future versions of said software. Again, it applies to a snapshot, as delivered.
In a nutshell, the customer receives open source everything they FOR A PARTICULAR VERSION.
I see no problem — either in spirit or letter — in Redhat’s approach here.
What if you bought an android phone, and could ask them for the source code to the Linux kernel on it, but if they caught you sharing it online, they would not allow your phone to update to the latest Android version?
This is debatable. The GPL allow redistribution of a given version of the software without additional restriction. If the user receives that copy knowing in advance that redistribution will lead to retaliatory actions this can be treated as an additional restriction.
Ok, yes as far as I understand they are not breaking the GPL, but it’s still a d**k move as it leaves downsteam projects/distros in a mess of a situation. While technically allowed, I’m with Jeff on this one.
SFC thinks they are in violation of the GPL for what that’s worth.
It might come down to what is a restriction maybe. Support is not part of the GPL, so putting a restriction to close a users account might not be a violation, but it very well could be a violation.
The problem is that the GPL states:
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exercise of the rights granted herein.
Red Hat are arguing that they are free to punish customers from exercising their rights under the GPL, and that punishment does not constitute a “restriction”, even though its done specifically to discourage people from exercising those rights. Whether Red Hat have found a loophole is something for the courts to decide, but it’s clearly against the intention and spirit of the GPL.
That’s a fair point, and worthy of deliberation.
However, I would continue to argue that if Redhat does not restrict parties’ rights to the source code they’ve been given, then they’ve satisfied the GPL.
It is my understanding (at least initially) that the GPL was meant to solidify the end user’s rights to the software they have, so that they’re not left with an unfixable binary executable.
And again, there are no rights granted by the GPL for FUTURE versions.
The GPL requires that you do not put additional limits on a user’s rights to redistribute.
Saying “you have the right, but we’ll cut ties” isn’t really in keeping with the spirit of that.
I suspect, if it ever ended up in court, they’d agree yhat there’s no guarantee of access to future versions, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a shitty and cynical take that flies against what FOSS has traditionally stood for.
We can agree to disagree. “The Software” was delivered, source included. And you as end consumer are free to redistribute and maintain as you wish.
However, I cannot see any contract law judgement that would force continuation of a subscription model on the vendor (in perpetuity!) if they do not wish to remain under contract.
That was great! I mean the circumstances are not great but I like the video. It seems there’s a lot of talk about how big companies take over open source projects and ruin them, which is a good conversation.
Somehow I’d kind of not known who Jeff Geerling was until this. And damn, he does a good presentation. Succinct, very clear and gets his point across extremely well without too much heat. No way I could I do that!
I’ve been watching ol Jeff for quite some time. He’s so delightfully nerdy I love him
Ive only recently started to follow him, and yeah, hes awesome.
He really seems to know his stuff
I really hope this doesn’t affect ansible. I’ll be so fucking mad.
It’s crazy that we’re even considering that, yet we are. Redhat have become so unpredictably malicious, it’s really depressing.
“IBM won’t affect our culture” they said…
One could always fork it, though I like the name. I’m a LeGuin fan.
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Guess they really wanted to be the Reddit of Linux
Reddit Enterprise Linux
2019-07-09: The death knell of Red Hat
Honestly, I am not surprised. Red Hat’s parent company IBM is an absolute joke. Almost as bad as Oracle.
Honestly, I think they’re worse. Oracle have actually done less evil in the past few years compared to before, whilst IBM/Redhat seem to be revelling in causing disharmony and aggressive business tactics.
Don’t worry, Redhat was garbage anyway. It’s going to pale in comparison to Watson Enterprise Linux.
Yep
This said it all perfectly. Think I’ll check out more of his videos.
You should. He’s done very entertaining stuff around Raspberry Pis and other fun projects.
If you like raspberry pis, SBCs, or Linux you’re in for a decent time. Although he did get a bit of flack for his Eben Upton interview. Though I felta lot of that was overblown.
Damn, couldn’t have put it better even if I spent weeks trying to sum it down.
Truly the year of enshittification.
I’m so annoyed with this. We were using CentOS, which was effectively killed, then I did a lot of research and spent time moving everything over the AlmaLinux.
Having to now do it all again another time is so frustrating; the only pragmatic long-term option is to bite the bullet and get things working on Debian.
I’d just finished migrating around 70 Centos 6 machines to Centos 8, a month ahead of them killing the distro that was supposed to last until 2028. We went with Rocky, but the problem is the same as Alma’s.
Fortunately both companies seem to have pretty well developed plans for coping with this, and no doubt Oracle and Amazon distros will too, so no need to jump ship yet.
That said, we’re also considering a debian shaped future, at least in part. There’s absolutely no way we’ll sign up for Rhel accounts. Not because they’re expensive, but because decisions like this undermine our trust in them as a business partner.
Ooof, I feel ya. Good luck!
Debian is great. I use it and love it every day.
I agree, it’s my preferred distro and I run a couple of debian servers at home, and my personal laptop that I’m using now.
But work is all Centos and Rocky.
All of my servers for my LLC and at home are Debian. At my day job we use RHEL. I get to upgrade ~400 servers to RHEL8/9.
I’ve created a todo item for myself at work; “See how easily we can switch new builds to debian in our automation and management systems”. Doesn’t hurt to be flexible.
Yea, we’re just starting a EL7 to Alma 9 migration. Kind of not looking forward to having to throw out all that work and try and migrate somewhere else if the rebuilds become impossible to make in the next few months or even few years. And if this doesn’t work, I don’t see why they don’t try something else in 2 years again, so I’m far less sanguine than I was back with them ending CENTOS.
It is a worry, isn’t it? I built two more Rocky 9 servers today and it certainly would be a major faff if Rocky went away. However, I have a lot of faith in them, and I also respect Alma. Both are strong, well run organisations with a lot of clever people working together for the benefit of the community. I think we’ll be fine, even if the details have to change a little bit.
We certainly won’t be trusting Redhat in any way though, but we’re not big enough to be useful to them. They’ve proved they have complete disdain for the foss community they depend upon, and showing ones colours like that is not going to help their bottom line. It’s a shame.
Look in to Rocky Linux. It was started by the original developer of CentOS the day Red Hat announced that CentOS would be moving upstream of RHEL. They’ve already put out an announcement saying that it’s essentially going to be business as usual for them.
Thanks tool.
From what I understand, Rocky and Alma are essentially the same and so I found it difficult to decide between the two when moving from CentOS. Whatever happens now, will apply to both.
The writing is on the wall and it’s similar to Twitter and Reddit: they wanted to kill CentOS as it was, weren’t expecting the community to come back with Rocky and Alma, so now they’re trying to kill those too. The above video posits a scenario where Oracle’s legal team help the little guys by going to battle with IBM, but I don’t see it.
At this point, I don’t think it’s smart to go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over, but then again I’d be very happy to see the little guys succeed.
Gotcha. I understand your opinion, but they seem pretty confident about their ability to continue to deliver.
And also, never get into bed with Oracle. I quit a job once when they started seriously sniffing Oracle’s panties. Oracle has hostages, not customers.
ORACLE - Not Even Once
I dont understand how redhat is going to police this policy of “we’ll keep source code open to paying customers, but reserve the right to cancel a customer that shares said source”.
Toss in GUID’s or randomly place identity files to anyone that downloads the RHEL source hoping they get accidentally published as an identifying attribute if someone does decide to publish it elsewhere.
And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out…
They could try that but I suspect it would be rather easy to find anomalies like that. These are ultimately patches to an upstream and already open-source project, so one can just diff the RHEL version with the release it’s based on and quickly notice that random GUID in the sources or random spaces/indentation. Or have multiple sources leak the code independently, and then you can diff them all between eachother to verify if you got exactly the same code or if they injected something sneaky to track it, and remove it.
Lots of companies in enterprise also want to host their own mirror because the servers are airgapped, so they can’t even track who downloaded all the sources because many companies will in fact do that. And serving slightly modified but still signed packages sounds like it would be rather computationally expensive to do on the fly, so they can’t exactly add tracking built into the packages of the repos either. And again easy to detect with basic checksumming of the files.
I don’t think that many companies have their shit together well enough to mirror the source code, besides the RHEL repos aren’t small, so that’ll cost.
The companies I’ve helped either had a minimalist mirror to reduce the surface area of what was installable or to save on cost.
It’s possible that a few enterprises do a full mirror of all RHEL sources, but i doubt it’s many
I don’t know, I’ve worked in Debian/Ubuntu companies mostly. Last two had thousands of servers and both had an apt-mirror custom repo including the deb-src ones. Otherwise we just get ourselves banned from the official mirrors when thousands of VMs pull updates from the same NAT IP.
Not sure how that works exactly on the RHEL side, maybe it’s not nearly as easy or common to do that.
Unenforceable for individual users, maybe. But the distros that depended upon it will need to be open and honest about their sources so cannot do that. Users trust distros because of transparency.
This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.
I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don’t see why he can’t just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.
doesn’t Fedora drift fairly well ahead of RHEL with new major releases of components from upstream with every release? Especially with the kernels getting so far out of sync with between the two.
Yeah, but that is Red Hat’s problem then, no?
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As far as kernels go, I wonder if it is at all practical to do what Arch does and provide a linux-lts package. Maybe they do and I am simply not aware of it. I haven’t used Fedora in a while.
Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)
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v
CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
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v
RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
You can absolutely run important services on Fedora server edition. Most of the stuff in containerized anyways, so having a more up to date version of the base system is actually an advantage.
It is really only those large corps with massive closed source lagacy applications and loads of compliance regulation that need a stale but long term supported distribution like RHEL.
Oracle really does eat Red Hat lunch. Oracle practically recommends using Oracle Linux to their own customers. After paying a lot of money to Oracle, you probably aren’t thrilled to pay for yet another expensive license and just install oracle linux.
Wait, I only knew this name from good Ansible stuff. I had no idea he created great videos too!
I am surprised it has taken IBM this long to begin poisoning the waters…
