this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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I've become a lot more sympathetic to RH after learning about Oracle Linux. I still disagree with it, but another mega-corp selling support for a RHEL clone is egregious.
Oracle Linux is 100% the cause of this change.
Imagine supporting 2 other distros to make your own enterprise linux that is your only source of money through optional subscriptions to it.
Then some other big unethical corporation (much like your own parent company) comes in, use the GPL license to clone it and slap an "Oracle db certified" sticker on it. Finally, they decide to use the same subscription model as you except they get insane margins since you did 99% of the work for them.
But looking at what Rocky Linux is saying publicly. It's not impossible that Red Hat won't levy their right to remove access to the sources to non-commercial forks of RHEL.
I think this is a good theory. I would be surprised if Red Hat hadn't realized the value of clones and the community (and contributions) they bring.
I hope, but also honestly believe, that this is targeted at Oracle and that publicly saying "Don't worry we're only gonna use this against this company" would be make Red Hat liable to a lawsuit.
IMO, this is the elephant in the room.
If you're looking at what people used CentOS or Rocky or Alma for - dev systems, CI systems, ... These aren't lost sales. If you forced them to off of their solution, they aren't going to pay the price tag and management/installation pain of RHEL. If they have people knowing how to run Linux, they'll use something else. And sure, they are drawing some resources from RH (bandwidth for packages at the very least), but they are giving the RH system a larger footprint in deployed systems. And people running it had a positive opinion about the system.
But Oracle Linux is a different beast. Here a company is poaching large customers willing to pay for support by repackaging your product for less effort. It sucks, but it's entirely consistent for Oracle to be part of ruining a good thing.
I gotta admit I was being pretty reactionary about this and didn't know about the Oracle Linux thing. That's just... Plain wrong. Can't say I wouldn't do thr same as red hat in their shoes
I honestly don't see why. Oracle is also bringing in newer kernels they support in OEL. How much additional contribution is needed before it's basically the same as any Linux distro bringing together FLOSS and tweaking it into a system they want?
I honestly don't get this take at all. Especially for Oracle Linux. Oracle does write / package much newer kernels and some other features. Why is it OK for Red Hat to package up the Linux kernel and other GPL software and sell support, but not for someone else to do so with Red Hat as the base? It's just the base is in a slightly different location, RHEL instead of CentOS Stream. Is Amazon OK for doing (now) Fedora -> Amazon Linux? Should Red Hat need to pay Linus for the kernel? Is Amazon doing "enough" modification that they're not "freeloading" but Oracle isn't? What's the threshold, and does it have any relation to the GPL?
But even if they didn't - you do know there are consultants out there for just about any software providing support. Heck, reading this one way, you would be against users of a distro supporting themselves. This doesn't make any sense to me at all.
IMO the value of RHEL is in the packaging, testing guarantee (you know everything they offer has been thoroughly tested), and the enterprise support. IANAL but those things seem to be solely the result of their own work, and shouldn't be subject to the licenses of the software they redistribute. If not legally, then at least morally. They could allow you to freely download and redistribute the raw source code that they pull from public git repos, but that wouldn't make a difference because you can already get the exact same thing elsewhere.
The majority of RHEL clones don't offer enterprise support (usually it's a separate company that offers it and the clone doesn't receive that money, but either way it won't be close the level of quality that a vertically-integrated mega-corp can provide), so they're not taking business away from RH. If anything, it's actually on-boarding new customers to RHEL. The clones getting the packaging and the majority of the testing guarantee is also not egregious, because they're not backed by a big enough corporation to do those things themselves, and they aren't making enough money to afford it either.
None of those things are true for Oracle: they offer paid support that is similar in quality to RH, and thus will take away business; they definitely have the resources to thoroughly test and package everything themselves and they likely make enough money from their support to afford it while still making a profit.
But here's the thing. You're saying that it's wrong to base development or support on RHEL because of
IANAL either, but you don't get to ignore software licenses legally just because you don't like what they say. This is well settled law.
I do also find the idea that we should worry about legal competition to protect one specific business a bit concerning. If Red Hat can't offer better support then that's on them. This same argument seems to me like it would be against right to repair, independent car repair shops and more.