Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register
Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams | The Register
From now on, only CentOS Stream's source code is available to all
A superficially modest blog post from a senior Hatter announces that going forward, the company will only publish the source code of its CentOS Stream product to the world. In other words, only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux… And under the terms of their contracts with the Hat, that means that they can't publish it.
Can we avoid clickbait titles? Really hoping the Lemmy community is better than what Reddit turned into.
..I don't see how this is clickbait, this is a major damaging move to downstream distros. They can no longer use RHEL source. Also, I just copy and pasted the original article's title. RHEL is an extremely influential distro, others will follow its lead.
I actually considered changing it at first because I didn't think it properly conveyed just how damaging to open source this is. This is an inflection point for the entire space. Red Hat is one of the most influential distros and others will follow its lead.
If you disagree with my take, fair, but tell me why. Same for all the people upvoting @carlyman's comment. I want to have real discourse with you all, and I will change the title if you have good reasoning that it is in fact inaccurate. Like you said, we don't want this to be like Reddit.
It’s also against the spirit of the GPL if not the letter. Red Hat isn’t just required to release source code to its customers upon request; that source code comes with GPL rights and restrictions attached (including the right to distribute).
Is it legal for Red Hat to require customers to waive their GPL rights? I don’t think it should be, but I don’t think courts are particularly friendly to copyleft holders.
It's the literal title of the article. If you don't like El Rog's style, then jump in your time machine, head back to the late 90s, and ask Magee and Lettice to kindly knock it off.
Accidentally deleted my last comment.. but a summary of what I had said, I don't think it's clickbait. This is an inflection point for the entire space and I actually considered changing the title because I didn't think it properly expressed just how damaging it is. It restricts people receiving RHEL source, compromising existing derivatives and essentially closing off the possibility of any more. RHEL is an extremely influential distro, others will follow its lead. Also, it's a copy and paste of the original title.
If you think anything I've said here is incorrect or you have a different perspective, I'm totally open for discourse. Just don't go around leaving negative comments without explaining yourself - I was hoping this community would be better than Reddit too.
(Lemmy REALLY needs a confirmation box for that. Not the first time lol)
Frankly, I’m more concerned about the precedent this sets for the GPL.
If Red Hat can do this, then there’s nothing (legally) preventing every other megacorp from ending public contributions to Linux and other GPL projects, forking them, and releasing them under restrictive contractual terms.
Granted, not everyone would take their code private. Microsoft and Apple make some contributions to BSD/MIT/etc. licensed software even though they are not required to. However, I think we’d miss out on quite a lot of FOSS development.
How does this work with the code license? If this is all fine, doesn't this mean that we should be avoiding the kind of license they're using in the future?
Most of their stuff is under the GPL. It's a GPL violation to not allow their customers to share the source. I'm guessing they'll reverse this decision (or selectively release everything they're obligated to) within a week.
SF Conservancy analyzed this and found that it's probably legally OK, if very much on the edge of what's allowed. RH doesn't sue you for redistribution or anything, they 'just' terminate the contract and the GPL doesn't force anyone to deal with anyone. It's the same stupid model grsecurity applied some years ago.
But regardless of legality, morally, this is just completely and utterly wrong. I'm not totally surprised post-IBM Red Hat went in this direction, but I'm disappointed and angry anyway.
The problem here is not the source of the applications, but the source of the package build scripts - which in big parts are RedHat property.
RedHat must provide you the sources - but for that it is sufficient to give you the source of whatever is packaged. In the past commercial distributions just fulfilled that requirement by dumping source packages, which have the source as well as the scripts required to build binary packages. They do not have to provide you with the build scripts.
The problem with RedHat is that many companies certify their stuff to work on RedHat - so for that to work without running into the occasional obscure problem you need to build the sources the exact same way as RedHat is doing. That's what CentOS used to do until version 7, and that's what currently some other distributions are doing. Without the build scripts it'll be next to impossible to do that - you'd pretty much have to duplicate the RedHat engineering team. But it is completely legal, as they own the scripts, and since they're completely separate from the application itself don't have to be GPL.
I work with (big, enterprise) customers who are actively migrating away from RHEL where they can. There are lots of free OSS alternatives that are enterprise-grade. Even Amazon Linux is gaining traction, especially in the cloud.
Yep reminds me of the sudden rush to adoptopenjdk when jre went stupid and were charging enterprise per instance, I hear they have changed back now
RIP Rocky?
The Rocky devs don't seem worried
Good to know. Thanks!