So... completely tone deaf.
I am not a Red Hat user or customer (I've been living on Debian and using it at work for nearly 15 years now), but I can perfectly understand their decision to not play along so nicely with EL rebuilders any more.
Look at Amazon, who, until very recently at least, simply took what RHEL provided, used that to lure customers into their "RHEL-compatible" cloud platform, far away from any need to compensate Red Hat in any way, and contributed back into RHEL and its upstreams... what exactly?
I can see this only become worse with other cloud heavyweights throwing their 800+ pounds behind other EL downstreams (such as Microsoft with Alma Linux) to continue this play, which will bleed most of Red Hat's established revenue streams - and with it, RHEL itself, and all the projects Red Hat is funding development of today - dry in the long run. They are trying to stop the bleeding, and I sure hope they will succeed. There is a LOT of Red Hat-funded software in Debian that I actually depend on, and if Red Hat withers away, chances are those projects will not survive either.
That said, I think this is still insufficient to thwart them.
I predict RedHat will wither away and get shut down in 10 years. Neither Amazon nor Oracle will pick up the slack. I would not bet on any projects that they sponsor.
This is a death spasm. First of many.
Yes, let's do look at Amazon! Because if RH is targeting Amazon Linux, they kind of missed the mark; Amazon, like Red Hat, now simply draws from Fedora as their upstream. All this does hurts is the old versions that were already on their way out.
> There is CentOS Stream the binary deliverable, and CentOS Stream the source repository. The CentOS Stream gitlab source is where we build RHEL releases, in the open for all to see. To call RHEL “closed source” is categorically untrue and inaccurate.
Where I could just go get their OS myself?
What makes this extra worrying is the important role RH plays in the linux ecosystem. When they get fully IBM'd, what will happen to Gnome, Systemd, Flatpak, etc?
They managed to do that just fine pre IBM acquisition
They are doing just fine with it, but they want MAOR.
A better pricing model. Nobody is opposed to paying them. Most people used Cent because of the cost. Instead of trying to capture that value they intentionally refused to capture it.
But now I realize he was right the whole time.
The whole, literally entire point of open source is copying and redistributing.
Open source is a threat to open source companies? Yeah kinda. Many of them make money selling things that are free and, as he says “not adding value”.
Ironically Red Hat does add a lot of value but now instead of trying to sell that value they’re trying to put walls around what is free.
> I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.
The demand for RHEL code is genuine. The expectation of a return on investment is the disingenuous part. GPL does not give you the right to deny others a genuine copy of your code. If someone pays for a RHEL license and then mirrors all the GPL packages, they would feasibly be complying with all the licenses in play. Putting up all these roadblocks and assuming self-righteousness is how the community loses trust in a platform like this.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....