Hacker News Reader

Comment by paride5745 | Hacker News Reader

The original founder of CentOS basically forked CentOS:

Prior to the RedHat "acquisition" how was CentOS getting RHEL source? How would the "Rocky Linux" CentOS fork go about doing the same thing?

I've heard time and again that RedHat will terminate a subscriber's contract if the subscriber is caught distributing RHEL source or binaries to discourage further distribution. Detecting such redistribution seems difficult to me, but setting that aside and assuming it's true, how does a project like CentOS or Rocky Linux get RHEL sources in a sustainable manner?

Red Hat ships source publicly, but not binaries.

http://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/8Base/en/RHOS/...

That answers my question. I had no idea RedHat freely distributed the source to non-subscribers. Of course, they are under no obligation to distribute that to the public.

No, but since they have no cost trial and developer options, its basically easier then managing who gets access to what, as anyone who gets those no cost versions are entitled to the source for those packages.

RHOS is OpenStack. The only two ways two get RHEL 8 sources are from your account’s download page (very tedious) or to use the *-source-rpms repos (reposync/manually) that are available with your subscription.

Is there anything to stop RH from not continuing to make these publicly available, since their intent is to stop the exact itch CentOS scratched?

There's nothing to stop them, no. But that wouldn't change that they have to make the sources available to their customers -and it takes one customer to get the source and provide it for a fork.

I guess what I am trying to say is that perhaps it's an inherently flawed model as evidenced but what just happened and, going forward, we should rid ourselves of such ties.

At the end of the day, we're talking about a super stable server distro with LTS. While many things are easier said than done, I believe this is important enough to the community that it could happen. My main concern with such a distro is security, a team developers providing security patches would be the most critical part of such an entity.

Hopefully before CentOS 7 goes dark in 2024 there will be viable alternatives. Right now, having to compile against custom libs not shipped with the distro (for example, modern OpenSSL) is a small price to pay for having another 3 years left to decide on best course of action to get off CentOS. Still, it's a terrible position to be in for those who upgraded to CentOS 8 already (as we were just about to do).

But if getting caught making further distribution of RHEL causes a Customer to lose their support contract then the Customers would be unlikely to do so.

One could hypothetically buy an unwanted cheap support contract to get access to the source.

GPL is copyleft, they're mainly doing additions and modifications to code that is GPL. They have to publish their code. I believe they try to be sneaky and hide how they add it but it's all open source.

They only have to publish the code to their customers, not to anyone else.

Terminating a contract when a customer redistributes the code seems to be a violation of the GPL to me, but I'm not a lawyer.

The support contract between RedHat and the subscriber isn't anything to do with the GPL. That's a separate document. They could terminate your support if you buy a red car. They can't stop you from buying a red car (distributing the source to RHEL) but they can terminate your support and perform no further distribution of GPL'd software to you.

Terminating support contracts for using your rights could easily run afoul of other laws in different regions as anti-competition. It only takes 1 region to take this approach and the code is out.

Making a support contract dependent on restrictions on distribution sounds a lot like imposing additional conditions on the GPL, just with extra steps.

I don't buy that. They're not restricting their subscribers from distributing the GPL'd code. They're restricting who they choose to offer support to. They're not adding any conditions to the GPL. You can exercise your rights under the GPL. You just may not ever get support from them again.

Actually I think (I don't know that it's been tested in court) that this is a known security vulnerability in the GPL, as long as they only decline to do any further business with that customer (including renewing their subscription), rather than reneg on a already-agreed-to deal.

But some of the tools would have been written from scratch, this is where it'll get tricky. No obligations there.

I also heard they obfuscated some code and removed comments to make things more difficult, before the RedHat acquisition of CentOS.

How did they not see this coming? Or do they just not care?

Red Hat have, contrary to the slashdot-circa-2000 meming, historically been an exemplar of open source values. They've released products that they purchased (such as RHEV) under free licenses, they do upstream delivery of their work, and they pay for a substantial chunk of the ongoing development of many key free software projects.

It was not unreasonable to assume that they would maintain CentOS.

This change has occurred now that Red Hat are IBM. I expect to see more, bad, changes. Cutting devs from free software contribution that aren't "directly important" enough, killing free software stacks like JBoss that compete with IBM offerings, and so on.

I saw some redhat people at a Linux conf and they scared me. Like they were all giddy on some cult koolaid. And they were actually strutting around wearing red hats. I maintained a healthy distance. I suspect IBM will be a perfect fit.

They always wear the hats at trade shows, it's just their promotional thing... It gives them easy recognisability, after all trade shows are all about marketing. They give them away too (but not the same quality as the ones they wear).

That giddy thing is also a tradeshow thing, some companies really pump their employees that work at these things, but they're not normally like that :)

Only if you know someone well enough you can get real info. The real communication at these tradeshows is not done in the booths but in back rooms and coffee corners. The front booths are just marketing with some low level PR staff.

Alan Cox was sometimes seen with a red hat, and he's about as far from traditional blue tie as one could get. :)

Enthusiasm, and a bit of counterculture in the mix, seems like a good sign for the long-term health of the organization, IMHO.

BTW, Linux conferences at least used to be very social events, for developers who'd only been interacting online in text, to get together. Maybe people were just really happy to be there.

Red hat is now owned by IBM. IBM needs to pull every cent of profit out of their acquisition.

Expect them to change licensing whenever possible and to use more restrictive licensing on new features to make it impossible for anyone to completely fork Redhat Enterprise in the future.

The Red Hat employees on freenode's #centos and #centos-devel have been quite adamant that IBM had nothing to do with this decision. How true that is, of course, is anyone's guess.

What is worse really?

1. IBM being IBM and forcing RedHat to milk RHEL for all it is worth ecosystem be damned 2. RedHat deciding to do this all on their own without even requiring any pressure from IBM - because they are just as bad as IBM now

IMO #2.

The set of people who make decisions like this has no intersection with the set of people who hang out on IRC.

The github ceo contacted the youtube-dl developers through IRC...

Obviously not related to this case, but seems like a pretty good indicator that the Venn Diagram has at least some overlap.

Rich Bowen (author of the initial announcement) was one of the Red Hat employees on IRC making that assertion. He has also said the same on the centos-devel mailing list: https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2020-Decembe...

My relatively conservative organization would never choose a new Linux distribution to replace CentOS, especially not one with a cheeky name. CentOS has a long track record and is well-trusted. I wish the developers all the best but if CentOS is gone, I suspect we’ll be discussing migrating to Oracle Linux (egh) or even Ubuntu. Rocky Linux will not even be discussed as an alternative.

That seems like a surprisingly capricious reason to make a decision that's going to have medium sized real-world impact in terms of rebuilding around a new distros way of doing things.

I am not saying I agree with it, just pointing out that some organizations consider long-term viability as a key component to these kinds of decisions. Just because a fork exists doesn’t qualify it to be a drop-in substitute.

Not so much a fork but just a re-packaging of RHEL.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com