I want to be clear on my bias here: I firmly believe that open source would not be a ‘thing’ if it weren’t for Red Hat. Linus Torvalds himself once said (albeit 10 years ago) that the shares he received from Red Hat before their IPO was ‘his only big Linux payout’. I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that Red Hat has had a major significant positive impact on Open Source across the world.
This morning I listened to an excellent podcast called “Ask Noah” where he interviewed Red Hat’s Mike McGrath who has been active on the linux subreddit and other social media. It seems that Mike has been involved in the decision to restrict Red Hat’s sources on git.centos.org:
https://podcast.asknoahshow.com/343 (listen at ~20 mins)
It’s really worth a listen. Mike clearly lays out the work that Red Hat (I was surprised to find out that it is NOT the Rebuilders) does to debrand the Red Hat sources, why they’re pulling that back on those unbranded sources, and that they understand the ramifications of doing so. It’s also interesting that Mike is of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with doing a Rebuild, and he defends them by stating “that’s the cost of doing business”. Noah and Mike go into many of the nuances of the decision and again, it’s really worth listening to. Mike also talks about “bad faith” when dealing with the Rebuilders at 40:30, which I think explains Red Hat’s decision. I got the distinct feeling he’s bound by some ethical code so he won’t/can’t say too much though.
There’s also this discussion about Rocky Linux securing a contract with NASA:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968
that had a lot of internal discussion at my company this week, which given what’s just happened may shed some more light on Red Hat’s decision.
There are always two sides to every story but in this case there are three sides to this story.
On one side, you have Red Hat, a long time champion of open source software, that has poured billions of dollars into open source development, and which has 1000s of employees who not only on ‘company’ time but in their own time manage, develop, contribute, and create open source code. They have funded countless successful and unsuccessful projects that we all use.
Against Red Hat are two largely distinct groups. The first is the Rebuilders themselves, who Red Hat has claimed ‘don’t offer anything of value back to the community’. This is not meant to be a statement on the usefulness of the rebuilds (Rocky, Alma, Oracle, etc.) but rather a very directed statement on whether or not the rebuilders are providing bug report, feedback, and contributions to the packages that Red Hat has included in RHEL.
The second group, which stands somewhat behind the Rebuilders, are the Rebuild users. One could argue that the users are caught in the middle of Red Hat and the Rebuilders, however, I think it is better to look at them as being an equal ‘side’ in this discussion.
The Rebuild users are in a very unfortunate position: they’re about to lose access to a free product that they’ve come to depend on. They are, as expected, unhappy about Red Hat’s decision to stop providing access to RHEL sources. My next statement is callous, and I expect it to be read as such: You get what you paid for. That is not meant to indicate anyone is cheap, it’s just that you shouldn’t have expectations when you are using something for free.
Here’s the interesting part for me. As far as I can see, none of the users are jumping to the Rebuilder’s defence of Red Hat’s accusation that the Rebuilders provide nothing back to the community. And, as far as I can tell across various social media and news platforms’ comments sections, largely the user community AGREES with Red Hat’s position. Informed users – not all users – are using a RHEL Rebuild knowing that there is no benefit in doing so for the community.
I have yet to read a reply from the Rebuilders where they categorically deny that this is the case. And to me, that’s glaring and damning of the Rebuilders’ position. Even the ‘defenders’ (for lack of a better word) of the Rebuilders have yet to provide a response.
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I have one major quibble with your analysis. It is this: Redhat no longer exists as an organization. Redhat is merely a trademark of IBM. You can’t defend IBM’s actions based on Redhat’s history. That was a different company
One other thing I want to add: I’ve read a bunch of comments about how the Rebuilds were used in educational and scientific settings, and that there is a prohibitive cost for RHEL in those environments. After reading so many comments about it, I have to believe that Red Hat is going to make some modification to their Developer License program to allow more than 16 ‘seats’ for those use cases.
I don’t have any expectations of them doing this (but I also have no expectations to the contrary), but I think it would be a good move from Red Hat to make the official RHEL more available, as you suggest.
In another thread I compared the RHEL rebuilds to piracy, and in that vein one could quote Gabe Newell and say that piracy is a service problem – part of the reason Alma/Rocky/etc. exist is because there is a group of users who want to use RHEL but cannot afford it. Red Hat seems to believe that these users should be satisfied with CentOS Stream, and maybe most of them would be, if they only gave it a try. But making RHEL more widely accessible, both to paying users and developers, would probably be good too.
Yes, from what I’ve heard they are raising to just over 200 (iirc there was already an agreement for this but the caveat being the type of services the systems ran) which still doesn’t cover many educational and academic research scenarios. We’d only be covered about 30% and we operate a comparatively small environment.
First off your argument that red hat deserves to see returns on their investment. But restricting redistribution of “their” software is a direct violation of the GPL license that they agreed to by working with GPL software.
Not to mention that the reason rocky Linux exist is because red hat killed centos.
Ree Hat has stabbed the community in the twice with the help of IBM and greed. My only hope is Oracle sues them over this express GPL violation, or that IBM’s lawyers realize there will be trouble. In my opinion anyone at red hat that tries to justify this should be ignored.
Red Hat wants to inherit the hard work of millions of developers doing billions of hours of work, to take that common heritage built by three generations of people’s work, and take it away. To which I say, nuts.
Your colonial bullshit is not wanted here. You can’t just walk in and say “this is mine”.
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I have not listened to the podcast unfortunately.
Rebuilders are fine, and RedHat is fine to not spend the effort to debrand their source rpms. The problem is one of value. The value RedHat provides for some people is probably worth more than RedHat charges. The value RedHat provides to others is less than the effort it takes to renew a developer license once a year for 16 installs. The problem is that there are several who are ending support for RHEL because they fall into the latter group (notably Jeff Geerling for ansible roles). RHEL losing out on that support might be huge, might not, only time will tell.
My company runs thousands of centos VMs. We cannot exist if we have to license rhel. We’ve been working on switching to Alma. We may have to look elsewhere for a free distro that has robust SeLinux support.
Can’t you keep using CentOS stream? Isn’t it still a very stable distribution? Just slightly upstream of RHEL instead of downstream.
What’s the harm in doing a rebuild? Serious question. I simply don’t understand where the harm comes from. I would appreciate any insight. Thanks.
I don’t think there is anyone arguing that a Rebuild by itself is a problem. Given Mike’s comments in the podcast linked above, the problem is when one of those (or many of those) Rebuilders competed directly against Red Hat for a contract.
From the general feeling I get from reading many threads on this issue, the general consensus is that the community agrees that, specifically, this behavior by the Rebuilders is wrong.
Oh, I see. But what do you think of this translation:
“Company Foo makes TVs and is always working to make them better. They give them out for free with the hopes of making money installing them and providing guidance on how to use them, but someone starts Company Bar and installs them for cheaper and starts taking on installation jobs.”
Is this wrong? Isn’t this just the definition of an open market? Please let me know if I’m missing some kind of context. I hope that we can continue to discuss this respectfully.
I should say that I want any open source project with the motivation to write good software to have all of the funding they need to make that happen. I just don’t see how it can be justified in this instance when compared to any other market.
There is no problem with your scenario, and it’s spot on to the issue that Red Hat has raised.
However, the piece you’re missing is that the TVs come from Foo. They don’t have to give company Bar TVs to install. If company Bar doesn’t have TVs then what should they do? They have some choices: work with Foo or develop their own TV.
I don’t see how Company Foo can dictate that all other entities (customers, for example) can receive a free TV on their doorstep (since the code is open source) except for Company Bar. To make it map better to the situation, Company Bar would receive a shipment of free TVs, rebrand them, ship them out to customers, and install them.
“They don’t have to give Company Bar TVs to install.” So the GPL doesn’t require that Company Foo permit free access to the TVs? They could decide to not give out their TVs to anyone?
Also, what if I wanted to get my cousin a free TV but charge him a few bucks to install it? Is this only a problem at scale?
Here’s where your analogy falls apart. The TV isn’t being shipped to everyone. It’s being shipped (“rebuilt”) by Bar, and then installed by them. They’re free to do that but Foo is under no obligation to help them do it.
Within the analogy (as it compares to Redhat and the Rebuilders), how is Foo helping Bar? Isn’t Foo simply leaving the TVs outside the factory for people to come and pickup? A bunch of trucks branded “Bar” come by, pick them up, rebrand them, and take jobs to install them, jobs that Foo thought they were going to get? Isn’t Foo now requiring individual people to walk through a lockable door, sign their name, and grab a TV instead of just leaving them outside in a pile?
Yes, that kind of makes sense, but Foo was leaving the TVs outside because they thought that was the most expedient thing to do. It takes effort to move them outside, and Foo doesn’t want to do that anymore. So now Foo, as you point out, has moved the TVs inside where only paying customers can get them.
It seems that he is bother by how they rebuild it and then do not add or contribute any code and then sell support to the customer on REHL work which in my opinion its not okay and I will agree with RedHat.
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Irrespective of whether the rebuilders are shitty or not, RH is clearly trying to restrict GPL and expecting to get away with it because they can pay more for lawyers. If they believe that other people using their source is making money unfairly, change the licensing. You don’t get to keep GPL so that you get all the benefits, contributions and goodwill from the community for free and at the same time claim that people cannot excercise their GPL rights. They’re free to make everything they build by themselves closed source.
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I’m perfect happy with having a seperate licensing so that software they build is open source but has paid commercial licence. I just find this current move crappy.
I might be wrong but AFAIK the only other big company that’s contributing to Fedora is Facebook/Meta. If Oracle etc. were also contributing to Fedora, my gut feeling is that Red Hat would not be so pissed about rebuilding RHEL because RHEL would also be benefiting from Oracle’s Fedora contributions.
Thanks for a solid assessment of the situation and providing some sources 👍
Accusation that the Rebuilders provide nothing back to the community.
Actually, what Redhat are saying about rebuilders is that they “don’t add value” - and that’s for Redhat, NOT to the community which they patently do. That’s quite a badly twisted misquote there, friend.
Also, Redhat didn’t create open source software. They’re a big player, sure, but I remember writing and releasing my code back in the 80s and 90s when it was called Freeware and Public Domain and distributed on cassette tape.
The free as in freedom principle isn’t violated. GPL stands. So why all the rage? People call RedHat IBMified, what the hell does it even mean? Has IBM done anything to the community?
Really there is no principle being defended. People’s workflow isn’t even impacted as it stands, they just have to figure out new paths going forward.
Interesting points, but I’m not sure I agree with your last sentence. Clearly, users of the Rebuilds are going to be impacted and part of that impact is their workflow. They may have to switch distros or do some other juggling to continue forward.
GPL explicitly states you can’t have additional restrictions on redistributing the source. Arguably having a support contract that explicitly says you can redistribute the sources to GPL software seems problematic and a likely GPL violation. That is the problem.
I’m not an expert on the GPL and I’ll go out on a limb and assume you’re not either. But it certainly seems like experts have weighed in and have said what Red Hat is doing is valid under the license: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
[Edit: valid. Although I admit, like many others, I am uncomfortable from a ‘spirit’ of the license point of view.]
I read that same link and took it to mean maybe RedHat is violating the GPL. Only way to know for sure is to go to court, which involves risks to both sides. The more I’ve thought about it the more unsure I am.
I am uncomfortable with the direction they’ve taken and fear this will start up another round of open source license proliferation, but hope not. That has never been helpful for open source and only served to make business hesitant to use it.
Did RedHat add that restriction? GPL requires source to be distributed along with binary, but the distributor can still decide who to distribute things to. If the only way to access binary is through being a paying customer, I don’t see why RedHat can’t say only paying customers can get access to source.
What’s the GPL violation in that, or did I misunderstand RedHat’s new policy?
So the issue comes as if you redistribute then you are effectively removed as a customer. Not directly a GPL violation but in kind of bad taste.
Did RedHat say that? This is a pretty problematic statement so I would really love to see the exact text in which they set their position.
Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.
Jesus. Now I understand why Rocky Linux’s path forward looked a little cumbersome.
Thanks for helping me finding that text!
It is still futile, but thinking about it in this term really does leave a very bad taste. Like, I could respect them for saying “we gotta make money so we will only ship source to paying customers.” I can’t respect them for doing this dirty little trick that doesn’t actually work. Makes them look stupid.
It does seem that both Rocky and Alma could have done more to work with Red Hat though, such as recommend Red Hat as the enterprise support (rather than roll their own) and have a script to help convert Rocky or Alma to RHEL etc.
Although I do feel that Oracle are the worst of the players and possibly the main issue.
Interestingly the “workaround” Rocky has put into place is to spin up a RHEL based cloud image/container and grab the SRPMs from that. Cheeky but very legal in terms of the GPL.
From GPL 2.0: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.0.html
- Each time you redistribute the Library (or any work based on the Library), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute, link with or modify the Library subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
It has been reported that the support contract from RedHat says you can’t redistribute the source you receive as part of being a paid customer and they reserve the right to cancel your support contract. The above says you can restrict someone’s rights granted by the GPL. I’m not a lawyer, but lawyers who deal with open source say this might violate the GPL. I’ll defer to them, but wish I had saved some of the links I’ve been reading.
It has been reported that the support contract from RedHat says you can’t redistribute the source you receive as part of being a paid customer and they reserve the right to cancel your support contract.
Where is the report? I mean yeh if that’s what RedHat said then they have chosen the path of getting sued to oblivion, but that’s not what the initial argument is about, and that’s also not what Rocky’s new path forward indicates. (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocky-Linux-RHEL-Source-Access)
I responded to only one part:
GPL stands
GPL might be violated with what they are doing, so people are pissed about it all and calling RedHat names. When IBM bought RedHat some people predicted doom, the end of open source, that RedHat is now destroyed, etc., etc. Probably some of is those same people coming back out and yelling “TOLD YOU SO!”. They are just stirring the pot to make themselves feel better. The sky is not falling for open source, things are just changing. If the GPL is being violated it will be figured out and fixed, just might take awhile.
Unfortunately I didn’t save the links, like I really wish I had. Alma, Rocky, and Lemmy posts have linked to them. I’ve been reading up on this since last week as it could affect my job and I’ll need to provide my profession recommendations at some point. Right now my advice is to wait and see, but be prepared.
If I listen to that video will I, in fact, get a laptop for free? Inquiring minds wanna know.
So joke aside, I don’t see anything in that video that is a defence of the Rebuilders against the accusations made by Red Hat. Is there something I was supposed to get out of watching it?
Was Almalinux and Alpine charging customers for support in their builds?
I don’t think Mike McGrath called out any specific company but if you look at that ycombinator link it looks like the ‘offender’ was Rocky Linux. That is purely speculation on my part.
Well if thats the case thats really bad in my opinion , I might side with Redhat on this one.
Alpine is completely separate by RHEL by a country mile (hell, it doesn’t even use glibc). You’re probably thinking of Rocky
Nice post, and a good overview over why RedHat is doing what it’s doing.
Before reading this I wasn’t really feeling good about redhat and the stuff happening rn but now i’m able to understand the decision making and there’s still hope for me that redhat won’t turn into a shitshow in a couple years haha
Also working with RedHat in the past has been quite nice so it’s good that i don’t feel a slight hate against the company anymore.
Quite hard to solve the problem when everyone is so emotional
Thanks again for the very informative post!
