RHEL hasn't gone closed source, it still complies with the GPL. If they provide you a binary, they must and will continue to provide you with the source code. I feel like this is like when they announced Centos Stream as a "rolling distro", their messaging is awful, and the optics are bad. I feel this is more to stick it to Oracle and unfortunately, Alma and Rocky are just getting caught in the crossfire.
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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It has me conflicted. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, we need projects like Alma and Rocky.
Yeah, I'm conflicted too. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, fuck IBM.
More detials found here: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream?sc_cid=701f2000000tyBjAAI
Seem more accurate that their public repos will be closed, so now only centos-stream will be public. You will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a paying customer.
Thanks, by reading "RHEL going closed source" first thing I thought is that would violate the GPL license, but the article you linked seems to indicate that's not the case.
CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?
CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?
No, CentOS is no longer a RHEL clone, but a beta version of stuff that goes into RHEL.
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My immediate thoughts as a fedora user: Fedora is looked at as a bleeding edge testing distro for what eventually goes into red hat. By using fedora, I am sort of a beta tester for ibm, and am in some ways contributing to the improvement of a distribution (red hat) that goes against what I believe a Linux distribution should do. Given that, should I distro hop?
Or is my brain just trying to make me distro hop again?
Edit: spelling
I would never consider Fedora bleeding edge, but that being said, after the Red Hat lawyers forced the removal of H.264 I did end up hopping after 5 very great years with Fedora. If you're up for learning something new NixOS is a lot of fun.
NixOS is actually what I was considering! I like the immutable aspects of it but the setup will require me to find some downtime in order to get started.
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You have to make up your own mind. Personally the association with IBM or Oracle would put me right off a distro. But you can find evil in all these big companies, so pick your poison.
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You aren't the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I'm not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.
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OpenSUSE maybe?
You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.
It's nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy...but usually some compromise is required.
Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.
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I wouldn't expect it to impact Fedora, but this will probably be significant for Rocky/Alma.
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This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There's been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.
IMO that's the main driver behind this change: don't feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.
So then Oracle just gets 1 dev account and pulls the source.
This was my initial thought as well, but I imagine that would violate the terms of their subscription and Red Hat could just revoke their access going forward.
I doubt it would legal to make that against the terms. It GPL code, Oracle is allowed to access it as they please.
Very true for the GPL code, but Red Hat adds code that isn’t GPL to the distro. So your downstream distros would have to cherry pick that code out.
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Some additional information from Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, since many people (including me) are confused about the implications of this:
https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/ https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
Interestingly, Rocky Linux claims to be largely unaffected by this, while Alma Linux is desperately looking for alternative solutions.
It seems like no one really knows what the implications are, and we will just have to wait and see.
Rocky's reaction seems the same as Alma, current long-term solution is they don't know. A more businessly optimism in the post doesn't really make up for a clear technical plan going forward.
Since Fedora is upstream of RHEL I'd like to think it'll be unaffected from the move. But only time will tell
They still give all the code to their customers and as it is still GPLed code, noone can stop redistribution. So I'm wondering who will be the first RHEL customer which runs some "open mirror" of the RHEL codebase.
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Honestly? I think Ubuntu's userbase is about to get a lot bigger. The larger hosting companies (AWS and Digital Ocean are the two that come to mind immediately) support Ubuntu as a first-class citizen, so once the not-true blue RHEL distros take the hit migrations are going to happen.
Someone enlighten me. What are we talking about? The whole distro? Isn't almost all of it GNU stuff under GPL or similar licenses?
Or is it just about some in-house made RH applications and patches done without any collaboration from outside people?
I don't get it how a Linux-based project can go closed-source after ~30 years.
To comply with GPL, RedHat simply has to provide source code to anyone they provide binaries to.
Yea, so why is everyone misrepresenting these news so damn hard? I'd think people who report on Linux would understand the core basics of GPL.
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People use rocky/centos because they don't want to deal with the hassles of licensing while also keeping the door open to an upgrade to RHEL if needed. I think this will be a net positive for Debian and Debian-based distros thanks to enterprise infra switching to Ubuntu which offers this (free use and an upgrade path to full compliance/commercial support.
Them closing up completely undermines their UVP.
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I knew it would happened the moment IBM bought them. Those corporate idiots can't comprehend OSS.
Absolute L move from them. Atleast it makes the choice easier if future distrohopping urges will haunt my zoom zoom brain.
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Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Rocky & Alma were easy targets. Next up thumbscrews on systemd!
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RHEL technically isn't going "closed source", the source code will just be paywalled now. Despite being a dick move from RedHat, it is perfectly legal to do under GPLv2, as far as I understand anyways...
I'm newish to Fedora and admit I don't understand the whole developer/governance structure of it vs RHEL, but the news did make me wonder about continuing to use Fedora.
Reading some comments here, maybe it's a non-issue. Guess I'll have to dig more.
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They've been essentially read-only for years, in my experience. It's stupid to go closed source, but they weren't easy to work with to get things fixed before now either.
Blueification of Red Hat . . . sad times
Well, I just hope they ARE thinking. Gotta be a good reason -I have no read anything about this- for doing this.
I guess a few people might be looking at other distros now.
They won't say it, but the reason for this is 100% to kill downstream distros based on RHEL. They already effectively killed CentOS, the downstream distro they controlled, by moving it from downstream to upstream. With this change they're now coming for other downstream distros that they don't control, like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Upstream repos like Fedora (and CentOS once it changed to CentOS Stream) will not be affected... for now at least.
I think downstream repos are important to the ecosystem because they give the FOSS community contributors an easy way to test against RHEL-compatible binaries without being encumbered by an RHEL license. IBM seems pretty hellbent on ensuring that people won't be able to do this without agreeing with their license, and as soon as they achieve that I think they'll tighten the screws on their own licensing in ways that aren't to the benefit of anyone but IBM. It seems pretty obvious to me that IBM is making this change because they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms, and my guess is that their benefit will come at the community's expense. Yes, you can get a free (as in beer) developer account and test using that but now you have to register VMs, keep track of your number of registered systems, and you have to worry about possibly violating the not free (as in freedom) license that you have to agree to in order to access the Red Hat developer program. I think this change will be bad for RHEL in the long term, but time will tell.
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