2y ago

Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?

I’m curious about what you think on how it will affect the Linux community and distros (especially RHEL based distros like Fedora or Rocky).

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This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There's been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.
IMO that's the main driver behind this change: don't feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.
- So then Oracle just gets 1 dev account and pulls the source.
  
  This was my initial thought as well, but I imagine that would violate the terms of their subscription and Red Hat could just revoke their access going forward.
  
  I doubt it would legal to make that against the terms. It GPL code, Oracle is allowed to access it as they please.
  
  Very true for the GPL code, but Red Hat adds code that isn’t GPL to the distro. So your downstream distros would have to cherry pick that code out.
  
  They could still revoke access. The subscription probably says something like "we can revoke access for any reason". Most subscriptions do
  
  True, but what's stopping someone from uploading it anonymously? They have to share the code with customers, but that doesn't mean GPL doesn't apply to non-customers. Anyone working at these companies can download the source code and upload it online.
- They didn't even go that far lol. There's still Red Hat branding all over the place in Oracle Linux.
  
  Wait wait, Oracle took someone's stuff and did a lazy half-assed job of slapping Larry's name on it and then shipped it as a product they then sell seven-figure support contracts on?
  Well, I do declare.
  
  Oracle is the Trump of Linux.

135 comments