This is the first of, probably, many posts about the changes to how Red Hat distributes RHEL sources, RHEL clones in general. Not to mention the past, present, and future of FOSS development and business.
Short version: There's probably something in this post for everybody to disagree with.
Earlier today at #almalinux we patched CVE-2023-38403 in iperf3 and released it prior to anyone else in the EL-ecosystem. We promptly submitted PRs with #centos and #fedora.
A lot was learned during this process so we can nail down the processes of doing our own patches while contributing upstream and ultimately deliver on our promises from https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/
"Activists have found this discussion frustrating, but kept the nature and tenure of these discussions as an “open secret” until now because we all had hoped that Red Hat's behavior would improve. Recent events show that the behavior has simply gotten worse, and is likely to get even worse."
The patch by @jonathanspw has been merged into @centos Stream 8! The c9s patch state is a bit different as the maintainer would rather backport than rebase.
This comes after Red Hat has now rated CVE-2023-38403 a Important, the second highest rating.
SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, enduring compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
The elephant in the room nobody talks about when discussing the #RHEL changes is the reliance of so many applications and users on a "stable" "enterprise" release because they're themselves to under-resourced to do the work to keep up with the actual speed of #OpenSource development.
"The chase for “bug to bug compatibility” hurts community, hurts RHEL customers and hurts the industry as a whole. The real innovation behind the CentOS Stream is the attempt to change it."
"Since #RedHat has no control over #RockyLinux or #AlmaLinux, it appears the company is taking aim at them by restricting #RHEL source code access to #CentOS Stream. This will make it more difficult for Rocky and Alma to maintain the 1:1 compatibility they currently have with RHEL.
Red Hat has certainly been making waves in the #Linux community. In addition to its widely criticized CentOS decisions, the company recently laid off #Fedora Program Manager Ben Cotton"
Keeping Open Source Open https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/ It seems like the Rocky Linux team is willing to find creative solutions to problems, even if it requires a bit of hacking. I am curious if Red Hat is willing to engage in this game of whack-a-mole. Was it truly beneficial RedHat? Was it worth it? #rhel#redhat#opensource#linux
Open Source community after Red Hat decides to go closed source 😂 #linux#redhat#rhel#opensource By limiting the RHEL public sources to CentOS Stream, it will now be more difficult for community/off-shoot enterprise Linux distributions like Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, etc, to provide 1:1 binary compatible builds against given RHEL releases.
"An #AlmaLinux contributor (who was formerly an ArchLinux user) was so fired up by our community that he now maintains over 600 Fedora and Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) packages, including some widely-used ones like certbot, brotli, iperf3, imapsync, and countless Python libraries, many of them as the primary contributor maintaining them for the greater Fedora and Enterprise #Linux ecosystem. EPEL is tremendously important to both Red Hat and #RHEL users."
Are there any good #debian guides for people accustomed to the #redhat ecosystem? I've always used #rhel professionally and for homelab stuff with #arch for my daily drivers. Recent events have me thinking I should know more about Debian. Outside of administering Proxmox I can't say I have much experience with it.
So I asked RMS what he thought about the whole RHEL story, since he's one of the co-authors of the GPL, and his answer was that he's not reached a conclusion yet and that "it's complicated".
I'd love to weigh in on the #RedHat situation -- as someone who contributes to #Fedora and #RHEL daily -- but wow, the vitriol around the recent news has gone off the rails. 🔥
"Debates continue, even today, in copyleft expert circles, whether this model itself violates GPL. There is, however, no doubt that this provision is not in the spirit of the GPL agreements. The RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] business model is unfriendly, captious, capricious, and cringe-worthy."
Given that, as the #MicroMirror team @warthog9 and I have concerns in supporting RHEL's upstream development branch in a community manner. We have removed Centos-stream from the eight Micro Mirror nodes as well as our main mirror.fcix.net mirror which were hosting that project, explicitly over these concerns.
The MicroMirror project is run, literally, as a hobby and a public benefit. No one on the team is paid for this effort, and in fact costs us money (though we actively appreciate and love the support we get, we still throw our own skin into this game too!). It's hard to be a part of Redhat's community when they seemingly take umbrage with our support, so from our perspective Redhat needs to either embrace the community as we have always wanted and expected from them, or until such time as they do they should consider getting into the Linux mirror business for their development branch of RHEL.
CIQ built a community on an objection to subscriber-only services, only to build a new subscriber-only service. Will their community accuse them of betraying Open Source?
I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux) | Jeff Geerling (www.jeffgeerling.com)
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment (www.suse.com)
SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, enduring compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.