Not surprised. A for-profit corporation wanting more money. Especially as we enroach further into late stage capitalism where corporations struggle to find more territory to profiteer from and squeeze more profit out of us.
The era of free services being profitable is ending rapidly, and we see this across many areas in the world.
I wouldn’t say they aren’t profitable, I would say the greed outweighs profitability.
3 Letters IBM
It’s 'Bout Money
Lmao, I’ll need to use this more frequently
You’re right. I should say “profit growth” which is what corporations look for. You can have solid growth, but unless it’s growing, they don’t care.
Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, “if you’re not growing, you’re dying.” There’s a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.
And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.
There’s a word for sth that grows unlimited and uncontrolled. Cancer.
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I was wondering when Red Hat enshittification would began the moment IBM announced the acquisition. Turns out it begins today.
They announced the discontinuation of CentOS in 2020. That’s when it started for me. This is just more of the same crusade against people “using RHEL for free” (which I’m sure none of the suits at IBM even begin to understand the value of, the real wonder is that RH managed to resist this move for so long).
Certainly in retrospect. Back then they defended the decision by saying they wanted to shift their resources to centos stream, and that would be fair enough. But now it’s clear that wasn’t their motivation at all. They wanted to kill the free RHEL fork in the hope to attract more customers, as a lot of people already suspected.
Took longer than I expected tbh. Time to reimage all my Rocky servers I guess. I really liked the 10 years of support they offered.
Maybe IBM can hire the Reddit CEO when he is fired to head up Red Hat. Seems like a perfect fit
I was wondering why you were mentioning IBM, then I read that they bought it for 34B. This decision tracks…
Jeff Geerling consistently has the most compatible, tested, updated, and well documented Ansible rolls out there. If I need to get some niche software installed and there is a geerlingguy role for it - I breathe a sigh of relief.
If he is considering stopping support for RedHat and it’s various distros - that is massive.
It’s most probably IBM forcing it, but yeah it’s dumb.
I don’t know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don’t think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it’s easy to blame IBM, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
Lol, redhat is just butt hurt they lost the NASA Linux contract to rocky
I’m absolutely not surprised that NASA took CentOS-in-more-than-name over the people who are trying to kill Enterprise Linux.
NASA did their contract beforehand.
And it was only for a few workstations, still I think it caused Red Hat to panic. Government is a big customer.
they wanted Red Hat for a reason.
They were dying and they needed a cash cow to milk. The only way that was gonna work is if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it. And they can’t stop, so they’re just kicking away.
if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it
I miss Cringely’s take on this.
. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.
It’s a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.
But this new one is QUITE the departure. It’s not ‘red hat’ stupid but a little further on the spectrum.
Ohh, let’s see, pay for Redhat which will rot away without community support or use one of a dozen other distros. Sorry yum, it’s been fun.
you’d be surprised how many comps use RHEL just for the “I’m completely fucked and I need corporate level support” or “we need a data center completely off the rack” or “we wanna throw money at this problem” or “we need somebody to sue or point our finger at if we get majorly fucked” or “we need an OS that meets compliance” use cases. many comps won’t just use some random community built OS to run their shit regardless of the community support. at the end of the day, many corporations with very complex requirements don’t have many legitimate data center OS options available.
How is this supposed to work with GPL ? Because anyone owning a copy is free to redistribute sources
The plan is to give the source Code to paying customers. This is gpl-compliant.
The concern is that Red Hat terminates your account if you redistribute the source to another party. This feels like an additional restriction placed on the source code, which if it is, would indeed violate the GPL.
Now THIS is a GPL-violation or at least a serious concern and asshole move.
Serious concern and asshole move? Yes. Gpl violation? Not sure. You could argue you are not restricted to do whatever you want with the code you receive with a subscription. But if you share the code, they don’t want you as a customer anymore and won’t give you new code. I don’t know if the GPL allows that.
This clearly goes against the intention of the GPL. Maybe not illegal.
This clearly goes against the intention of the GPL.
That I agree with. Maybe this will cause the FSF to create a 4th version.
Terminating a support contract, in itself, is not a GPL violation. The restrictions only affects the ability to receive future updates.
Edit: Red Hat indeed claims that no GPL violation is happening, yet they inform their customers that sharing updates leads to contract termination, which clearly breaches the GPL at least in spirit: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
I think it depends on whether it’s considered an additional restriction on the recipient’s right to redistribute the software.
Saying, “you can redistribute the software but you will face _____ penalty” seems like a gray area to me.
Context is important. It’s possible that the software is distributed without any warning like that and that the termination of the support contract is done without citing the redistribution of previous versions as a reason. OTOH if the customers could prove that there’s widespread knowledge of the retaliatory termination that could be equivalent to a (non-written) restriction that is indeed incompatible with the GPL
The warning is in the agreement every customer (and free developer account) signs to obtain access. They also mention they could sue you, although I think it is unrealistic they would do so just for redistribution.
Yes more details would be good.
According to Alma Linux
“the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.”
Yeah, it’s a big myth that GPL prevents corporate profiteering.
I haven’t seen this in person so I can only speculate, but I bet they’ll only provide the sources as a tarball or something instead of a git repo, which will make it a PITA for anyone do actually do anything useful with it. I mean, you could potentially still build a full distro from it, but you wouldn’t be able to feasibly maintain it without the ability to do a sync and merge from upstream. So this way, Red Hat achieves their goal of being able to kill any spinoff distro, whilst still remaining compliant with the GPL.
Additionally, they have to release sources for the projects but not necessarily for things like the spec files or the rpms.
Here’s the source for the kernel . . . .
Thanks I can get that from kernel.org
It’s the part that’s not GPL that’s the value add here.
Build scripts are absolutely required by the GPL
It’s not a “they will.” Red Hat customers are able to download source rpms from the repository or the site, this has been the case for a very long time. It is possible to clone / sync the repository, this is how airgapped networks can still host their own.
exactly, why isn’t this a gpl violation
I don’t suppose they’re modifying much of the GPL’d kernel necessarily. That’s the part protected by GPL.
Their own actual distro is not exactly a modification of GPL software. And if they modify GPL software, they wouldn’t have issues providing source code to that.
I am basically in the same boat, interacting with RHEL mostly because some of our customers insist on using it. It is already a giant pain with its tiny number of packages and the whole license tool struggles. At least so far we could build our internal tooling and the software we build for our customers on simple Centos or Alma Docker containers and use those for test systems as well. But now dealing with RHEL at all suddenly became an order of magnitude more painful, especially as others will also reduce support for it in their third party software we use.
the whole stream debacle was a massive red flag for me. at that point the decision was made to completely transition the tiny number of remaining RHEL based systems to debian and be done with it.
red hat has contributed much to the FLOSS ecosystem and some may require the corporate backed walled garden, but stream was (and this is) exactly the sort of unhelpful drama no one needs right now.
Yeah fuck this move. Seems incredibly short sighted and a huge fuck you to the community.
@FrankTheHealer @REdOG I guess Debian based distros win.
Is there even a Debian based distro that is up to date like Fedora, does not have snaps and does not have “Unstable” in its name?
Siduction. It is rolling release though.
Not a huge fan of rolling releases but Ubuntu/Debian are too far behind, Fedora is a very nice middle ground.
My best middle ground is openSUSE tumbleweed. It is a rolling release but very reliable. Its not bleeding edge. It has snapshots which function like very small stable releases every few days insteqd of every package being updated individually. Every such snapshot has automatic testing. So all in all, very stable for a rolling release.
Just checked their website and it seems like they’re using debian sid packages. What’s the difference between using siduction and plain debian sid, besides having a preconfigured desktop?
I never used siduction, im juat aware of its existence. I think they add some stability(=reliability) on top of sid and also keep updating packages during sid’s freezes. Dont quote me on this.
Pop?
Probably the best choice but they have no KDE variant and are working on their own DE so things are probably changing very soon.
Mint?
Mint isn’t super up-to-date, which if you want the cutting edge kernel/mesa for gaming is not great, but it’s a solid choice, and I 🥰 them for keeping all of the Snap shit out of core.
Does Mint still use the Ubuntu packages?
As @addie@feddit.uk mentioned they are way out of date for gaming on AMD, especially if you purchase a new GPU at some point.
I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora when I got my 6900 XT because it would have taken another 2-3 months for Ubuntu to catch up to a kernel version where I could use it.
For most packages yes. You can also use Debian Edition, but if you want new packages that’s even worse
Mint is also based on Ubuntu LTS, so it is way behind Fedora by the time another release comes out. I like it as a distro but it doesn’t meet the request.
consider PCLinuxOS for a mageia (mandriva, conectiva and mandrake, both branches from RedHat pre-Enterprise Linux) descendant.
This is start of end RH.
Feel the Hat Red flow through you
I have seen IBM do this multiple times. When they buy a company, they leave it pretty much alone for a year or two. Then they start to make their IBM changes to it, and change it enough to make anyone that knew the product before them hate it. IBM buying RedHat was the beginning of the end. I told my boss about it the day I read the news of the IBM buyout, “We need to stop using CentOS for any new systems.”
I’m in process replacing CentOS with Debian. Don’t see point to use close source.
Please don’t fuck up my beloved fedora. Kind regards.
Moving away from Fedora
*sigh* Do I have to go abandon Fedora now too? I really hope they don’t pull a CentOS on that one
I highly doubt this would affect Fedora. Thankfully, it’s community driven and self-goverened so Red Hat execs can’t go and tell them what to do. (Though I don’t know how many ties the Fedora council had to Red Hat)
All of Fedora’s funding and IP comes from and belongs to Red Hat, this would be very persuasive. At least openSUSE has more sponsors than just SUSE.
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Redhat: Yes, but also we are liars.
I gave up on RedHat when they gave up on the community. I wish them well, but I’m never going to use or recommend RedHat again,
I’m not sure how confident I feel about Fedora’s future lately.
I’ve just switched to fedora from Arch :/
