Jeff Geerling stops development for Redhat
Jeff Geerling stops development for Redhat
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
126 comments
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I get where Jeff Geerling is coming from, but I think RedHat has a point as well.
I think a lot of people are coming at this from the perspective that RedHat themselves are just repackaging open source code and putting it behind a paywall, instead of also being one of the top contributors of software and bug fixes into the Linux ecosystem. Jeff mentions that Redhat is based on other open source software like the Linux kernel, but at the same time doesn't mention that they're also one of the leading contributors to it. I mean seriously, good luck using Linux without a single piece of RedHat code and see how far that gets you. If you're entering the discussion from that perspective of "Redhat is simply just taking other people's work as well", it's easy to have a biased view and start painting RedHat as a pure villain.
I also think that people are downplaying exactly how much effort it takes to build an enterprise Linux system, support customers at an engineering level, and backport patches, etc. Having downstream distributions straight up sell support contracts on an exact copy of your work won't fly or be considered fair in any other business situation and I get why RedHat as a business doesn't want to go out of their way to make that easy.
And it's not like Redhat isn't contributing the developments that happen in RHEL back into the FOSS community. That's literally what CentOS Stream is and will continue to be, alongside their other upstream contributions.
Does it suck that we won't have binary compatibility between Alma / Rocky and RHEL, yes it is frustrating as a user! Does it suck that we once got RHEL source for free and now we have to resort to Centos Stream? Yes! But the reality too is that open source STILL needs sources of income to pay developers to work on the Linux ecosystem, which is getting bigger and more complicated every day. That money has to come from somewhere, just sayin.
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This argument that open source somehow needs to exploit users and blatantly skirt the intent of the GPL because profit must be taken from it is absurd.
Why is it assumed that they weren’t perfectly sustainable before and why is it the end users responsibility to bear the burden of making their business model viable if they weren’t? Being unprofitable doesn’t excuse you from following the terms of your software license.
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Red Hat weren't ever unprofitable under the old model. This is just the classic killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. They'll get a short term boost in profit until customers start moving to competitors.
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The profit motive is antithetical to software freedom
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Except they're aren't violating the GPL at all. Their source code is still available to subscribers (and it isn't behind a paywall because you can get a free license) and available to the public via CentOS Stream. Their code also goes into upstream projects as well.
The GPL exists so that companies can't just take the code and contribute nothing back. But that isn't what Redhat is doing here so I find your accusations that Redhat is exploiting users to be very hyperbolic.
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No, RHEL "exploits" large companies and the public sector that require a lot of compliance certificates and long term service guarantees for the software they procure. If Red Hat doesn't collect this money, it goes into the pockets of people with much lower upstream contributions than Red Hat.
The regular user doesn't need RHEL. Fedora or any other non-enterprise Linux distribution is perfectily fine and they will directly benefit from the contribution that Red Hat finances through their enterprise sales.
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The problem is that nothing Red Hat has done justifies them breaking the rules.
Have they made tons of contributions back to open source? Yes. Do they need to make money? Yes. Are there organizations and people who are, in essence, freeloading off their work? Yes.
But here's the thing. At the end of the day, they chose to make their project open source and to build it on Linux. And that choice comes with rules that they (and everyone else that have used Linux or other FOSS projects) have to follow, no exceptions. You can argue that their motivations for wanting to do so are understandable all day long. You can argue the GPL is bad and shouldn't work this way. But they still chose this ecosystem.
Now, have they actually violated the GPL? We'll leave that up to the lawyers to decide I guess. But if we're only talking whether they should be allowed to violate the GPL, the answer is absolutely not. If they didn't want RHEL to be open source and stolen by freeloaders they should've made their own operating system with their own license.
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Redhat, the organization/company no longer exists. Redhat did those things in the past, and earned a lot of love, respect, and clout. All that is left of that legacy is their contributed code and an IBM product name.
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They're only really restricting the packaging files (and associated testing), the vast majority of which was done solely by them. They could theoretically let you download just the source code that they pulled from public git repos, but that wouldn't make a difference because you can already get that elsewhere.
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I agree that they should be allowed a profit. However calling it open source when redistributing rhel code causes them to hold the right of canceling you access to the code and binary, eventhough gpl states that redistributing is a right under gpl rubs me the wrong way.
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In the video, and in the blogpost that is effectively the transcript of the video, he clearly states that though locking away the source code is within IBM's or RedHat's rights.
What seems to have done it for him is, the subscription terms and conditions that prevent redistribution of source code by subscribers or else have the subscription revoked. This is what he argues as being borderline illegal and that RedHat could be banking on the army of lawyers on IBM's retainer.
And, knowing Oracle, what is to stop them from becoming a subscriber? That way, RedHat has a poster child of a subscriber, Oracle gets access to the code which they can and most likely will, with their own army of lawyers, repackage and publish as Oracle Linux. Admittedly this is my cynical take on Jeff's.
Time to start debating moving more projects under GPLv3 or AGPLv3 which demand more innovative ways to run a business than what IBM is doing.
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It's not as if they didn't still get paid under the previous model. It's just not conducive to a profit line that has to be on an incline forever, else be axed or forever altered, such as in this case. It's greed, pure and simple. They have to find a new way to make the line on a chart go up and people who are more interested in short term gain figured they can wait out the backlash storm and rake in more profit on other businesses that are already locked in. They're not dumb, they just aren't incentivized in anyway to be concerned for the long-term health of what they are built on.
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... open source STILL needs sources of income to pay developers to work on the Linux ecosystem ....
free as in freedom, not free like free beer
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Free as in freedom, but you can only do it once before red hat cancels your account due to sharing the source code you downloaded from their portal.
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All the good things you said about Redhat should be in past tense. IBM recently laid off tons of Redhat employees, including the Fedora team lead! Redhat is no longer an organization in any real sense. It is only the name of a product now. It's as meaningful as IBM's "Watson". They are only marketing terms.
Don't expect much investment or technical innovation out of Redhat/IBM going forward. IBM is always going to put its short term (short sighted) self interest ahead of everything else.
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I've become a lot more sympathetic to RH after learning about Oracle Linux. I still disagree with it, but another mega-corp selling support for a RHEL clone is egregious.
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Oracle Linux is 100% the cause of this change.
Imagine supporting 2 other distros to make your own enterprise linux that is your only source of money through optional subscriptions to it.
Then some other big unethical corporation (much like your own parent company) comes in, use the GPL license to clone it and slap an "Oracle db certified" sticker on it. Finally, they decide to use the same subscription model as you except they get insane margins since you did 99% of the work for them.
But looking at what Rocky Linux is saying publicly. It's not impossible that Red Hat won't levy their right to remove access to the sources to non-commercial forks of RHEL.
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IMO, this is the elephant in the room.
If you're looking at what people used CentOS or Rocky or Alma for - dev systems, CI systems, ... These aren't lost sales. If you forced them to off of their solution, they aren't going to pay the price tag and management/installation pain of RHEL. If they have people knowing how to run Linux, they'll use something else. And sure, they are drawing some resources from RH (bandwidth for packages at the very least), but they are giving the RH system a larger footprint in deployed systems. And people running it had a positive opinion about the system.
But Oracle Linux is a different beast. Here a company is poaching large customers willing to pay for support by repackaging your product for less effort. It sucks, but it's entirely consistent for Oracle to be part of ruining a good thing.
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I honestly don't get this take at all. Especially for Oracle Linux. Oracle does write / package much newer kernels and some other features. Why is it OK for Red Hat to package up the Linux kernel and other GPL software and sell support, but not for someone else to do so with Red Hat as the base? It's just the base is in a slightly different location, RHEL instead of CentOS Stream. Is Amazon OK for doing (now) Fedora -> Amazon Linux? Should Red Hat need to pay Linus for the kernel? Is Amazon doing "enough" modification that they're not "freeloading" but Oracle isn't? What's the threshold, and does it have any relation to the GPL?
But even if they didn't - you do know there are consultants out there for just about any software providing support. Heck, reading this one way, you would be against users of a distro supporting themselves. This doesn't make any sense to me at all.
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I was mad when I first heard about it, but now? Not so much...
You would be mad as well if a megacorp uses your successful foss to generate revenue cough Oracle Linux cough, floods you with merge requests and issues, expects you to fix them, and don't pay you a dime. Everyone says that this is your fault: You shouldn't have licensed it the way you did. But that doesn't change the fact that you hate everything about your situation. You hate the people who use your work for free, and hate yourself for giving your work away for free.
But this is Red Hat. They asked their legal team how they can get out of this mess. So they found a loophole to close-source RHEL. Now... whether or not RHEL will survive this is a different beast.
Edit: Red Hat also created the following major projects:
- Wayland
- PipeWire
- PulseAudio
- systemd
- FreeIPA
- Keycloak
- OpenStack
- NetworkManager
- Ceph
If that wasn't enough, they're also major contributors of the following projects:
- Xorg
- GNOME
- LibreOffice
- radeon
- Linux kernel
If you run any Linux distribution today, chances are you use Red Hat projects. You can also say that anyone who uses the Linux kernel profits off of Red Hat.
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It isn't close-sourcing RHEL though. CentOS Stream is there and freely available and its basically the "git master" branch of RHEL.
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If it was just that they were repackaging source code and putting it behind a paywall, then there would be no problem at all.
The problem is, as I understand it, that they are selling modified GPL code without giving people access to it. That's against the GPL license. Out of all people, Red Hat should be aware of what the GPL states.
So I think it's pretty fair to accused Red Hat of being intentionally evil here. If it was just a mistake, then I'd say it's a very very dumb mistake. Either way, if these are the kind of people who run Red Hat now, things don't look good.
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The access is given as per the GPL, it doesn't have to be publicly available.
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I am surprised it has taken IBM this long to begin poisoning the waters...
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This said it all perfectly. Think I'll check out more of his videos.
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You should. He's done very entertaining stuff around Raspberry Pis and other fun projects.
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If you like raspberry pis, SBCs, or Linux you're in for a decent time. Although he did get a bit of flack for his Eben Upton interview. Though I felta lot of that was overblown.
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2019-07-09: The death knell of Red Hat
Honestly, I am not surprised. Red Hat's parent company IBM is an absolute joke. Almost as bad as Oracle.
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Don't worry, Redhat was garbage anyway. It's going to pale in comparison to Watson Enterprise Linux.
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Honestly, I think they're worse. Oracle have actually done less evil in the past few years compared to before, whilst IBM/Redhat seem to be revelling in causing disharmony and aggressive business tactics.
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I’ve been watching ol Jeff for quite some time. He’s so delightfully nerdy I love him
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Ive only recently started to follow him, and yeah, hes awesome.
He really seems to know his stuff
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I dont understand how redhat is going to police this policy of "we'll keep source code open to paying customers, but reserve the right to cancel a customer that shares said source".
Toss in GUID's or randomly place identity files to anyone that downloads the RHEL source hoping they get accidentally published as an identifying attribute if someone does decide to publish it elsewhere.
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And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out...
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They could try that but I suspect it would be rather easy to find anomalies like that. These are ultimately patches to an upstream and already open-source project, so one can just diff the RHEL version with the release it's based on and quickly notice that random GUID in the sources or random spaces/indentation. Or have multiple sources leak the code independently, and then you can diff them all between eachother to verify if you got exactly the same code or if they injected something sneaky to track it, and remove it.
Lots of companies in enterprise also want to host their own mirror because the servers are airgapped, so they can't even track who downloaded all the sources because many companies will in fact do that. And serving slightly modified but still signed packages sounds like it would be rather computationally expensive to do on the fly, so they can't exactly add tracking built into the packages of the repos either. And again easy to detect with basic checksumming of the files.
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I don't think that many companies have their shit together well enough to mirror the source code, besides the RHEL repos aren't small, so that'll cost.
The companies I've helped either had a minimalist mirror to reduce the surface area of what was installable or to save on cost.
It's possible that a few enterprises do a full mirror of all RHEL sources, but i doubt it's many
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This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.
I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don't see why he can't just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.
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Oracle really does eat Red Hat lunch. Oracle practically recommends using Oracle Linux to their own customers. After paying a lot of money to Oracle, you probably aren't thrilled to pay for yet another expensive license and just install oracle linux.
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Fedora isn't the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, "unstable" from a business perspective)
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CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
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RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn't disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You're not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That's what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that's what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that's still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
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Unenforceable for individual users, maybe. But the distros that depended upon it will need to be open and honest about their sources so cannot do that. Users trust distros because of transparency.
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Jeff is 100 spot on. IBM/Redhat is really shooting themselves in the foot for some short term profits.
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I really hope this doesn't affect ansible. I'll be so fucking mad.
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It's crazy that we're even considering that, yet we are. Redhat have become so unpredictably malicious, it's really depressing.
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"IBM won't affect our culture" they said...
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One could always fork it, though I like the name. I'm a LeGuin fan.
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That was great! I mean the circumstances are not great but I like the video. It seems there's a lot of talk about how big companies take over open source projects and ruin them, which is a good conversation.
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Somehow I'd kind of not known who Jeff Geerling was until this. And damn, he does a good presentation. Succinct, very clear and gets his point across extremely well without too much heat. No way I could I do that!
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Guess they really wanted to be the Reddit of Linux
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Reddit Enterprise Linux
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Damn, couldn't have put it better even if I spent weeks trying to sum it down.
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I’m so annoyed with this. We were using CentOS, which was effectively killed, then I did a lot of research and spent time moving everything over the AlmaLinux.
Having to now do it all again another time is so frustrating; the only pragmatic long-term option is to bite the bullet and get things working on Debian.
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Look in to Rocky Linux. It was started by the original developer of CentOS the day Red Hat announced that CentOS would be moving upstream of RHEL. They've already put out an announcement saying that it's essentially going to be business as usual for them.
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Thanks tool.
From what I understand, Rocky and Alma are essentially the same and so I found it difficult to decide between the two when moving from CentOS. Whatever happens now, will apply to both.
The writing is on the wall and it’s similar to Twitter and Reddit: they wanted to kill CentOS as it was, weren’t expecting the community to come back with Rocky and Alma, so now they’re trying to kill those too. The above video posits a scenario where Oracle’s legal team help the little guys by going to battle with IBM, but I don’t see it.
At this point, I don’t think it’s smart to go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over, but then again I’d be very happy to see the little guys succeed.
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I'd just finished migrating around 70 Centos 6 machines to Centos 8, a month ahead of them killing the distro that was supposed to last until 2028. We went with Rocky, but the problem is the same as Alma's.
Fortunately both companies seem to have pretty well developed plans for coping with this, and no doubt Oracle and Amazon distros will too, so no need to jump ship yet.
That said, we're also considering a debian shaped future, at least in part. There's absolutely no way we'll sign up for Rhel accounts. Not because they're expensive, but because decisions like this undermine our trust in them as a business partner.
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Ooof, I feel ya. Good luck!
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Yea, we're just starting a EL7 to Alma 9 migration. Kind of not looking forward to having to throw out all that work and try and migrate somewhere else if the rebuilds become impossible to make in the next few months or even few years. And if this doesn't work, I don't see why they don't try something else in 2 years again, so I'm far less sanguine than I was back with them ending CENTOS.
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This was his first reaction, just as satisfying to read: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
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Red Hat is dead to me.
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Truly the year of enshittification.
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Wait, I only knew this name from good Ansible stuff. I had no idea he created great videos too!
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I can’t believe how many people fundamentally misunderstand the spirit behind the GPL.
It helps to consider “the software” as a single snapshot in time, with the GPL’s intention that the consumer may make their own fixes, rebuild, and redistribute. Check.
Remember: “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer.” Selling open source software has always been explicitly allowed, as long as you make the source available to those who receive it. Check.
What the GPL does NOT provide is guaranteed access to maintenance and future versions of said software. Again, it applies to a snapshot, as delivered.
In a nutshell, the customer receives open source everything they FOR A PARTICULAR VERSION.
I see no problem — either in spirit or letter — in Redhat’s approach here.
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The problem is that the GPL states:
You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Red Hat are arguing that they are free to punish customers from exercising their rights under the GPL, and that punishment does not constitute a "restriction", even though its done specifically to discourage people from exercising those rights. Whether Red Hat have found a loophole is something for the courts to decide, but it's clearly against the intention and spirit of the GPL.
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That’s a fair point, and worthy of deliberation.
However, I would continue to argue that if Redhat does not restrict parties’ rights to the source code they’ve been given, then they’ve satisfied the GPL.
It is my understanding (at least initially) that the GPL was meant to solidify the end user’s rights to the software they have, so that they’re not left with an unfixable binary executable.
And again, there are no rights granted by the GPL for FUTURE versions.
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The GPL requires that you do not put additional limits on a user's rights to redistribute.
Saying "you have the right, but we'll cut ties" isn't really in keeping with the spirit of that.
I suspect, if it ever ended up in court, they'd agree yhat there's no guarantee of access to future versions, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a shitty and cynical take that flies against what FOSS has traditionally stood for.
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We can agree to disagree. “The Software” was delivered, source included. And you as end consumer are free to redistribute and maintain as you wish.
However, I cannot see any contract law judgement that would force continuation of a subscription model on the vendor (in perpetuity!) if they do not wish to remain under contract.
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This is debatable. The GPL allow redistribution of a given version of the software without additional restriction. If the user receives that copy knowing in advance that redistribution will lead to retaliatory actions this can be treated as an additional restriction.
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What if you bought an android phone, and could ask them for the source code to the Linux kernel on it, but if they caught you sharing it online, they would not allow your phone to update to the latest Android version?
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Ok, yes as far as I understand they are not breaking the GPL, but it's still a d**k move as it leaves downsteam projects/distros in a mess of a situation. While technically allowed, I'm with Jeff on this one.
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SFC thinks they are in violation of the GPL for what that's worth.
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126 comments