The Red Hat RHEL Situation Looks Really Bad

37 thoughts on “The Red Hat RHEL Situation Looks Really Bad”

• If i was both @almaLinux and @RockyLinux, i would re-invest my efforts and experince into taking their experince with building out enterprise Linux distros, and apply it to Debian. they could make a free / open distro to rival RHEL and ubuntu. with 10- year LTS support

• If you're company needs corporate linux distro you can choose from red hat and ubuntu and suse, you have choice…No need for this drama…

• There no free lunch.Corporation only really needs profite…

• Free Software does not imply Open Source. Let me say that again: Free Software does NOT imply Open Source! Free Software is all about protecting the freedoms of software users. Open Source Software is (or was originally) all about leveraging the benefits of Open Software Development models. As Free Software Licenses the GPL et al are designed to protect your freedoms as a software user (there is no such thing as an Open Source Software License — or, I have never seen one — what are colloquially called Open Source Licences are just The OSI Approved Free Software Licenses). If you are not a client of RedHat then they are under no obligation to give you access to RHEL or any of their other software, and if you are not a user of their software then you have no Free Software License from RedHat, and no freedoms to protect.

  Please understand this. Free Software never meant what the majority of people using it think it means, and the marketing term "Open Source" as used colloquially was always just a a rebranding effort in the Free Software Movement (one which has caused more harm than good as it has worked to conflated Software Freedoms with Open Source Development in the minds of a great many people).

  The upshot is that if the FOSS community finally internalises this we may actually be able to get a sustainable FOSS revolution! Businesses and individuals should not have to resort to hiding behind trinket-selling to make a living from FOSS. FOSS is not inherently incompatible with or hostile to legitimate business activity and setting it up this way harms everyone involved.

• The only reason i use linux is to run docker and backend server software, this doesn't affect me

• Oracle, 2 days ago, made an official statement how they will deal with – in case anyone cares.

• Time to fork.

• As an Android dev, I've used Fedora Hyperland, but Arch's rolling updates aren't for me. With Red Hat's recent decision, I'd love your recommendation for a stable distro for Hyperland. Thanks! #LinuxCommunity

• The "Stream" in CentOS Stream now refers to Red Hat peeing on the open source community.

• Here is what everyone who uses, redistributes, or writes GPL software needs to understand:

  Back in the 1970s, personal computers were a brand new thing. They were mainly used by hobbyists and coders who would often get together at computer clubs to examine and share code in a communal spirit. Likewise students at universities would often write, share, and improve the code that ran on their larger Unix systems.

  This was the impetus of the concept of Copyleft, a word coined by Li-Chen Wang for his Tiny BASIC interpreter in 1976. Copyleft is the freedom to use the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. It embodies this communal spirit of sharing. The GNU General Public License (GPL) was created by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) in 1989 to implement this concept of Copyleft in Copyright.

  The GPL has been called "viral" by those meaning to discourage its use among corporate users. And it actually is viral in the sense that everyone who accepts GPL software is bound by those same conditions. You should definitely NOT use GPL source code in software that you intend to distribute outside of your company – UNLESS you intend to stay true to those terms.

  This is the world you have agreed to play in when you use GPL software or when you redistribute it, which is exactly what Red Hat does. It is the world you have agreed to place your work into when you write your own software and distribute it under the GPL. This is precisely what RMS did with GNU emacs, what the GNU Foundation did with all of its software, and what Linus Torvalds did with Linux. Anyone can take their GPL code and copy it, modify it and share it PROVIDED THAT they distribute it under the GPL license and do not put any further restrictions on it.

  The GPL version 2 license specifically bars you from adding any further restrictions. Putting a punitive restriction on sharing the GPL source code in your user subscription's Terms of Service is NOT in the spirit of Copyleft and, moreover, it clearly violates the GPL v2 license's prohibition on adding further restrictions.

• In less than 10 years they will be dead

• As a desktop user (Debian based distros), I don't care about RHEL (although RHL 5.2 and Mandrake 6.0 were my first experiences with Linux)… but… this is the best thing that could happen for the Debian ecosystem…

• @6:00 Aren't you just begging the question here? You basically have to grant someone else the same rights to the source code that were granted to you under the GPL. Most FOSS projects are AFAIK in the public domain with obvious is more in the spirit of the FOSS people than a greedy corporation trying to disincentivizing the distribution of the source code .
  @11:22 Common sense is enough. You don't need to read someone's mind. It is all in the open. They are a corporation doing what corporations do and AlmaLinux doesn't want to put itself into legal "hot water".

• It would suck to be a web hosting service with hundreds of servers.

• What will happen to Fedora

• Is it the end of redhat

• I never spent much time on RHEL. Now I won’t even bother with Fedora. I’m sticking with Debian and other flavors of Linux. I have a Fedora image on one of my raspberry pi but I will be reformatting it. Either the red hat will follow GPL 3 or they are violating the terms.

• I am an Alma Linux user and this looks like the end to me.

• Translation, We are IBM and we don't leave money on the table. Oink oink.

• Red hat just turned it's hat upside down that's all

• They just fired people in US and Europe. In Europe we had to wait 2 months since was announced. Imagine waiting everyday, checking your mails first thing in the morning to see if they fired me. I wasn’t but I which I was, RH culture is dying.

• Moving to Arch-based. At least I won't be faking <being on the bleeding edge> 😛

  laughs at CentOS Stream

• Forgive a stupid question, but, why not get all together, and pay for the one binary of RHEL? Technically the one legal copy of binary has access to RHEL and all the source code including CentOS Stream soo… all beneficiaries of alma linux should just pay RHEL guys for one copy and use the access to source for the updated Alma?

• Debian is there corporate boys!

• I used to use rocky linux on both of my home servers since I wanted to try something similar to rhel but not sign up for some account. I just swapped the systems over to debian since I don't know about how much longer these projects will put up a fight against rh/ibm.

• An honest question: is there community code directly in RHEL or only from the developers that Red Hat pays to develop?

• IBMHat ))

• As a former RH employee.. I am not even slightly surprised about RH trying to pull this kind of shady trick. I saw similar things happening first hand (at a smaller scale) even before IBM was involved.

• Waiting to see is the apparent course, although there will be those who attempt to predict outcomes in practice rather than solely theory on paper. Generally speaking, different licences have been useful over the years and (almost irrespective of what Red Hat might be doing nowadays) Apache licence is a good example and something multiple people (myself included) have felt kindly towards, especially for CGI (or even CGI-perl) which has long history in server technologies and scripting over the years. Many a time, a person (such as on a MSWindows PC but other operating systems too) would connect to the server (by internet, a lot of the time) and the server would often be Linux (perhaps unsurprisingly, Red Hat often enough) and the CGI on the server woudl deliver the thing they wanted. CGI (or even CGI-Perl ) had frequently been difficult to read code compared to some other server-side includes, and CGI usually relied upon Apache Server being there as a mechanism by which to run it upon. The Apache (be that perhaps LAMP or XAMPP) server made it so much easier to do, and it took the edge of the already difficult to read code when a person wanted to replicate or make their own version of such a server. Open Office going through the "Apache license" is another example of a benefit. Of course GPL has strengths, and so do other licenses. There are different ways at looking at thing for different use case scenarios. Consider OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt (who has provided great works, such as OpenBSD's usage of OpenSSH) has his angle on a licence and Berne Convention have a different angle on ISC license and there is a lot to be learned from the body of knowledge that tries to predict would would actually happen in practice with licencing compared to the principle or theory on paper.
  My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining… Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.

• I gave up on Red Hat based distros when Ubuntu came out. Have not looked back.

• Hello 1980's UNIX wars nonsense!

• When you say "for you as a random developer (…) nothing changes" 5:11

  It's very short sighted… and very sad, open source has been the foundation of the advancement of software, true, I'm not a kernel developer of anything so I'm not directly impacted, but this looks like f*** lawyers messing things up

• Linus is going to be pissed…lol

• If Red Hat increases the maximum licenses that a free developer account can hold/use from 16 to at least 100, I think that this will solve the 80% of our problem. The other 20% is the ideology behind Open Source and such.

• Be real, CentOS Stream is good enough. Or can you point to any real problem caused by Stream updates that would not have happened following regular RH updates? CentOS Stream is what will become the next MINOR version of RH, it's just a bit ahead of the official patch releases, and not at all the beta of RH+1 ; comparing it to Debian sid is extremely disingenuous

• I am certainly not a fan of redhat, but Alma and Oracle deserved this kinda….

• Don't know if RedHat is bad, but certainly it's obtuse at the moment. They need to boot the corpos out of the PR spots before they finish cutting off their own feet.

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