I really don't understand what purpose this move serves, especially if the RHEL source code will still be available to people with access to those repos - so it's still kind of public, if you give them your personal info and update that info annually in return? Is it just to have people use different mirrors for the sources? I don't see how this entices someone to buy RHEL or get a Developer Sub who isn't already doing that.
@vwbusguy
100% -- not sure how this is a "pro" either -- it doesn't enhance my opinion of #redhat -- it certainly makes me question what other changes are in the pipeline and if they will also negatively impact the appeal of their brand aswell.
@vwbusguy From what the Alma devs said. They don't provide all the patches they use on RHEL in Stream or something. And you can't just take the sources from the customer portal as that's against RHEL's TOS (Unless it's GPL or AGPL software, of course).
I get the sense that Red Hat doesn't seem to consider how many current RHEL customers are also AlmaLinux and Rocky users. #OpenSource is not a zero sum game.
@vwbusguy TL;DR as I understand it: CentOS (Stream) uses the same git source trees as RHEL (instead of extracting the SRPMs as they had to do before). Those SRPMs are now no longer available from RHEL, but the CentOS ones are, which should (in theory) be the exact same. Also they get released a few weeks earlier (https://toot.kif.rocks/@ruhrscholz/110589206553619700)
@vwbusguy Red Hat doesn’t want any RHEL viable clone on the market. Simply this. No way to have RHEL without Red Hat.
Probably, they analyzed the market and decided that there’s a sizable chunk of business “under” big enterprises (using RHEL by default), down to SMEs. Now this market has less choices. Coming to RHEL, just one: Red Hat.
It’s not strictly lock-in because you can have other distros, but the mantra is that RHEL is the “cloud linux” now. It isn’t, but still.
@fedops@RL_Dane@dfloyd888 I'm still upset about this and several others who were prominent figures in the broader open source community who very much did not deserve that.
"Open Source" has always been about courting Business involvement and money. And man, that's a complicated dance.
Linux is much stronger and better for all of the work that companies like IBM have put into it, but as a community of people, I'm not sure if we're any better off than 23 years ago, when you'd have to visit forums/IRC to find the right hardware to run Linux on, etc. (Very scrappy origins)
@RL_Dane we absolutely definitely are better off now, but that doesn't mean that things can't get spectacularly derailed by color-coordinated pencils.
Just the fact a company says with a straight face that they're replacing people with sparkling autocomplete tells you a lot about either their understanding of their business or, quite possibly, the quality of work their Indian sweatshops deliver. In IBM's case I'd say: both. @vwbusguy@dfloyd888
@RL_Dane@fedops@dfloyd888 Fedora legally isn't actually anything. Red Hat owns the trademark, but there's no Fedora foundation, corporation, etc. Anyone now can fork Fedora and call it by a different name. There have been a bunch of distros over the years that have done exactly that. This isn't generally so much a "stick it to Red Hat" thing as much as a "what naturally happens in open source" thing.
@vwbusguy the Fedora release model is just incompatible with businesses. Fedora Server being as excellent as it is, I just cannot update all machines annually. And no, not everything is containerized and can run on immutable infrastructure.
SUSE's is much more amenable. Plus SLES is pretty big in Europe, a close number 2 to RHEL.
@fedops@RL_Dane@dfloyd888 All of this is subjective. At the end of the day, use the best tool for the job. The real problem isn't with Fedora or SuSE, but Red Hat has broken a number of "contracts" around the lifespan of CentOS and its relationships to downstream (and upstream) projects.
@fedops@RL_Dane@dfloyd888 One way that #SuSE is definitely better is that #OpenSuSE Leap and SLES have reliably co-existed for nearly 8 years now. If platform predictability is now a concern, (Open)SuSE looks pretty good. As of 15.3, Leap and SLES are built from the same publicly available sources.
@RL_Dane@vwbusguy@dfloyd888 My first distro was Red Hat, I ditched it once it became RHEL. I learned an important lesson.
Cool: a corporate version of a community distro (Debian/Ubuntu)
Not cool: a community version of a corporate distro (RHEL/Alma). At the end of the day your upstream is beholden to shareholders and not the community.
@RL_Dane@vwbusguy@dfloyd888 No! #RHEL is still #FOSS. The free software license says anyone who runs the software should have access to the source code. Not everyone on the planet.
If a distribution is paid, then its only mandatory to give the source code to those who bought it. That's it.
Is it a bad move? Yes. Is it against #FreeSoftware? No.
@hirad@RL_Dane@vwbusguy@dfloyd888
Technically, if you only make the source code available to your customers only if they request it in a Fax, and you post it to them printed on toilet paper, you're still abiding by the GPL.
@RL_Dane yes, if they do that they violate the license.
And unless there is evidence to the contrary, I will give the benefit of the doubt to one of the biggest Linux corporations that they know they can't do that and therefore they don't do that.
@passthejoe AFAICT, the RHEL sources are still available, but they would need to be fetched through a Red Hat subscriber account login, which could just be a "free"* Developer Sub. Also, IANAL, but there doesn't seem to be anything stopping anyone from hosting their own public mirror of those source assets.
Not entirely free as you have to give away your contact info and update it annually.
@vwbusguy@jbowen I don’t know. Alma seems to think it’s true, and as I understand it Red Hat only has to provide the source to the people it distributes binaries to. And if redistribution is a violation of their terms then they could just cancel those subscribers who redistribute.
If it ends up working out like that then no corporate controlled FOSS project is safe. I said it earlier half joking, but what stops IBM Hat from locking Ansible behind a Red Hat sub?
@furicle@mos_8502@jbowen That it makes it harder is a given. There's no way that this makes it easier for a rebuild distro or any hobbyist or vendor that wants to be downstream of RHEL to do so. The complications seem to be measured by amount of annoyance rather than inhibition, but it's a non-trivial amount of annoyance.
I think the ultimate (hard) answer is to just cut RHEL/IBM. Let them play their stupid reindeer games.
Nobody wants to hear this, but I think if all of the work that went into RHEL clones went into making Debian more enterprise-ready, it would be amazing. But maybe (of course) the problem is bigger than I think it is from a birds-eye vantage point.
Like someone else said, OpenSuSE Leap is gonna look hella good now.
@RL_Dane@furicle@mos_8502@jbowen Regardless of any reactionary feelings anyone might have for Red Hat right now, I'll just say that the #OpenSuSE crowd are great people and are worth checking out on their own merits.
@vwbusguy@mos_8502@jbowen but not a one time annoyance, but a pain on every single update of every single package going forward (iiuc, and I could be full of it)
That's making friction for others all out of proportion to what it was costing them.
@RL_Dane@furicle@vwbusguy@jbowen He publicly stated that underaged porno should be legal. He’s also a known sex pest and serial sexual harasser. I don’t know that he’s a paedo, but he is definitely a pervert.
@vwbusguy@jbowen not really. The licenses may require you to provide source code for software you ship, but they never require you to continue shipping software to a client that violates your terms.
@vwbusguy I don't get it either. But then it's IBM. And if there's one thing they've been known for it's totally effing up everything they touch. Sort of an inverse King Midas.
@fedops@vwbusguy It's kind of obvious, as the original vendor lock-in principles on the (mainframe) computing industry were largely designed by IBM. Now they are just following the old principles, by releasing low quality trial version for free, and keeping the "source of truth" behind paywall & terms of service limited support contracts.
But this doesn't surprise me at all after seeing how Fedora has been closing down in the recent years. They are undoing their own creations.
@fedops@vwbusguy Basically it's the classic "do we provide support for people who don't directly give us money" problem. If the 3rd party Open Source contributions are not directly measurable in the yearly sales volume (of the support and consulting contracts), there's little value on keeping it freely available.
@autiomaa yeah, typical manager behavior. Don't understand that Rocky and Alma customers will not automatically become RHEL customers as they either don't need or can't afford their subscriptions. 🤷 @vwbusguy
@fedops@autiomaa It's not just that - this is making it harder to justify buying RHEL as these bombshells (add IBM poaching Ceph) contribute to Red Hat's platform seeming volatile, which is the last thing you want for a reputation in the enterprise space.
@vwbusguy that is exactly the point! And those beancounters have no idea what that even means.
I had a lot of respect for Big Blue back then, but the current IBM is nothing but a rotten shell of its former self. I know a few people that got sold of to them through outsourcing, and every single one quit. @autiomaa
"Unfortunately 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."
"In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released. These updates will be carefully curated to ensure they are 1:1 compatible with RHEL, while not violating Red Hat’s licensing, and will be vetted and tested just like all of our other releases." https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
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