Hi,
I just stumbled over this :
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-CentOS-Stream-Sources
Is this the end of Rocky Linux as we know it ?
rumors of Rocky Linux’s death have been greatly exaggerated 
We’re aware of the situation, we’re working on short term solutions as we investigate what this means.
Rest assured this is not the “death” of Rocky.
I have been collecting our notes from some various meetings and conversations here: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.24fab14385c0aa2db6fa7340a8b2aae7
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Being from Montana the comment about buying a farm in Montana made me chuckle:
Buy a farm in Nebraska or Montana. Raise cattle
Stack suggests goats instead, as they may be easier (plus milk, cheese, gyro’s, and they will eat poison ivy!)
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Another story about this:
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Makes me glad I never paid for real RedHat.
edited by moderator
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I don’t know about the details, but this sounds very much like some IBM executive wanting to “do open source” without actually granting access to said source.
At some point the FSF will gonna raise an eyebrow and gently but firmly slap some wrists.
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guess it’ll be fine, and buying a license and being a customer is also acceptable for all communtiies?
I am curious about the motivation behind this move, targeting at setting obstacles for other distros, but why?
This doesn’t sound good for the future of RHEL clones!
Thanks for the reply…
So this means going forward, Rocky Linux would not be 1:1 bug compatible.
Would it become like CentOS stream as Upstream to RHEL ?
It is in effect now for RHEL 8 and 9 and will continue for any future
RHEL releases. [1]
[1] [CentOS-devel] Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream
Hmm, I was going to ask - is it legal…
Might be time to test the GPL (but, which one…)
I mean, if something were to escape into the wild, could it be caught?
At the risk of being flamed into oblivion, RH does have a right to do whatever they want with their commercial product.
Yes, they do have an obligation under the GPL to make the corresponding source available to anyone who downloads. But, no doubt there are many components that are original works which they could choose to exclude from the larger community. So this behavior is just “writing on the wall”. IBM has made a significant investment and they intend to seek a return.
And honestly, I don’t think it’s fair to browbeat them too much about it. They’re a business. They have employees who have expenses and kids who need college tuition. The worlds economy is increasingly dependent on copyright law - movies, clothing, software and content providers on facetube or whatev, … If entities cannot enforce ownership of their works, all of these things would be homogeneous and boring.
These sorts of events actually spawn new and potentially much better solutions. Recall how Linux used to use BitKeeper until someone tried to reverse engineer it, triggering a kerfuffle and then what came out of it? … git
Honestly, I would not at all be surprised if something better than RHEL came out of all of this.
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this is a low move and waiting for Rocky to see if they can still get the source roms now
First response from AL Community:
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One of the downstream distros is Oracle Linux. Am I correct that Oracle knows something about money?
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At that point I wonder if the best move wouldn’t be to support the Debian LTS project. I’ve been 100 % GNU/Linux since 2001, and in two decades this is the third time Red Hat is pulling the rug from under our feet.
- Red Hat Linux back in 2003
- CentOS back in 2020
- Now this
Guess it’s time to move to Debian. I’m getting sick of this nonsense.
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Amazon likely saw the writing on the wall with their AL2023 release based on a hybrid of Fedora versions. Maybe a suggestion here should be the same, change the basis for Rocky to Fedora upstream instead of RHEL.
This move is typical IBM business practice and quite honestly I’m not surprised.
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While i dont disagree with the general point, they have that right - RedHat has long been a sponsor of opensource development. This kind of move is a slap in the face to the entire Linux community.
Other possible fallout - Redhat retires all opensource support and project sponsorship… OR the Linux community retaliates by refusing to support their sponsored projects.
in any case - this seems like a brash move. Only time will tell what the breadth of the fallout will be
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yeah it made me chuckle to. But in Indonesia we usel eel instead goat
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