Rocky strikes back at Red Hat
hackaday.com
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Just use Centos Stream to build your value and contribute back.
Red Hat bases its model on dwelling in the grey zone.
So if Rocky aspires to be a Red Hat clone... they can adopt this bit, too :)
It's not a very good argument. The GPL does not state nor does it imply a continuing duty to deliver you source code. You have a right to the source which corresponds to the binary you've been delivered. Period.
If I release a new binary to which I hold full copyright, after having delivered GPL sources to you, and I wish to change the license of that software to fully proprietary, your rights are not restricted re: the GPL bits you've previously received. Why? Because you should still have the source to the binary you received from me that was licensed as GPL.
I felt bad for Mike McGrath when I read his apologetics. The technical guy playing as a pawn in a proxy battle between salespeople and lawyers.
Some sources do not hit Stream in a way that makes it possible to rebuild a release of RHEL verbatim, and devs can and have reported issues with compiling against Stream for deployment to RHEL, especially for the latest versions, where Stream and RHEL are diverged for a time.
What are these users doing, that can't be done with good ol' Debian, or any other of the million distros? I'm genuinely interested in that.
A requirement may specifically include all security updates asap for that software on that version and it is nobody's interest to change kernels (especially by who charges the clients for this routine constant work).
Are we really going to build out compatible configuration management, monitoring, logging, etc? -- it's not a seamless transition. How much time do we have to put towards this?
And yes -- there is software compatibility issues. Look at the OpenHPC software distribution, it's designed for SUSE or Enterprise Linux: https://github.com/openhpc/ohpc/wiki/2.X
It's not unimaginable. Think systems which have been certified by some regulatory body.
So, most of finance and banking, some of health, all of munitions and arms, many aviation systems, many industrial systems, etc.
I worked in EMV and munitions, and a lot of the time it was simply cheaper to continue making the old system than it was to certify a whole new system.
The fastest certification process I knew off took about 6 month. The longest took about 2 years.
At those timescales it becomes expensive.
Those users (of which I used to be part of) find it a lot cheaper (almost negligible) to pay for things like RHEL instead of re-certifying.
You do make me wonder, though, about who the vocal users are: RHEL is not important enough to license, but important enough to not move to a different distro?
The scientific community, who run extremely high core counts and thus get a raw deal on licensing, but need the drivers for their hardware to be completely reliable as well as software compatability to work with anything from proprietary vendors that their community might need. Eg. CERN who are backing Alma linux.
And lot's of CentOS. Mainly for development. If I needed a virtual machine to troubleshoot something, I would make a CentOS one. A lot easier to not worry about the license keys. Same for build machines and temp lab setup machines, CentOS was quick to set up.
Delivered machines required RHEL. The others did not.
And “mostly sponsored” is just another way of saying sponsored. Just because you sponsor something does not mean you own it. It does not really give you many rights as I understand. Because you are a sponsor, not an investor.
You make the argument for GCC but that is a piece of GNU which I feel furthers my point. Cool, RHEL put some money into an already free and open piece of software… that makes them exempt from violating the GPL?
edit: Stallman, any thoughts?
They aren't violating the GPL as per legal point of view.
Whatever morals people think should go beyond legal matters is wishful thinking.
Anyone is also welcome to up their game and pay the projects Red-Hat is putting money on.
Whose the first?
I guess I am curious what the legal reasoning is behind them skirting it is.
You're obviously confused as to the terms of the license. Red Hat seems to be fully compliant.
The GPL requires that the distributor place no restriction on redistribution of the sources or binaries by their clients. The subscription agreement, however, is terminated if you exercise this right, despite Red Hat not being allowed to restrict the exercise of this right. This is on the very edge of legality and may be found illegal - they're shifting the consequence somewhere else to say that it's not redistribution that's restricted, but that if you redistribute then they restrict everything else.
This one. Though they can add any restrictions (like asking money for the sources, which GPL is fine with).
You can only ask in exchange for sources for the cost of physically distributing the source, nothing more, and in that case you must offer it to anyone asking at all, even if they do not have the binary. Otherwise, you have to distribute it for free on the same medium as the binary itself.
You can not either add any restriction to the act of distributing the program or it's sources. The GPLv2 says for example "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.". The question is whether or not terminating the subscription is a restriction, which it totally is to any reasonable reading by a layperson, and may be as well in front of a judge.
The value of the code has to exist in really different economies.. London to Algiers so to speak. So there has to be some room for different kinds of deals IMHO
Again -- you've said this elsewhere -- which source and which binaries? RH places no restrictions on the redistribution of source or binaries received pursuant to Section 3 of the GPL. RH simply terminates the business relationship if you decide to build a 1:1 clone. What you're reading into the GPL is a duty not to terminate a business relationship, and to deliver new and distinct sources and binaries, after the business relationship is terminated.
All that said, I will just admit that I am upset with RHEL and need to do some more research into the GPL.
On one side your Red Hat:
- takes non commercial open source and does integration and sells support. Also contributes to a megaton of open source projects across all layers of Linux.
The other you have the rebuilds:
- take Red Hat's commercial but open source work
- does no integration work whatsoever, since RHEL's already done that
- trivial contributions to almost no open source projects that aren't only necessary for their position as a clone
- undercuts RHEL in support offering since they don't have to do practically anything themselves.
So yeah, RHEL is an excellent citizen of open source and the others are just parasitic freeloaders.
RHEL is for big business having bespoke applications; unless you need the stability nobody expects normal open source devs to make RHEL their testbed.
Because that doesn't say anything about stuff running on RHEL, and you can test on Debian just as well so why bother?
Like, why do you care about RHEL at all in a way that isn't covered by CentOS Stream?
I don't test on centos stream because I'm skeptical anyone deploys it to production and code working there wouldn't tell me much about working on RHEL. If my code crashes on their bleeding edge, do I try to fix it or wait to see if something under it is broken? Could waste a lot of time there for zero benefit.
I personally think this is the beginning of the end times for RHEL. It will not survive IBM.
And if you're building infrastructure on free software that has dependencies on RHEL, or rather "free RHEL", shame on you. RHEL is for shops with wheelbarrows of money that used to run Solaris or HP/UX and are running proprietary software. What is happening is IT project managers are trying to justify their existence and cut costs, so they switch the contract to Oracle Linux so they can earn that bonus check.
It is business as usual with any of them.
Maybe they should remove their Linux contributions as well, that they have been doing since around 2000.
Scraping source using dodgy methods almost sounds like "pirated" Linux.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259
but i don't think the issue is with them, the real issue is huge corporation like Oracle who are ought to destruct Redhat and I can understand where they are coming from... Rocky, Alma, they are casualty..
Of course, having had licensed RHEL machines and VMs in the past, this whole thing makes me much less likely to ever pay RedHat/IBM for them again… Definitely already time to look for alternatives. It is really quite a shame though, given the amount of Linux and related open source development RedHat developers did.
It's like building a diet exclusively based on eating the free samples at Costco then going "oh those evil bastards, I'll starve to death" when they take them away.
Maybe use platform-agnostic architecture next time or don't build your house of cards on proprietary-adjacent distros.
"Due to this ongoing bad behavior by IBM's Red Hat, the situation has become increasingly complex and difficult to face. No third party can effectively monitor RHEL compliance with the GPL agreements, since customers live in fear of losing their much-needed service contracts. Red Hat's legal department has systematically refused SFC's requests in recent years to set up some form of monitoring by SFC. (For example, we asked to review the training materials and documents that RHEL salespeople are given to convince customers to buy RHEL, and Red Hat has not been willing to share these materials with us.) Nevertheless, since SFC serves as the global watchdog for GPL compliance, we welcome reports of RHEL-related violations."
TL;DR: To be sure they were complying, marketing department is as important as the legal one, and they were fearful of people taking a good look there.
Every time you ask why use busybox for userland utilities its always some bullshit reason around security or resource usage that doesn't hold water.
My time is more valuable than shaving off a few milliseconds running gimped core utilities with major functionality missing on a non embedded system.