How Red Hat’s Open-Source Negligence Is Doing Actual Harm to the Linux Community
learnlinux.tv
learnlinux.tv
If there are non-profits and hobbyists who have been using one of the free derivatives, and this change causes problems for them, I feel sorry for them. But actual for profit companies could very well pay or use something else. If you want a similar system for free, you can use Fedora or CentOS Stream. And RHEL even gives you 16 free installations for non-commercial use. If you can't pay for RHEL and that 16 installations isn't enough, you most likely don't actually need it. So many companies rely on free labor of others in the form of FOSS, and they seem to be angry about the idea that they would actually have to make a contribution.
RHEL also isn't just stealing software others wrote, they are a big contributor to many of the projects that RHEL is built upon.
Besides, FSF/GNU never said that you can't charge money for FOSS or that the source code must be published for anyone in some git repository. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
What seems to have happened is "influencers," including many who have no skin in the game and shallow takes, have seen an opportunity in this topic to make a few bucks by churning out populist clickbait. It's a discussion about business and licensing which has been perverted into a culture war. As usual all the nuance is lost and the loudest personalities have ended up dominating. /barf
There is a valid problem. The business has tried to solve that immediate problem without worrying about the knock on.
In this case blocking large funded competitors ripping off your work is valid. The way they've approached it has cut off a large number of valid use cases that have arguably driven adoption of RHEL in the first place.
In Reddits case for profit firms were hammering APIs and costing Reddit significant amounts. 3rd party apps also cut off ad revenue. A flat high fee cuts off those 3rd party apps entirely when your own product has significant deficiencies it upsets your most valuable users (contributors and mods).
In both cases there was potential for a more nuanced change that works for both sides.
From my view, Red Hat is a company which is doing something similar and as long as they comply with the GPL (which in fairness may be a bit of an open question with Red Hat now, but we'll see), then I don't really care what else they do, they have a business to run, and in the grand scheme they're still one of the good guys compared to companies with proprietary business models.
There is a lot of outcry among the "FOSS community" which frequently seem to be people that I don't relate to (and some don't really contribute to any FOSS projects or run any FOSS businesses, they just make content). This reminds me of the time that Canonical added an Amazon lens to Unity. It was in poor taste, there was some subset of the FOSS community which went apeshit over it. It took me all of twenty seconds to uninstall that lens and move on with my life and I continue to wish Canonical all the best in terms of making money in a GPL-compliant way. Businesses sometimes do things that are in poor taste but as long as they continue to contribute they are still part of the team as far as I'm concerned.
> Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, study and change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes.
if one user bought a copy, the license allows them (encourages them even) to redistribute it however they see fit, including say selling it for one cent less than the original, or simply giving it away for free. All the license requires is a single seminal user, and from that point onwards, “free as in free beer” is enabled by “free as in free speech.”
What a weird cosmology that leads to - you create a product, which everyone wants, and you carefully evaluate what the maximum price you can receive for it is - which is paid to you, by the luckiest person alive, who in turn distributes it to absolutely everyone for free, for the good of all.
This is feeling real worldbuildy.
However, it doesn't mean that Red Hat is required to keep doing business with them, or that they are automatically entitled to receive all future updates.
As I said, GNU never said that the source code must be downloadable by anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, from some public repository. It would be a completely valid business to sell binaries and then only provide the source code on request. This of course does not fit some people's idea of what free software is about.
There are of course a lot of ways that people can use to obtain RHEL source code even from now on, but I think that some people underestimate how much friction this can cause for the downstream derivatives.
The GPL says "Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code" (emphasis mine). So if one of your paying customers were to post your binary and the written offer somewhere public, then you would have to make the source code available to anyone in the world.
That's misreading the GPL. The person who posted the binary has to provide the source code; in your example, that's the "paying customers", not RedHat. RedHat is only required to provide the source code to persons they distribute the binary to.
Nope, look at this option in the GPL:
> Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
----
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
----
RedHat is only required to pick (a), (b), _or_ (c). AFAICT, they picked (a) by putting SRPMS in their repos alongside their RPMS.
Well they can't pick (c) because they don't meet either of the two requirements it has. And I know they picked (a) in real life, but I was responding to thedriver's hypothetical:
> It would be a completely valid business to sell binaries and then only provide the source code on request.
And that's (b).
> However, it doesn't mean that Red Hat is required to keep doing business with them, or that they are automatically entitled to receive all future updates.
That sounds a lot like they can do something about it. It also sounds like RedHat would be violating the GNU Public License by restricting what people can do with it, i.e. share it.
> As I said, GNU never said that the source code must be downloadable by anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world, from some public repository.
That's a strawman.
No it's not. It's literally what people are demanding.
The legal issue as I've read it is that RedHat is trying to restrict their customers from redistributing the source code themselves; their removal of the public repos is an annoyance but not the legal issue.
That's debatable: https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c...
The issue is, IMO, that they are saying they are terminating access to those publishing those sources. I don’t know if that goes against the letter of the GPL (IANAL), but I’d say it certainly goes against the spirit, they are denying their users a freedom to publish those sources, in a way.
What? GPL gives you the source if you receive the compiled form. When the source changes, you get those as well if you receive the compiled form.
Edited in if you receive the compiled form twice for clarity.
No, it does not say this. It says that if someone gets a piece of software, a binary for example, they must be given the source code it was built upon on request. It does not say that they have to receive all future source code updates even if they don't get future versions of the software.
Yes, if the consequence of excercising freedom is death(or imprisonment) then you aren't actually free, because killing (or imprisonment) stops you from excercising freedom. Red Hat terminating your license does not stop you from excercising the freedom the GPL gives you.
Anyway, Red Hat's EULA doesn't restrict freedom 4. You asserted an alternative formulation where it does infringe to be equivalent.
I reject that equivalence assertion. Does that make it clear?
> They never restrict your freedom 4 with their EULA. Only availability of future binaries. All already received binaries have their licenses intact and unrestricted, even if you break the EULA.
And
> You can exercise freedom 4, but only if you never use any updated version of this software again
To me those seem 100% equivalent in what they do, I’m asking you to explain the difference which is obvious to you, but not to me.
I never say already received binaries have their licence violated. I actually never ever said the licence is violated at all, that was in my premise before the IANAL part.
You can exercise freedom 4, but only if you never use any version of this software released after exercising that freedom.
Red Hat is doing the same thing, threatening to cut off the relationship if you decide to exercise one of the GPL's freedoms. Counts as a restriction in my book.
I thought this was clear, but as 2 misunderstood me already, I guess not.
GPL means I can’t distribute GPL software or its derivatives without its source. It doesn’t mean i have to distribute it to you for ever.
So if I don’t distribute the software to you, I don’t need to give you updates. Just like if I download some gpl code and change it locally, as long as I don’t distribute any part of it, i also don’t have to publish its sources.
Now the issue is not that, the issue is the spirit. GPL meantions “no further restrictions”, so is “exercising your GPL rights terminates your contract” a restriction? Technically you can still do what ever you want with that software , without any law suite etc, but I wouldn’t consider it free if there’s grave, even if non legal, consequences from doing so.
Edit : written before parent clarified his comment :)
I edited my comment as it’s apparently misunderstood by everyone.
Your final paragraph was exactly what I meant with going against the spirit of the GPL.
> Sure, not legally. Just de-facto. Or to use some reductio ad absurdum, you can exercise all your freedoms, but you will be killed for it, is not very free, is it?
It is just legalistic rambling and I've found it better to not engage this line of (non) reasoning.
Only those whom the component was distributed to can make this demand (although GPL lets this individual distribute the source afterwards), and only for that specific source revision.
The spirit of GPL is just compliance. It predates all modern source code distribution and collaboration systems and processes - a floppy disk sent by snail mail in response to a letter is likely the original intent.
People who choose to attach GPL licenses to their code are certainly not lawyers and bureaucrats; they intend for a certain level of sharing to occur, else they'd have chosen BSD or MIT license.
That seems unfair when Rocky/CIQ explicitly uses Red Hat's 10-year support as an advertisement point and contribute nothing to that fair?
https://ciq.com/support/rocky-linux/
With regular updates and a 10-year committed support lifecycle for each
major release, Rocky Linux is ideal for use in enterprise environments. It
is easy to migrate from CentOS and other RHEL-derived Linux distributions,
and it is secure and scalable.
Platforms on top of GPL-licensed can promise all they want but still live under the control of the community and that's part of the business many companies like Google, Meta, Obsidian are in.
Selling, and entering into an agreement, the support you don't own based exclusively on the work of another third-party that actually promises that, that's at the very least not right. CIQ/Rocky can't do anything on top of Rocky Linux because of their bug-for-bug compatibility and this decision and message benefits CIQ and not Rocky Linux users. That's also evident.
Rocky Linux could go on using CentOS Stream as an upstream with the help of Red Hat, but CIQ made the business decision to push for a RHEL clone, not the Rocky Linux user community.
You talk about morals, but if you can't see the morals here I don't think you really understand how this whole business works.
FOSS is not GPL, GPL is not FOSS. Licenses are a very small part of what we consider the modern free software movement.
Those that don't want to pay have lots of options on Distrowatch.
Red Hat share everything they do, the entitlement stinks.
Actually, you can use them for commercial production purposes too. It's just a company can't use them, as they are bound to an individual.
So it's more accurate to say it's for "personal use", whatever use that may be.
I genuinely cannot think of a company that contributes more to open-source projects than Red Hat. They to do this through hiring hundreds of talented engineers and adhering to an incredibly generous upstream-first policy, where most of the work they do gets made available for everyone else. No matter what Linux distribution you use, you are running a huge amount of code written by Red Hat.
Unfortunately, because we don’t live in a utopia, they need to be able to pay their engineers to do this work, and clones that simply redistribute their packages pose a serious threat to their ability to do this. Previously, Red Hat went out of their way to make the exact RHEL sources available to these clones. Now, Red Hat is still publishing all the code they write through Stream, but they do not have a specific repo for the exact RHEL patch set. I don’t see how this isn’t completely reasonable.
If you led a company making a product, and were responsible for thousands of employees, and some other company simply took that product and repackaged it, released it for free, while (in the case of Rocky and Oracle) running ads to compete with you in the process, are you telling me you would go out of your way to publish the exact patchsets to a special repository to make it as easy as possible for them to do this?
It would be giving customers insurance. customers made redhat huge. Free software with many vendors is insurance. Redhat was known to go the distance for customers, which also got some critics from some mantainers, but as a customer, what more could I want than that? They deliver, and give me the guarantee that if I’m not happy i can go to Rocky or Oracle and see if they are any better.
Do you think you could get better customer focus than a company like this?
But now this changes things. People are seeing this as “gpl rights” or “free loaders”, but it’s more like a social network shitting on its users because its market is set. Or any other company trying to get bigger lock in rather than providing better products/service.
This is the typical big mistake of seeing uses without revenue and having the hubris to believe those are dollars lost.
I think it takes a lot of hubris and contempt for RH staff to know this and think that clearly you can see something they don’t. RH have concluded from the data they have that clones are siphoning away their profits. Until RH starts taking a financial hit from this (so far they are doing great!) I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing.
No contempt whatsoever, this decision of theirs is very well aligned with most companies do. Also, it's not that I'm seeing and they don't, it's just the whole "lost revenue" fallacy from piracy or clones or wtv, that I don't like. Just like I actually detest the whole "capture users" lingo usually used nowadays.
> I’m inclined to believe they know what they’re doing. I'm inclined to believe that, like any other big corp, some exec, board member, or any kind of higher up, just saw Oracle and Rocky ads, saw their own usage and wtv metric they had for freeloaders, and wanted to get money back, or not bleed to other vendors, specially something like Oracle.
Again, no matter how much statistics they have on Clone Adoption, the impact on ecosystem on a whole is unmeasurable. It's a big ecosystem system, and such big change has side effects. They most likelt won't matter in this decade, and because so much shit will change till the next one, we will never be able to tell for sure if this was well worth it.
What is undeniable truth is that customers are worth off. And I don't think Redhat was at an existential risk the way they were operating.
Capitalism works as long as company actually care about the customers. Limiting who can service a customer is not good for the customers. That's all.
Unlike most startups, and darlings like Uber, Dropbox, Airbnb, and the like, Redhat actually makes loads of money. So please try to count as many software companies are more profitable than Redhat.
Redhat saw “freeloaders” and wanted a piece of that pie. Terrible mistake.
Redhat says those distributions don’t really do much, they are not completely wrong, but they do one thing that helps redhat, they expand their market. Because of a lot more companies using “RHEL compatible” distros, lots of software, (specially in areas with more regulation, or very specialized domains, etc) simply target those, this makes Redhat a very good option even if you can get some build from elsewhere, or Amazon/Oracle copies of those.
It also provides a safety net/insurance for anyone picking a Redhat contract. Can’t go much wrong.
Anyway, the issue is simple, it’s lack of vision, not only from redhat leadership but from plenty of other companies in today’s world, they are more concerned with “capturing” their small pond, instead of having a very small part of the ocean.
Ocean is scary, too big to be controlled, even if your small part is much bigger than the pond, it requires actual expertise, and to benefit from such a huge thing you have to actually look for opportunities. And worse, you have to allow others to also make profits from that huge ocean.
Much easier to just close a pond and rent seek. Lazy
CDProjectRed, you could just copy your friend’s Witcher3 installer. It was a best seller.
Interesting choices because Redhat is trying to chase higher highs without understanding what brought them there, and so does bullshit like this, While CDproject TeamRed after witcher, also got so greedy, but in this case on employee number, that old employees left, army of juniors/newhires building their next and most ambitious game. It was a dumpster fire on release day, and under delivered on everything, with plenty of delays.
There’s also small businesses like sourcehut (but wamted to give 2 very different big ones), which its author wrote this: https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
Some big start ups like Grafana are growing, and unlike Mong and Elastic, actually uses a free software license, but i dunno if they are profitable yet.
Second, lost revenue implies they would actually be able to make money from such things, piracy studies imply otherwise, and so does my personal experience. Revenue is not theirs to be lost. It’s a bullshit argument.
Third: Conclusions from leadership are blinded by pressure and greed, so it’s easy to parrot BS like “lost revenue”. Harder to double down on things like “customer focus” whose impacts is harder to measure. And redhat was always known for costumer focus, the free software provides huge insurance to their customers. And they are throwing that all away for “lost revenue”
There’s no such thing as “lost revenue”. Ok, maybe if some natural disaster took away your goods that were already ordered.
Opportunity cost is a central concept in economics. When deciding between decisions A and B, companies will consider the revenue they would gain from either decision. If companies accept the revenue from decision A, they are doing it at the cost of the revenue they would have made from decision B. This is what I mean by “lost revenue”. By choosing to shut down git.centos.org, RH loses the revenue they would have gotten from keeping the repository open and gains the revenue they believe they will get from shutting it down. My apologies if this sounds condescending, but you keep insisting that there’s no such thing as “lost revenue” and I genuinely don’t know how to respond to that without just explaining opportunity cost.
Companies get things wrong and make bad decisions all the time.
Look, don't act like RHEL is the only distro in existence. There's also Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Arch, and tons of other distros.
Even for boring old enterprise stuff there's Ubuntu LTS.
Yeah, it sucks that RH doesn't want to make life easy for rebuilders. But ultimately building your entire business model on copying the work of some other company verbatim is not a great idea.
It's an amazing idea - copying RH meant no work had to be put into actually supporting the Linux community and keeping all the profits. Massive margins were made.
It's just that the angry HNers think that RH should continue to just give things away to repackagers for free and let them profiteer off their work.
The only people making serious money that I can see are RH themselves, maybe Google if you want to count Android. They're earning $3.4B a year in revenue, compared to $140M for Canonical. Everyone else is scrounging around between the couch cushions for spare change by comparison.
RH deserves kudos for being the biggest corporate OSS contributor (by far), but I'm just not buying this argument at poor RH can't sustain themselves against freeloading competitors when they seem to be the only ones making serious money.
Indeed. But the thing is that Red Hat is veering on the abusive edge of exploiting the work of FOSS contributors just the same - the "classic" and accepted FOSS monetization way was to provide paid support with SLAs for customers. This work cannot be copied by anyone else, just the business model - but that's ordinary business competition.
Which FOSS contributors? The repackagers? Who are free to repackage Ubuntu, Debian, etc.?
The reason is pretty simple: when a company makes a profit from using an open-source package, it should be forced to contribute its improvements back to the community in turn.
The best example of why that's needed is Apple.
My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well. I'd much rather an ecosystem of enterprise Linux, such as Ubuntu and SUSE rather than a pile of free Red Hat clones.
Yes, RH (and others) are doing pretty significant work in the open-source space. I'm not denying that. But without the previous work that all the other non-Big Money-funded people did, RH, SuSE, Oracle MySQL and others wouldn't even be in business.
> My biggest concern is that Red Hat funds so much, so we are at the mercy of Red Hat doing well.
Agreed on that one. Open Source in general lacks decent funding mechanisms.
All this started with a simple thing “user freedom” or “end user freedom” if you prefer.
It’s not about community or upstream, neither efficient or bug free software, rather that we as users are not helpless with some piece of code. We can inspect it, learn modify and share it, this also means we can go to anybody else for help.
None of that cares about upstream.
But that indeed includes that if I’m a customer of some company that provides me software, and its under a free software license, and they start to treat me badly, i can go and pay somebody else to help me with it
RedHat's current business model is selling (via copying) the work of millions of other people, then refusing to adhere to the license terms they used to copy all of that work.
Blaming IBM is a conspiracy theory that's more copium than anything else.
That's because at the time, CentOS was still alive.
All the “rebuilders” redhat is complaining are just CentOS folks continuing to do their thing after their name was bought. So this is almost as old as redhat. Not “a new treat”
Because the GPL requires them to do so for their users. They are circumventing this by making anyone who re-publishes the source (allowed by the GPL) ex-users.
You see many confused people talking about that around, but they're just that - confused. The real problem is that there's a threat of termination of your paid plan once you exercise your GPL freedoms, which is at best fishy. Technically you still have access to all your GPL freedoms, but the GPL states that there must not be any further restrictions, and this certainly feels like one.
> Why is Red Hat obligated to release source code
They are not obligated to release source code to the public. But they _are_ obligated to put no restrictions whatsoever on redistribution (100% clone or not).
From the GPL: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License."
Red Hat is basically saying "We understand that the GPL allows you to redistribute our product as is. But, if you do, we will terminate our relationship with you.". IMO that is no different than a company saying "Yes, you have a statutory right for refunds within 30 days. However, if you exercise it, we will not sell you any products in the future.". That counts as a (indirect) restriction in my book.
You know damn well if you know anything of the industry that nothing good was going to come of IBM acquiring anything or anyone.
OpenSUSE is rpm-based. Does that mean that it will diverge or lag behind more?
Technically, access to source code isn't revoked, right? Someone could set up private git repository, extract and copy source files there, it is just pita, not impossible. So, the freeleecher business model is still very much possible, it is just you'll have updates later, or am I missing something?
Consider that original Unix was developed in a couple of months and its point was to be compact, minimal, and portable. Linux today is a product of rent seeking in an environment of increased profit expectations, tolerated by its original developers (approaching retirement) as a well-paid hobby, that much is clear looking at its 30 years of development time. What are the goals of Linux as a development project? The Linux desktop is not only stagnating but severely regressing. It has become unusable for me after 12 years, with its focus on RH "innovations" such as gnome 3.x/4.x, completely unnecessary containers, and wayland, while applications are lacking. A fscking joke compared to Mac OS. The server-side? A cloud OS benefitting only FAANG where RH also uses its muscle to drive Docker out of business who dared to provide alternatives (not that I'm a big fan of solutions to self-inflicted problems anyway). Android Linux? The largest known spyware vector in the world. It's time for Linux developers to take a deep look into the mirror.
On the plus side, RH's and Linux' demise means opportunities for the BSDs, for other Linux vendors such as SuSE, or entire new operating systems.
It seems like OSS Community loves to attack and eat their own - RH is one of the top Linux contributors across the board, while the profiteers did practically nothing for the community.
The rabid the attacks of freeloaders are quite intersting to see here on this site.
> Making Red Hats business model untenable.
Uber business is untenable. Redhat is very profitable.
> The rabid the attacks of freeloaders
The rabid attacks of people and customers that got their promises broken. Even Dante claimed that the last circle of hell is for the ones that break trust. So, nothing really unexpected is happening here.