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Comment by repelsteeltje | Hacker News Reader

Yet another Rocky post that craftfully manages not to mention Red Hat or RHEL by name.

[added]

And CentOS, but not CentOS Stream.

Projects have always done this, as Red Hat has always been rather litigious and it's unwise to give them any unnecessary ground for legal complaints. The common euphemism has been "Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor" since the early days of CentOS.

Back in 2007, CentOS's self-description was "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor's redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free".

Interestingly, Oracle does not remove the /etc/redhat-release file.

That would be an interesting fight.

There's actually a (very silly) reason for not removing /etc/redhat-release. There's many applications out there that rely on that file's existence, even if it's just a symlink to the proper file. Some apps use this as a way to figure out "what kind of system" it is (e.g. is it a red hat like system?) or as a way to figure out what the system is and version it is running. It's a bit annoying, as sometimes these apps either read it or they don't, so it's inconsistent.

It gets even more weird when you consider /etc/os-release has better information (in my opinion) then the {redhat,system}-release file would ever provide. There's also the random situations where if redhat-release doesn't exist, an app may look for system-release and do some sort of parsing to figure it out (again, ignoring os-release) and may get it wrong.

That's part of why you'll find Oracle Linux, CentOS Stream, Fedora Linux, and even us with /etc/redhat-release existing as a symlink to our own. I find it to be the odd bandaid to something that shouldn't be a problem, but sometimes life just isn't straightforward.

Rocky Linux has /etc/redhat-release as well. Reason being that some software checks that file for version / compatibility information, and we want to avoid breaking it. (They should be checking /etc/os-release, but it is what it is.)

What should have they done? Thank them and IBM for setting the landscape ablaze, and dropping a couple of napalms on top by stopping white-box SRPM distributions?

Ah yes, the Rocky Linux attitude in action. Red hat has done and continues to do absolutely nothing deserving of thanks. Not for their work on fedora, not centos stream, not the myriad of projects that they maintain, absolutely nothing.

But RHEL is under GPL licence, right? So what Rocky does is covered by GPL, thanks aside. No thanks expected when it is a war :)

No, RHEL is not under GPL. Only about 1/3 of it is.

GPL applies to the distribution as a whole, so even if parts are say MIT licenced at source they still need to distribute it under GPL.

What they have done made great waves in scientific research communities. They had an unwritten agreement starting with ScientificLinux and CentOS took its place, which allowed tons of places from CERN to universities worldwide to use a standard base for software development.

Now this base is gone, and we're still trying to find our new base. This is highly damaging.

I'm not keeping sides (Rocky vs. Alma, etc.), but it was a rugpull for us, worldwide.

Fully agree, the rug pull sucked and they should not have done that

I have no hard feelings with RedHat or IBM at the end of the day, but being labeled as a freeloader just because we can handle our problems ourselves without a license is a bit insulting to be honest.

I know it's said that "freeloader" is a term used for companies abusing their license terms or using loopholes by buying 10 licenses and using the KB with 10K CentOS nodes, but it didn't help at the end.

So, RedHat/IBM handled this very badly and roughly. Their perception slipped from "One of the oldest distributions we respect as a community" to "Another tech company which wants money" very fast and very abruptly.

This is sad.

I think it's important to point out that the "freeloader" comment was not something that Red Hat or IBM said. It's something that one or two people said internally or on mailing, as part of a larger conversation where the context isn't that clean. Muy memory is hazy but I dont' think they actually used the word "freeloader" specifically, I think that was a paraphrase in a news article or something. I'll see if I can find a link.

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481006

Mike actually talked about the term in LinkedIn, trying to clarify it, accepting that it's an internal term in the process. Citing relevant part of his answer [0]:

    Finally, I wanted to say something about the term "freeloaders"  I've seen many use it.  This is a mostly internal term we have at Red Hat, it looks like at some point it slipped out in the public.  So what does it mean?  A freeloader is when a large enterprise business has 20 RHEL licenses, 150,000 community rebuild systems, and sometimes hundreds of user accounts and hundreds of kbase searches per month.  It's not the enthusiasts, it's not the hackers and coders, it's not the academics, and it's not the people that use rebuilders because they can't afford it.  We really try not to use the term, but when we do, it's about the large companies that can afford to pay but don't.

I see this as damage control mostly, because RedHat and IBM has the power to negotiate these problems on every level they want with their customers. Heck, Docker called us for 280 Desktop installs in a month (which is another story not related to my department, but I digress).

At the end of the day, we became labeled as freeloaders, even if it was unintentional. Also the quote above acknowledges us (researchers, enthusiasts, coders, hackers (in folklore sense)), and does nothing to address about the rugpull we had gone through.

The only thing we got after that was discontinuation of SRPMS like a slap on the face.

[0]: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7080669...

We thank our upstream often, in person, in social media, etc.

We sponsor the Fedora Flock conference, the only opportunity to fiscally support Fedora, and will continue to do so. Same with the CentOS Connect conference. Those checks get written directly to Red Hat, by the way.

Given you work for Red Hat, we can even say we've paid you a little! :)

Thank you for sharing that, that is great to hear! (Small note, I left red hat several years ago so no longer work there)

We do love collaborating with our upstreams--I myself recruit folks into Fedora and CentOS whenever I can, in addition to Rocky.

It's more than words and sponsorship--I really do mean it when I say I want to empower the Enterprise Linux community, and I'm thrilled that Rocky is at a point where we're able to do so.

Fedora, perhaps, but any goodwill they might have gotten from releasing Stream was burned when they killed CentOS. You don't get thanks for making something available when it's worse than the thing it replaced.

Probably following my grans advice.

If you cant say anything nice dont say anything at all.

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