Hacker News Reader

Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

Wtf.

Ok thanks for posting. I will never use any RedHat product ever again.

The alternative is paying for the software you're using. If you don't want to pay for for-pay software, there's plenty of no-cost Linux distros available.

The problem with these audits is that the exact licensing conditions can be vague, or the audit points to something that is in compliance, but might not be (e.g. you're licensed for 8 cores, but your replacement servers have 12 cores, you still only need the 8 cores so you disable 4 cores in the bios ... well, they will say, for all we know you only disabled those cores when we came to do the audit ... so now you owe us the money for 4 extra cores at full list price, going back 18 months).

The IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional. This may be outdated, but they used to use these stupid “processor units” that had some loose correlation to CPU performance. If a perfectly well-intentioned systems person moved licensed software to some new server that had half the cores, but was on a newer generation CPU, and didn’t think to ask the lawyers about it, you could get tagged for huge bucks. I will never buy IBM software ever again if I can go to any reasonable length to avoid it. RHATs licensing seems not to be moving to the IBM model yet, but I’m frightened.

> The IBM licenses are so obtuse that it can only be intentional.

This is the company who popularised "This page intentionally left blank".

Obtuseness is very much part of their toolkit.

> This is the company who popularised "This page intentionally left blank".

That was an objectively good move though.

> “processor units”

Graphical processor(ing?) unit. How many (cuda) cores are we talking about? /s

It appears that

1. The audits can take considerable time and resources to complete (effectively, an extra cost)

2. The audits can be wrong, which sounds like a nightmare to deal with ([1])

As such, avoiding Redhat even if you are "paying for the software you're using" may still seem like a good idea.

----

[1] Answer in the FAQ about incorrect audits

> First, it is vital to carefully review the audit findings in detail. IBM's customers often do not receive all the license credit they are entitlted to, and IBM typically will agree to modify its initial demands if there is a mistake in the calucations. Sometimes, IBM’s compliance teams often do not have a complete file of all license agreements that an audited company may have signed. In many cases, the negotiated terms of a license agreement can include alternative counting rules or other variables that change the way license requirements are determined for certain products. If the auditors are unaware of those terms, then the calculated audit discrepancies likely will be inflated and erroneous.

Not so simple. The skus change over time, and you have to dig into contracts 10+ years old to prove you paid for perpetual licenses for products which they renamed.

Redhat still operates independently from IBM. Redhat also uses automated license enforcement instead of audits.

For how long?

The day it stops is the day the important 60% + of people walk out. I theorize that IBM taking the same approach that a modern company does with an open source company. They're probably doing community management.

There is no profit to be gained from seizing Redhat's sales operations that I can think of.

CentOS

If RedHat doesn't eat IBM from the inside, it will go down in flames, and take CentOS with it. Without Red Hat, CentOS doesn't seem to have enough community support to keep going (I might be wrong).

It's not even like Ubuntu, where you can quickly jump ship to Debian.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com