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I'm actually with Red Hat on this one. There are many other great distributions that you can use, such as Debian. People are just angry that they can't get an exact copy of a paid product and 10 years of support for free.

If there are non-profits and hobbyists who have been using one of the free derivatives, and this change causes problems for them, I feel sorry for them. But actual for profit companies could very well pay or use something else. If you want a similar system for free, you can use Fedora or CentOS Stream. And RHEL even gives you 16 free installations for non-commercial use. If you can't pay for RHEL and that 16 installations isn't enough, you most likely don't actually need it. So many companies rely on free labor of others in the form of FOSS, and they seem to be angry about the idea that they would actually have to make a contribution.

RHEL also isn't just stealing software others wrote, they are a big contributor to many of the projects that RHEL is built upon.

Besides, FSF/GNU never said that you can't charge money for FOSS or that the source code must be published for anyone in some git repository. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

I've been watching this "crisis" unfold since the original announcement from Red Hat and I think most people are. Not giving Red Hat carte blanche here but fundamentally they are one of the largest contributors to open source, they're not violating the GPL (yet), and they're unhappy with Oracle and VC funded rebuilders using Red Hat's brand value for a free ride. Anyone with a foot in the business world at least kind of understands their position.

What seems to have happened is "influencers," including many who have no skin in the game and shallow takes, have seen an opportunity in this topic to make a few bucks by churning out populist clickbait. It's a discussion about business and licensing which has been perverted into a culture war. As usual all the nuance is lost and the loudest personalities have ended up dominating. /barf

I'd view it more similarly to the whole Reddit fiasco.

There is a valid problem. The business has tried to solve that immediate problem without worrying about the knock on.

In this case blocking large funded competitors ripping off your work is valid. The way they've approached it has cut off a large number of valid use cases that have arguably driven adoption of RHEL in the first place.

In Reddits case for profit firms were hammering APIs and costing Reddit significant amounts. 3rd party apps also cut off ad revenue. A flat high fee cuts off those 3rd party apps entirely when your own product has significant deficiencies it upsets your most valuable users (contributors and mods).

In both cases there was potential for a more nuanced change that works for both sides.

One of the biggest problems with open source, is no one wants to pay for it. It is time to charge for great work and people need to stop expecting excellent software being delivered to their doorstep for free. The whole idea behind open source is knowledge sharing, not free work.
It's especially funny when some people complaining about this probably make 200k a year in silicon valley, then think that someone else should work for free to supply their company with software that they can use to make a profit.
Same here, doubling down with Red-Hat on this.

Those that don't want to pay have lots of options on Distrowatch.

Even if they want an Enterprise RPM Linux, why not SUSE?

Red Hat share everything they do, the entitlement stinks.

> Besides, FSF/GNU never said that you can't charge money for FOSS or that the source code must be published for anyone in some git repository.

The issue is, IMO, that they are saying they are terminating access to those publishing those sources. I don’t know if that goes against the letter of the GPL (IANAL), but I’d say it certainly goes against the spirit, they are denying their users a freedom to publish those sources, in a way.

The source code requirements of licenses like GPL is fulfilled if a person who receives a component can request e.g. a tarball of the source used to build the version of the component they had received, in such a state that you can reproduce the component.

Only those whom the component was distributed to can make this demand (although GPL lets this individual distribute the source afterwards), and only for that specific source revision.

No, I don't think it is against GPL, certainly not the letter, and not even the spirit. GPL gives you source. GPL does not give you stream of updates.
> And RHEL even gives you 16 free installations for non-commercial use.

Actually, you can use them for commercial production purposes too. It's just a company can't use them, as they are bound to an individual.

So it's more accurate to say it's for "personal use", whatever use that may be.

The stupid thing is those companies using RHEL have been relying on people being able to learn those systems on the free derivatives. So has Red hat.
You can still learn it for free with the developer subscription or CentOS Stream. A company building it's entire infrastructure with the free derivatives isn't "learning" anymore.
Agreed. Red Hat is simply doing what grsecurity did in 2017. It is legal and does not violate any license.

https://lwn.net/Articles/721848/

One big difference is that the sources are still provided. Only the "tagging" when a release happens is not.
> It is legal and does not violate any license.

That's debatable: https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c...

I like this bit

> Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, study and change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.

if one user bought a copy, the license allows them (encourages them even) to redistribute it however they see fit, including say selling it for one cent less than the original, or simply giving it away for free. All the license requires is a single seminal user, and from that point onwards, “free as in free beer” is enabled by “free as in free speech.”

What a weird cosmology that leads to - you create a product, which everyone wants, and you carefully evaluate what the maximum price you can receive for it is - which is paid to you, by the luckiest person alive, who in turn distributes it to absolutely everyone for free, for the good of all.

This is feeling real worldbuildy.

Yes, someone can buy RHEL, request the source, and then share it away. And they can do nothing about it.

However, it doesn't mean that Red Hat is required to keep doing business with them, or that they are automatically entitled to receive all future updates.

As I said, GNU never said that the source code must be downloadable by anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, from some public repository. It would be a completely valid business to sell binaries and then only provide the source code on request. This of course does not fit some people's idea of what free software is about.

There are of course a lot of ways that people can use to obtain RHEL source code even from now on, but I think that some people underestimate how much friction this can cause for the downstream derivatives.

Wow, another blog post on the same two changes everyone else has been talking about for two weeks, rehashing the exact same arguments.

I genuinely cannot think of a company that contributes more to open-source projects than Red Hat. They to do this through hiring hundreds of talented engineers and adhering to an incredibly generous upstream-first policy, where most of the work they do gets made available for everyone else. No matter what Linux distribution you use, you are running a huge amount of code written by Red Hat.

Unfortunately, because we don’t live in a utopia, they need to be able to pay their engineers to do this work, and clones that simply redistribute their packages pose a serious threat to their ability to do this. Previously, Red Hat went out of their way to make the exact RHEL sources available to these clones. Now, Red Hat is still publishing all the code they write through Stream, but they do not have a specific repo for the exact RHEL patch set. I don’t see how this isn’t completely reasonable.

If you led a company making a product, and were responsible for thousands of employees, and some other company simply took that product and repackaged it, released it for free, while (in the case of Rocky and Oracle) running ads to compete with you in the process, are you telling me you would go out of your way to publish the exact patchsets to a special repository to make it as easy as possible for them to do this?

Yes.

It would be giving customers insurance. customers made redhat huge. Free software with many vendors is insurance. Redhat was known to go the distance for customers, which also got some critics from some mantainers, but as a customer, what more could I want than that? They deliver, and give me the guarantee that if I’m not happy i can go to Rocky or Oracle and see if they are any better.

Do you think you could get better customer focus than a company like this?

But now this changes things. People are seeing this as “gpl rights” or “free loaders”, but it’s more like a social network shitting on its users because its market is set. Or any other company trying to get bigger lock in rather than providing better products/service.

This is the typical big mistake of seeing uses without revenue and having the hubris to believe those are dollars lost.

RH presumably has access to far more detailed statistics on usage and adoption of CentOS and RHEL than we do. Many of the execs at RH have been at the company for decades, and so will have been observing these statistics over the years and through various transition periods.

I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.

Redhat was actually really profitable, one of the reasons it was bought out.

Unlike most startups, and darlings like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, and the like, Redhat actually makes loads of money. So please try to count as many software companies are more profitable than Redhat.

Redhat saw “freeloaders” and wanted a piece of that pie. Terrible mistake.

Redhat says those distributions don’t really do much, they are not completely wrong, but they do one thing that helps redhat, they expand their market. Because of a lot more companies using “RHEL compatible” distros, lots of software, (specially in areas with more regulation, or very specialized domains, etc) simply target those, this makes Redhat a very good option even if you can get some build from elsewhere, or Amazon/Oracle copies of those.

It also provides a safety net/insurance for anyone picking a Redhat contract. Can’t go much wrong.

Anyway, the issue is simple, it’s lack of vision, not only from redhat leadership but from plenty of other companies in today’s world, they are more concerned with “capturing” their small pond, instead of having a very small part of the ocean.

Ocean is scary, too big to be controlled, even if your small part is much bigger than the pond, it requires actual expertise, and to benefit from such a huge thing you have to actually look for opportunities. And worse, you have to allow others to also make profits from that huge ocean.

Much easier to just close a pond and rent seek. Lazy

I don’t understand why people keep claiming that the advantages of these clones (expanding the ecosystem) outweigh the disadvantages (lost revenue) to Red Hat. Surely, RH have access to far better statistics on this issue than we do, and they have obviously concluded that this is not the case.
First, There will never be data for everything. Nor is data analysis without errors.

Second, lost revenue implies they would actually be able to make money from such things, piracy studies imply otherwise, and so does my personal experience. Revenue is not theirs to be lost. It’s a bullshit argument.

Third: Conclusions from leadership are blinded by pressure and greed, so it’s easy to parrot BS like “lost revenue”. Harder to double down on things like “customer focus” whose impacts is harder to measure. And redhat was always known for costumer focus, the free software provides huge insurance to their customers. And they are throwing that all away for “lost revenue”

There’s no such thing as “lost revenue”. Ok, maybe if some natural disaster took away your goods that were already ordered.

> Surely, RH have access to far better statistics on this issue than we do, and they have obviously concluded that this is not the case.

Companies get things wrong and make bad decisions all the time.

What kind of "vision" includes "we'll let others take our work for free, undercut us on pricing" that doesn't end up in bankrupcy for the company?
Redhat. Did you miss their huge profits?

CDProjectRed, you could just copy your friend’s Witcher3 installer. It was a best seller.

Interesting choices because Redhat is trying to chase higher highs without understanding what brought them there, and so does bullshit like this, While CDproject TeamRed after witcher, also got so greedy, but in this case on employee number, that old employees left, army of juniors/newhires building their next and most ambitious game. It was a dumpster fire on release day, and under delivered on everything, with plenty of delays.

There’s also small businesses like sourcehut (but wamted to give 2 very different big ones), which its author wrote this: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...

Some big start ups like Grafana are growing, and unlike Mong and Elastic, actually uses a free software license, but i dunno if they are profitable yet.

What a bunch of...

Look, don't act like RHEL is the only distro in existence. There's also Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, and tons of other distros.

Even for boring old enterprise stuff there's Ubuntu LTS.

Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.

> Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.

It's an amazing idea - copying RH meant no work had to be put into actually supporting the Linux community and keeping all the profits. Massive margins were made.

It's just that the angry HNers think that RH should continue to just give things away to repackagers for free and let them profiteer off their work.

It's not even the only RPM Enterprise distro.
> But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.

RedHat's current business model is selling (via copying) the work of millions of other people, then refusing to adhere to the license terms they used to copy all of that work.

> Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.

Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors just the same - the "classic" and accepted FOSS monetization way was to provide paid support with SLAs for customers. This work cannot be copied by anyone else, just the business model - but that's ordinary business competition.

Want to hear alternate view points. Why is Red Hat obligated to release source code. They had done this in the past, for decades. They are trying something else now. Why hold them on the hook for this? Practically all companies use Linux and open source. Barely any contributes or keeps their source code open. For example, no hosting company I know has their code open. Practically no SaaS has code open (sure, you can give me 10 examples, but I can you 1 million examples in the contrary).
To start with, I totally sympathize with Red Hat on this one. The question is not whether Red Hat deserves to do this, but whether the _LICENSE_ allows them to do so.

> Why is Red Hat obligated to release source code

They are not obligated to release source code to the public. But they _are_ obligated to put no restrictions whatsoever on redistribution (100% clone or not).

From the GPL: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License."

Red Hat is basically saying "We understand that the GPL allows you to redistribute our product as is. But, if you do, we will terminate our relationship with you.". IMO that is no different than a company saying "Yes, you have a statutory right for refunds within 30 days. However, if you exercise it, we will not sell you any products in the future.". That counts as a (indirect) restriction in my book.

> Why is Red Hat obligated to release source code.

Because the GPL requires them to do so for their users. They are circumventing this by making anyone who re-publishes the source (allowed by the GPL) ex-users.

Because the terms of the GPL license prohibits added restrictions, therefore these new coercive retributive actions against code sharing (an explicit right of the user) is a violation of the GPL.
Because angry HNers who downvote you demand free (as in beer) software and are pissed that someone actually wants to pay their employees for Linux development.
Just a reminder: Red Hat is owned by IBM, though they say that this is an independent subsidiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
Everyone seems to have forgotten IBM acquired Red Hat. What did anyone think IBM was going to do, other than fsck it up in bad ways?

You know damn well if you know anything of the industry that nothing good was going to come of IBM acquiring anything or anyone.

Red Hat continually denies IBM had anything to do with this decision.
There are companies out there so done with Red Hat now they’re wholesale moving to a radically different distribution.
Care to name few?
So, two main questions that I still don't understand completely.

OpenSUSE is rpm-based. Does that mean that it will diverge or lag behind more?

Technically, access to source code isn't revoked, right? Someone could set up private git repository, extract and copy source files there, it is just pita, not impossible. So, the freeleecher business model is still very much possible, it is just you'll have updates later, or am I missing something?

RH's interpretation of GPL licensing in today's mature Linux market more than ever demonstrates lack of alignment of their incentives with their customer's and can be summarized as: let's introduce a thousand exclusive crap features on top of a POSIX core, then milk customers for support and ongoing maintenance. Yes RH pays most Linux devs (with SuSE a distant second, or at least it used to be like that), but their contributions are only monopolizing know-how, driving Linux further into the ground away from POSIX, and increase your dependency, a net negative. What's the point of GPL without choice?

Consider that original Unix was developed in a couple of months and its point was to be compact, minimal, and portable. Linux today is a product of rent seeking in an environment of increased profit expectations, tolerated by its original developers (approaching retirement) as a well-paid hobby, that much is clear looking at its 30 years of development time. What are the goals of Linux as a development project? The Linux desktop is not only stagnating but severely regressing. It has become unusable for me after 12 years, with its focus on RH "innovations" such as gnome 3.x/4.x, completely unnecessary containers, and wayland, while applications are lacking. A fscking joke compared to Mac OS. The server-side? A cloud OS benefitting only FAANG where RH also uses its muscle to drive Docker out of business who dared to provide alternatives (not that I'm a big fan of solutions to self-inflicted problems anyway). Android Linux? The largest known spyware vector in the world. It's time for Linux developers to take a deep look into the mirror.

On the plus side, RH's and Linux' demise means opportunities for the BSDs, for other Linux vendors such as SuSE, or entire new operating systems.

Interesting posts after said community actively took Red Hats work and resold it for their own pure profit with no investment. Making Red Hats business model untenable.

It seems like OSS Community loves to attack and eat their own - RH is one of the top Linux contributors across the board, while the profiteers did practically nothing for the community.

The rabid the attacks of freeloaders are quite intersting to see here on this site.

Redhat is profitable in such environment. This environment is not new, see CentOS.

> Making Red Hats business model untenable.

Uber business is untenable. Redhat is very profitable.

> The rabid the attacks of freeloaders

The rabid attacks of people and customers that got their promises broken. Even Dante claimed that the last circle of hell is for the ones that break trust. So, nothing really unexpected is happening here.