- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.ml
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it
I miss Cringely’s take on this.
Please don’t fuck up my beloved fedora. Kind regards.
*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)
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?
Siduction. It is rolling release though.
Just checked their website and it seems like they’re using debian sid packages. What’s the difference between using siduction and plain debian sid, besides having a preconfigured desktop?
I never used siduction, im juat aware of its existence. I think they add some stability(=reliability) on top of sid and also keep updating packages during sid’s freezes. Dont quote me on this.
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 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.
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.”
sigh Time to go back to either openSUSE or Debian…
Come to the Debian side, it’s all unicorns and rainbows here 🥳🦄
Use Arch btw
How is this supposed to work with GPL ? Because anyone owning a copy is free to redistribute sources
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.
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.
Now THIS is a GPL-violation or at least a serious concern and asshole move.
Serious concern and asshole move? Yes. Gpl violation? Not sure. You could argue you are not restricted to do whatever you want with the code you receive with a subscription. But if you share the code, they don’t want you as a customer anymore and won’t give you new code. I don’t know if the GPL allows that.
This clearly goes against the intention of the GPL. Maybe not illegal.
Terminating a support contract, in itself, is not a GPL violation. The restrictions only affects the ability to receive future updates.
Edit: Red Hat indeed claims that no GPL violation is happening, yet they inform their customers that sharing updates leads to contract termination, which clearly breaches the GPL at least in spirit: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
I think it depends on whether it’s considered an additional restriction on the recipient’s right to redistribute the software.
Saying, “you can redistribute the software but you will face _____ penalty” seems like a gray area to me.
Context is important. It’s possible that the software is distributed without any warning like that and that the termination of the support contract is done without citing the redistribution of previous versions as a reason. OTOH if the customers could prove that there’s widespread knowledge of the retaliatory termination that could be equivalent to a (non-written) restriction that is indeed incompatible with the GPL
Yes more details would be good.
According to Alma Linux
“the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.”
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.
What may this cause to a casual fedora user?
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.
It’s ultimately because of capital. Capital controls resource allocation, so any project that requires resources will have to align with capital interests
