Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?

Thanks, by reading "RHEL going closed source" first thing I thought is that would violate the GPL license, but the article you linked seems to indicate that's not the case.

CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?

undefined> u will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a pa

Their developer plan is free

I can't be the only one who has no real interest in dealing with their developer program just to support their outdated distro.

Is this a fork in the stream, then at this point?

It has me conflicted. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, we need projects like Alma and Rocky.

I'm happy for you. Some of us have commercial software that needs a RHEL like distro to run.

With all the new updates happening around all the Linux peripherals, I wouldnt like to stay behind for the next 2/3 years on Debian

So then Oracle just gets 1 dev account and pulls the source.

They didn't even go that far lol. There's still Red Hat branding all over the place in Oracle Linux.

Edit: spelling

I would never consider Fedora bleeding edge, but that being said, after the Red Hat lawyers forced the removal of H.264 I did end up hopping after 5 very great years with Fedora. If you're up for learning something new NixOS is a lot of fun.

You have to make up your own mind. Personally the association with IBM or Oracle would put me right off a distro. But you can find evil in all these big companies, so pick your poison.

You aren't the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I'm not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.

OpenSUSE maybe?

You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.

It's nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy...but usually some compromise is required.

Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.

Go NixOS man it's the one that finally convinced me to ditch windows entirely and stop hopping

I think it’s time to distro hop again

undefined> Given that, should I distro hop?

Yes

Do it, you coward! Hop with me!

Yes, distro hop.

Opensuse. If you're used to fedora the learning curve is minimal to make that switch. I used SuSE for years until their Gnome 3 implementation had some issues. I switched to fedora for a couple of years, then switched back to tumbleweed a couple years ago and have been on that happily since.

Great, I've got an alma ec2 instance with like 5 different services at work, I wanted to avoid changing it for at least a while =/

Well, users and contributors of Fedora might stop doing said things...

Rocky team seems to think it won’t matter! https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/

My thoughts exactly; One less distro to hop to.

From what I've read redistributing it is against the EULA. So you could share it once.

Rocky's reaction seems the same as Alma, current long-term solution is they don't know. A more businessly optimism in the post doesn't really make up for a clear technical plan going forward.

Doesn't Canonical hold the updates (also security ones) for days if you don't have the "pro" license?

To comply with GPL, RedHat simply has to provide source code to anyone they provide binaries to.

The source can be open, just not easy to access...send an email and in 30 days they provide it, they are not obligated to have everything available instantly as they do now or provide an infrastructure to make life easy for community projects.

They could also mix in proprietary code to make things more awkward afaik.

I'd bear in mind in-house made applications RH provide include systemd, wayland, pipewire & gnome....as long as your distro and use case don't depend on any of these, there's no need to worry.

It's a complete non-issue. Sensationalist headlines are so easy to make about this.

Anybody who has a FREE developer account can access the source code.

Fellow Fedora user here. I find this is a little concerning, but overall, I'm not too worried. Fedora is their test bed for stuff, although it is a very stable, well maintained test bed.

They won't say it, but the reason for this is 100% to kill downstream distros based on RHEL. They already effectively killed CentOS, the downstream distro they controlled, by moving it from downstream to upstream. With this change they're now coming for other downstream distros that they don't control, like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Upstream repos like Fedora (and CentOS once it changed to CentOS Stream) will not be affected... for now at least.

I think downstream repos are important to the ecosystem because they give the FOSS community contributors an easy way to test against RHEL-compatible binaries without being encumbered by an RHEL license. IBM seems pretty hellbent on ensuring that people won't be able to do this without agreeing with their license, and as soon as they achieve that I think they'll tighten the screws on their own licensing in ways that aren't to the benefit of anyone but IBM. It seems pretty obvious to me that IBM is making this change because they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms, and my guess is that their benefit will come at the community's expense. Yes, you can get a free (as in beer) developer account and test using that but now you have to register VMs, keep track of your number of registered systems, and you have to worry about possibly violating the not free (as in freedom) license that you have to agree to in order to access the Red Hat developer program. I think this change will be bad for RHEL in the long term, but time will tell.

Could you elaborate, I didn't get the reference.

Who do I have to let sit on my face to eradicate systemfail?

Technically none of the open source licenses require you to publish the source to everyone. They just require you to publish the source to the same people who get binaries from you.

it's unfortunate

Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.

To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn't undo everything else Red Hat does.

anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be.

Used to be?

The enshittification brought to you by IBM.

Great response to the discussion, as this 2012 article lays our their path many years ago. Lots of very economically valid reasons for changing, and it seems to have worked even if it is a shame to see. It makes me wonder if the changing economy is going to put more pressure on other favorites to monitize or fail. I say this given that volunteers are showing a decline so without people spending free time, then open-source software will face further challenges.

I don't want to digress too much, but I can't help but juxtapose the slow change and monetization RH has done very well as compared to the idiocy that Reddit is doing.

None in the personal desktop space. But RHEL is still considered industry best practice for web server deployments. Though I think that will change pretty soon.

Realistically, there is no massive advantage RHEL offers today. Historical it was the most stable and secure offering, but not anymore.

Reduce effort. They say there’s duplication between hosting RHEL and Centos, so they’ll just do Centos. Since Redhat becomes Centos anyway it seems neither here nor there.

Fedora is upstream. CentOS Stream is fed from that. RHEL is fed from that.

RHEL (Stable) <- CentOS Stream (Dev Test Bed, basically RHEL Next) <- Fedora (Cutting Edge)

I.e. the reality of linux since its inception?

I am worried about the impact it will have on clone distros like Alma linux.
The code can still be accessed from a free developer account, but I'm not sure about the implications it will have on the legalities and licences.

How has Cannonical support been recently? I used Ubuntu Server for a while, but never really needed to use my support contract, but my recollection is that it was fairly light.