Should we be wary of Red Hat?

IBM sucks. They have bought up a bunch of small data centers and made them worse.
I'm still pissed about CentOS as well. Long live Rocky.
- Alma is actually a real community distro. They deserve so much more support than Rocky does.
- Fuck Rocky. They are a leech on open source. They break user agreements to get at Red Hat source and don't contribute upstream. Use Alma, they actually work with the community and contribute upstream.
  
  Ok, but why is there even an agreement required to access to source to something, uh, open source?
- I wish Almalinux/Rocky would be recognized by Fedora.
  
  What does that even mean? Alma already contributes and is down stream of CentOS Stream. Rocky doesn't contribute and steals Red Hat source.

I'm all for Linux distributions run and owned by the community. With those we don't have to be afreaid of weird business decisions. Debian is a good example, and very democratic. But I believe several other distros are maintained by a community as well, including Arch, NixOS...

Not really
It isn't a black and white thing. Redhat simply exists like anything else. I don't like everything they do but they also fund a ton of research and development. If Fedora ever becomes problematic people will just move. Ubuntu desktop used to be good but after it turned to shit many people moved.

Yeah but its pretty easy to avoid them. They survive on government contracts not community support. There's lots of better alternatives than Fedora.

I'm wary of them and I refuse to use Fedora (because it's basically their testing bed) due to their support of the US military, in addition to the reasons you've mentioned. Also, I'm trying my damnedest to #BoycottUSA
I prefer LMDE. It doesn't check all my wants, but it finds a great balance and I don't feel like an unpaid tester.

They make you sign into their support portal to view most of their documentation and download most of their software. That right there is a deal breaker for me because it violates the spirit of open source.

It definitely makes me suspicious, considering they're a standard 'money above all else' company (though they're better at playing the long game than some other companies) operating in a fascist state. They don't seem to abuse their power much, yet, but that can change rather quickly.
I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority. Suspicion of Red Hat was a major reason why systemd was so controversial.
- No...systemd was controversial because it complicated an entire ecosystem and caused lots of growing pains for very little payoff at the time. SysV was fine for many, but now so is systemd, and it's solved many growing pains for distro maintainers.
  
  @justanotherperson @rumschlumpel The idea of replacing system-V init with an init system capable of parallel start-ups in an era where multi-core CPUs became the norm makes sense. If it had stopped at this I would have been fine with it.
  But it then goes and takes over DNS and in a way that breaks some mail sites that have spf records in a single record longer than 512 bytes which is officially against the DNS standard but which bind9 was fine with, then it had to take over system time keeping, and then user home directories, and then it wants to containerize everything.
  The original Unix and by extension Linux philosophy was make one tool to do one thing and make it do it well.
  Systemd by contrast is now one bloatware that wants to do everything and doesn't do everything well. It does perform it's function as a new init well.
- I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority.
  Yeah, I’m with you all the way — no shade to OP, but the question has a flawed premise. I think the majority opinion is that they’re both an asset and a liability. They’re a huge contributor to the ecosystem and have done a lot of practical good, but I also think the community will turn on a dime if the suits overstep into FAFO territory.
  (All that said, fuck Lennart Poettering. Dude couldn’t design a plan to get himself out of a paper bag.)
  
  Honestly I don't really see the systemd hate
  Unless they system has less than 64mb of storage I wouldn't use anything but systemd
  
  I don't disagree with OP at all, though. Just because it's a minority doesn't mean they're wrong.
- All companies (and people for that matter) are "money above all else." If you don't have income you are in trouble.

Remember that in 2023 RedHat restricted access to the source code of RHEL packages, which had a big impact to lots of server distros. This article explains really well why that's problematic:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

I don't trust anyone with a red hat. Is Red Hat the MAGA of Linux?

There is not much criticism of Red Hat? What? In what universe? I never see the name Red Hat absent the army of detractors they attract.

🙄
This dumb thread comes up every few years from paranoid people new to the community who don't understand how this ecosystem works.
There are countless threads and blog posts about this, so I'm not sure why you're bringing your paranoia here to kick up some fear mongering or whatever your intent is, but let me break it down for you:
Fedora is its own entity
Red Hat is a for-profit company
Red Hat doesn't own Fedora
Red Hat contributes assets to many FOSS initiatives, not just Fedora
Yes, some RH employees also work on Fedora. It's free contribution. Same as Canonical, Valve, IBM, Universities, and other private companies.
There is nothing to be "weary" of because if something were to change about the Fedora ecosystem that didn't benefit users, guess what? There will be instant forks, and a massive shift away from that community. Red Hat knows this because they aren't fools.
People aren't "shilling" for Fedora. It's the new standard for well-built and easy to run distro since Canonical decided to ruin Ubuntu (see point #6)
Red Hat EMPLOYS many contributors straight out of open source projects, and also just directly funds projects they want to see improve. So do other corporate entities. You know Redis was basically single-handedly funded by Amazon for multiple years so the project would upstream features they requested? Also many Apache projects, memcached, ELK, Grafana...etc.
Get outta here with the shit-stirring for absolutely no good reason 🤦
- Fedora is heavily controlled by Redhat. The people behind it are pretty much all Redhat employees and the trademark is owned by Redhat.
  With that being said, I think Redhat does a decent job with Fedora. They allow the project to run on its own and provide plenty of funding and man hours. This is mostly due to it benefiting them in various ways but it also means that Fedora will never have funding issues.
  One complaint I have is that Fedora doesn't seem to want to recognize that Almalinux and Rocky exist. In the forums they commonly promote Fedora server instead and for the bootc docs they only list Fedora, Centos and RHEL even though Almalinux has a bootc image.
  
  Let me pick this apart piece by piece because you don't understand how any of this works, and for your uninformed answer from AI or Reddit:
  A Trademark is nothing more than branding. Meaningless. The substance of the project is MIT Licensed which means...open.
  As you can read in their Charter docs: "Many basic decisions are made through a process known as “lazy approval”, in which general consent is assumed unless valid objections are raised within a period of time..." So, no, Red Hat as an entity isn't making decisions in the direction of the project.
  Fedora ecosystem is one group of devs working on a specific line of tooling centered around rolling releases. Alma and Rocky have their own, which is mostly a free version of RHEL focused on LTS releases (not desktop). Two factions of the same coin with different goals.
  In Fedora forums you're wondering why Fedora people would suggest Fedora Server??? See #3. They have completely different use-cases and userbase.

Isn't RedHat who pushed systemd? Most init enthusiasts hate systemd ! Dunno if related tho. I'm just recently into linux so I never had the chance to give the init system a try !
However, I'm an opensource and free from corporate shit software lover. Try to avoid everything related to corpo (Redhat, Ubuntu...). That's exaclty the reason why I'm reluctant to give Fedora a try, even though it seems kinda a good distro !
Debian as server distro EndeavourOS as daily drive
- I think 10 or so Linux users don't like systemd
  Everyone else is to young to care or moved on

Isn't IBM just doing embrace, extend, extinguish?
- No. Look at IBMs stock value history. There is a pretty clear point at which Remini stepped down and they really started to see the benefits of Red Hat. Nearly all IBM profit comes from Red Hat. They were drowning and their pivot to cloud was failing. With Red Hat they've been able to actually get a presence in the cloud with OpenShift.
  
  Their stock history can also be explained as stock holders seeing value in destroying Red Hat.
- @queermunist @propitiouspanda I don't think they'd put the funds into development that they do if that were the case.
  
  Why not? Until they have cornered distribution of the software they can't Extinguish yet. EEE isn't an instant process, it takes time. Crush all other distribution first and then killing it comes next.
  The goal is proprietary Linux. Why would they settle for anything less?

Power of what sort?

IBM is evil (literally making NAZI death camps possible)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
If it wasn’t for IBM the Holocaust couldn’t have happened.
So morally move away from them as soon as you can justify.
The alternatives provide better support anyway
- Interesting read. "made Nazi death camps possible" seems a bit much, though - I don't see how punch cards were absolutely necessary to carry out a census and send all the jews, romani etc. they could find to camps and eventually kill most of them.
  
  IBMs tabulation machines were never required for the functions of the death camps, but they vastly increased the speed and efficiency with which the Nazis were able to find and murder people through the death camps.
  There are clear differences in countries where the census database were poorly implemented and those that had a well established census database before the Nazis invaded, in how many people the Nazis were able to find and murder.