Linux @lemmy.ml

2y ago

Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?

www.jeffgeerling.com Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? | Jeff Geerling

120 comments

Not surprised. A for-profit corporation wanting more money. Especially as we enroach further into late stage capitalism where corporations struggle to find more territory to profiteer from and squeeze more profit out of us.
The era of free services being profitable is ending rapidly, and we see this across many areas in the world.
- I wouldn't say they aren't profitable, I would say the greed outweighs profitability.
  
  3 Letters IBM
- You're right. I should say "profit growth" which is what corporations look for. You can have solid growth, but unless it's growing, they don't care.
  
  Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, "if you're not growing, you're dying." There's a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.
  And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.

I was wondering when Red Hat enshittification would began the moment IBM announced the acquisition. Turns out it begins today.
- They announced the discontinuation of CentOS in 2020. That's when it started for me. This is just more of the same crusade against people "using RHEL for free" (which I'm sure none of the suits at IBM even begin to understand the value of, the real wonder is that RH managed to resist this move for so long).
  
  Certainly in retrospect. Back then they defended the decision by saying they wanted to shift their resources to centos stream, and that would be fair enough. But now it's clear that wasn't their motivation at all. They wanted to kill the free RHEL fork in the hope to attract more customers, as a lot of people already suspected.
- Took longer than I expected tbh. Time to reimage all my Rocky servers I guess. I really liked the 10 years of support they offered.

Maybe IBM can hire the Reddit CEO when he is fired to head up Red Hat. Seems like a perfect fit
- I was wondering why you were mentioning IBM, then I read that they bought it for 34B. This decision tracks...

Jeff Geerling consistently has the most compatible, tested, updated, and well documented Ansible rolls out there. If I need to get some niche software installed and there is a geerlingguy role for it - I breathe a sigh of relief.
If he is considering stopping support for RedHat and it's various distros - that is massive.

It's most probably IBM forcing it, but yeah it's dumb.
- I don't know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don't think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it's easy to blame IBM, but I don't think it's that simple.
  
  Lol, redhat is just butt hurt they lost the NASA Linux contract to rocky
  
  they wanted Red Hat for a reason.
  They were dying and they needed a cash cow to milk. The only way that was gonna work is if they didn't kick the cow and spoil that milk like they've kicked every cow before it. And they can't stop, so they're just kicking away.
  
  . I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.
  It's a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.
  But this new one is QUITE the departure. It's not 'red hat' stupid but a little further on the spectrum.

Ohh, let's see, pay for Redhat which will rot away without community support or use one of a dozen other distros. Sorry yum, it's been fun.
- you'd be surprised how many comps use RHEL just for the "I'm completely fucked and I need corporate level support" or "we need a data center completely off the rack" or "we wanna throw money at this problem" or "we need somebody to sue or point our finger at if we get majorly fucked" or "we need an OS that meets compliance" use cases. many comps won't just use some random community built OS to run their shit regardless of the community support. at the end of the day, many corporations with very complex requirements don't have many legitimate data center OS options available.

Yeah fuck this move. Seems incredibly short sighted and a huge fuck you to the community.
- @FrankTheHealer @REdOG I guess Debian based distros win.
  
  Is there even a Debian based distro that is up to date like Fedora, does not have snaps and does not have "Unstable" in its name?

Please don't fuck up my beloved fedora. Kind regards.
- Moving away from Fedora

How is this supposed to work with GPL ? Because anyone owning a copy is free to redistribute sources
- The plan is to give the source Code to paying customers. This is gpl-compliant.
  
  The concern is that Red Hat terminates your account if you redistribute the source to another party. This feels like an additional restriction placed on the source code, which if it is, would indeed violate the GPL.
  
  Yeah, it's a big myth that GPL prevents corporate profiteering.
- I haven't seen this in person so I can only speculate, but I bet they'll only provide the sources as a tarball or something instead of a git repo, which will make it a PITA for anyone do actually do anything useful with it. I mean, you could potentially still build a full distro from it, but you wouldn't be able to feasibly maintain it without the ability to do a sync and merge from upstream. So this way, Red Hat achieves their goal of being able to kill any spinoff distro, whilst still remaining compliant with the GPL.
  
  Additionally, they have to release sources for the projects but not necessarily for things like the spec files or the rpms.
  Here's the source for the kernel . . . .
  Thanks I can get that from kernel.org
  It's the part that's not GPL that's the value add here.
  
  It’s not a “they will.” Red Hat customers are able to download source rpms from the repository or the site, this has been the case for a very long time. It is possible to clone / sync the repository, this is how airgapped networks can still host their own.
- exactly, why isn't this a gpl violation
- I don't suppose they're modifying much of the GPL'd kernel necessarily. That's the part protected by GPL.
  Their own actual distro is not exactly a modification of GPL software. And if they modify GPL software, they wouldn't have issues providing source code to that.

I am basically in the same boat, interacting with RHEL mostly because some of our customers insist on using it. It is already a giant pain with its tiny number of packages and the whole license tool struggles. At least so far we could build our internal tooling and the software we build for our customers on simple Centos or Alma Docker containers and use those for test systems as well. But now dealing with RHEL at all suddenly became an order of magnitude more painful, especially as others will also reduce support for it in their third party software we use.
- the whole stream debacle was a massive red flag for me. at that point the decision was made to completely transition the tiny number of remaining RHEL based systems to debian and be done with it.
  red hat has contributed much to the FLOSS ecosystem and some may require the corporate backed walled garden, but stream was (and this is) exactly the sort of unhelpful drama no one needs right now.

This is start of end RH.
- Feel the Hat Red flow through you
- I have seen IBM do this multiple times. When they buy a company, they leave it pretty much alone for a year or two. Then they start to make their IBM changes to it, and change it enough to make anyone that knew the product before them hate it. IBM buying RedHat was the beginning of the end. I told my boss about it the day I read the news of the IBM buyout, "We need to stop using CentOS for any new systems."
  
  I'm in process replacing CentOS with Debian. Don't see point to use close source.

sigh Do I have to go abandon Fedora now too? I really hope they don't pull a CentOS on that one
- I highly doubt this would affect Fedora. Thankfully, it's community driven and self-goverened so Red Hat execs can't go and tell them what to do. (Though I don't know how many ties the Fedora council had to Red Hat)
  
  All of Fedora’s funding and IP comes from and belongs to Red Hat, this would be very persuasive. At least openSUSE has more sponsors than just SUSE.
- They already laid off the Fedora Program Manager back in May.
  IBM is closing off Red Hat to bleed it dry.

Redhat: Yes, but also we are liars.

I gave up on RedHat when they gave up on the community. I wish them well, but I'm never going to use or recommend RedHat again,

I'm not sure how confident I feel about Fedora's future lately.
- I've just switched to fedora from Arch :/

While Jeff's support for ELs has been imperfect - I marveled at the supply-chain issues gleefully baked into the drupal vagrant stuff - I came here to really say:
IBM's not really the poster-child for preserving the sanctity of source code in the past (cough cough Monterey cough), and I'm surprised they're even suggesting everyone respect their own demands around that.

sigh Time to go back to either openSUSE or Debian....
- Come to the Debian side, it's all unicorns and rainbows here 🥳🦄
  
  I used to avoid debian due to past trouble with outdated packages, but I just found out that debian+flatpak provides a nice user experience, with a stable system and up-to-date user apps.
- Use Arch btw
  
  Running Arch right now on laptop and desktop. Best documented distro by far, does precisely what you tell it and no more; is efficient, fast and cutting-edge.
  Of course, you need to know precisely what to tell it in order to get it installed in the first place, but once you've crossed that almighty hurdle, it's great.
- Don't use openSUSE, it's driven by SuSE who have shown their true colors before by paying Microsoft and screwing the rest of the community.
  openSUSE is still directed by the purse strings of SuSE. It can end up like Fedora.
  
  Debian it is, then. Thanks for the heads up!

Wow what the hell, this is the first I'm hearing of this change. I use Rocky Linux for my server atm and I was thinking I liked it for server use quite a lot more than Fedora, but if they're going to do this then I'm going to have to jump ship unfortunately. Maybe I'll go back to Debian. Or even better, maybe I'll try using Devuan in a prod server setup for once?
I'm super not happy to have to jump ship again though when I JUST settled into something I'm comfortable with that works near perfectly well for my usecases, after multiple years of jumping around undecided.
E: Although I did just read that statement from the Rocky Linux team, and maybe it'll be fine? But I'm still gonna prepare to move just in case this fucks over the Rocky Linux ecosystem anyways
- Devuan? The SysV Debian linux?
  Unexpected choice for a server. I'd like to know why you dont seem to consider OpenSuse Leap which is supposedly more server/enterprise oriented?
  Also, have you tried MX linux which is another Debian/sysV? and if so, what do you prefer in Devuan?

I’m honestly surprised it took Red Hat this long to do something like this. It really is a dreadful move even if they can do it.

Who's surprised? IBM is owned 8% by Blackrock so this shouldn't surprise anybody.

@REdOG
IBM: We poured money and resources into Linux before 99% of the business world had even heard of it. We helped make it great. Why shouldn't we require a return on that investment?
PLEASE UNDERSTAND, I think IBM/RH is bone-headed as heck and are now inexcusable violators of the GPL, and other licenses.
I knew they were going to break RH and make it something abominable.
But they were there at the very beginning of the 2000s, promoting Linux heavily. (Not altruistically, of course)
- This is not a violation of the GPL. They are allowed to charge for access to the source. If you provide binaries/images to a customer, you also must provide source. However, anyone who doesn't pay isn't entitled to it.
  However, this is still a total bonehead move.
  
  But anyone with access to source code licensed under GPL can legally redistribute said source code. One of the fundamental freedoms is that if you are given GPL-licensed source code, you can modify and redistribute it as much as you like.
  I think the real problem might be that some of the work from Red Hat doesn't fall under the GPL, hence this wouldn't apply, but I'm not sure.
  Or what if they only distribute it to companies that sign an agreement not to redistribute? Then they have the right to redistribute according to the GPL, but if they do, Red Hat will kick them out. This would seem like a way to circumvent the fundamental ideas behind the GPL and free software. If they do this, I can no longer be supportive of Red Hat in any way, and will likely have to distro-hop away from Fedora due to this misalignment of ideology.

I know this isn't related but: Why do I see a completely different set of comments here when I'm logged in, as opposed to when I'm not?
- Sometimes comments won't load for the post, it loads the comments for the last post you visited. Refreshing tends to fix it
- I’ve noticed much better post syncing on 0.18. 0.17.4 still relies websocket for syncing post comments and was constantly behind. I’m not mostly seeing that on instances that haven’t quite upgraded yet.
  Though if I was running a larger instance i probably wouldn’t upgrade quite yet until ironing out any kinks in a non-prod.
- I noticed this when I set my language settings in my lemmy profile.
- Could be bc of how you set sorting comments in your account vs guest's default.

Users looking to run an EL-like linux that pre-dates RedHat's derivation and meddling will want to look at PCLinuxOS .
Its pedigree is mageia, so Mandrake and Conectiva.
While it's got a horrifically bad PXE install, and while that means Vagrants and templates are ghetto and thin on the ground, it's otherwise a very fine OS with a wide compatibility range that RH couldn't even match with this AppStream bullshit (ohai, /etc/alternatives).

Fuckkkk
Huge L for the community and for my cheap ass company that will likely be migrating away soon 😭

Are there any other distros that are foss and provide optional enterprise support? Enterprises deploy distros that offer guarantees, warranties, and compliance measures to ensure stability, reliability, and legal compliance. If I'd build a company, I'd feel a lot more comfortable with a distro that I can upgrade to an enterprise version when that's necessary. But... now?
I suppose there's Ubuntu and SLES.
- I believe opensuse fits your description.

Fuck, I really hope this doesn't turn the tides for other Red Hat projects.
Not even my Linux distros can escape the enshittiness. WTF man.
- I use Fedora, but I'm very uneasy with the fact that they are married to Red Hat. If things go south for Fedora, I hope a community driven fork can survive if not Fedora itself.
  
  Not to mention CentOS stream is now essentially a fork of current code... total bummer. WTF.
- It's ultimately because of capital. Capital controls resource allocation, so any project that requires resources will have to align with capital interests

What may this cause to a casual fedora user?

What's to stop the CentOS-like distributions from each purchasing 1 copy of RHEL? Wouldn't that copy still be under GPL, with the software freedoms intact -They can then change and give away anything based on RHEL - they might have to strip out any artwork that is RHEL-specific but they have to do that anyway. Would Red Hat be able to stop them under GPL? Could Red Hat just refuse the sale?

The chatter around the water cooler at my office is that this may kill Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux (at least as downstream forks of RHEL). It will be very painful for companies that want RedHat support for their production systems but don't want to pay for RHEL licenses for developer test beds.

Idk it makes sense to me. Companies using your source and work to directly compete against you is bad. Forcing competitors to use upstream is an ok solve.
- It's free software, so you should be free to do with the code whatever you want as long as you don't restrict the freedom of others.

120 comments