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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there's another perspective on RedHat's backtracking on CentOS I've not thought about before: that they feel like they do/pay all the hard work when AMZN and others just rebrand RH/CentOS, add their proprietary bits, and merely supply a VM (AMI) image. So they basically want to go after AWS, Azure, Google as customers; just like Google wanted those other cloud providers to contribute to k8s a year or two ago.

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That would be a pretty rich attitude of them to take if this case. It’s not like RHEL is developed from scratch.

At least 90% of the products value is tied to the Linux kernel itself. The majority of which comes from development effort outside Red Hat. (How many customers would stay if IBM hypothetically kept the userland and swapped to an AIX kernel?)

true for the components, but not for all of the low-level integration work needed to bundle/assemble these, and all of the development/integration of the installers, etc.

there's a reason people use linux distros over building their own

RHEL's only real value is the looong support cycle. (And CentOS was the gateway drug, and now probably someone at IBM, beancounter or VP of sales, or someone with an ideology about how to convert free users into paying customers thought that many current CentOS users will just buy RHEL if they really need RHEL7/8. And ... it's hard to think they won't. The "vendor lock-in" happened the moment they picked CentOS instead of Debian/Ubuntu.)

The low-level integration is just as good in Debian/Ubuntu land too. Hell, Arch does it too pretty well. (There's an announcement list about manual updates, it's worth subscribing to even if you don't use arch[0], because usually the same change will percolate down on the grapevine and next releases of other distros will also change similarly.)

[0] btw, I don't use arch

>RHEL's only real value is the looong support cycle.

They also have in-house expertise for most critical Linux subsystems, which could in theory be useful if you are a paying customer.

No questions about that. And were I operating something that critical I'd feel good about paying to International-RHEL-Machines for support, they have great engineers.

But at the same time there are many other ways to get really competent support. Of course not for their frankenkernel. But again, were I operating something critical I would likely want to budget for regular updates that support newer HW/firmware/kernel/libc ... but we all know that certifying all that is much more expensive than just occasionally running yum upgrade. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even if 90% of the product’s value was the Linux kernel (which I disagree with but I won’t get into it), the massive value that Red Hat adds to the kernel is a stable ABI for 10 years. Fixes and new features have to be meticulously backported while maintaining compatibility and stability. So yes, it’s community code, but with a huge amount of release engineering to get it to an “enterprise”-ready state.

It may be a rich attitude, but wasn't RHEL the distribution that shipped its kernel patches as single massive diff file for a while to spite Oracle?

Disclosure: Red Hat employee

As of the most recent analysis that I've been able to find [0] (2018), Red Hat was the #1 most active corporate contributor to the kernel (drivers excluded - Intel and AMD do a lot of support for their own hardware), IBM was #2, and Amazon isn't even on the list.

And while I can't find any statistics on contribution breakdowns for GCC, glibc, Xorg, Mesa, Grub2, and other important pieces of the ecosystem, Red Hat does a lot of maintenance and development work outside of the kernel as well.

* Pipewire (Wim Taymans)

* RADV Mesa Vulkan Driver (David Arlie)

* Firefox Wayland support + hardware acceleration support + GCC compilation validation (Martin Stránský)

* The plurality of GCC and Glibc and (until recently) Xorg maintainers

And so it goes with a lot of other components.

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/775440/

(I actually found more recent ones after posting this, they look mostly similar although IBM dropped further down the list)

This is exactly why I use Red Hat software. Its the insurance provided by the fact RH engineers are massive contributors to the Linux ecosystem as a whole.

And you didn't even mention all the other big project Red Hat is maintaining/developing like systemD, NetworkManager or FreIPA.

If standing behind systemD is your argument, you aren't playing with a very good hand.

And Red Hat GPLs almost EVERYTHING possible, including their acquisitions.

No other publicly traded company I know of ever had a track record like that. I hope that philosophy stays/grows within IBM.

IANAL and do not have the exact understanding but wouldn't something like Redis's RSAL work in this case but for Cent OS and Cloud providers?

Source : https://redislabs.com/redis-source-available-license

You can't relicense a Linux distro to an incompatible (and not even actually open source) license.

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