I agree with ‘ioplex’ that IBM/RH does have a right to do whatever they want with their commercial product - that said, I also think IBM/RH may be experiencing some financial challenges as it has been reported that growth at Red Hat the first quarter of this year was the smallest increase since IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. IBM/RH also laid-off roughly 700 employees in April.
I think that this was good cover to justify a move that IBM has probably been considering since it acquired Red Hat.
It also brings to mind a situation nearly 20 years ago that lead to a series of legal disputes between SCO Group and Linux vendors and users which ultimately lead to the demise of SCO
I think it’s too early to declare that the sky is falling, the Linux community is very resilient. And yes, it very possible that something better than RHEL may come from all of this.
Free software meant computer use freedom. Linux is just the kernel
powering your rocky linux distribution. In case you’re still interested
to defend your rights to share and modify software freely, one must stay
away from GPL version 2 and use GPL-3 licensed (aka copyleft) softwares
whenever possible.
So, for what I can understand between that link, and this one: Introducing CentOS Stream 9 – Blog.CentOS.org, is that the RHEL distro has an additional important step of doing human QA on the packages before including it in the RHEL distro. The automated testing happens for both: RHEL and CentOS Stream.
So, in theory, a community enterprise linux distro could build from CentOS Stream and improve the testing, and do the additional human QA tasks, and create a distro very similar to RHEL. The part that would be harder is the additional 5 years of security patches making the 10 years cycle. However, it wouldn’t be different than Ubuntu LTS (free), or Debian, with a 5 years cycle.
As a developer of Open Source Software for over 20 years and captain of cacti.net, I’m more inclined to believe that RedHat has not only committed suicide, but killed Fedora as well.
I’m as much mad as I am sad, but this is life when pressures from the machine drive execs in unnatural ways. Remember “don’t be evil”?
Rocky haas a great name and a great team. They just need a little cash so they can hire key resources and take over the mantle and OWNERSHIP of the RHEL framework. So, support them if you can.
They have already begun this. Can you say GLUSTER? I talked to the key Architects and Product Management in a private meeting and was appalled at what I heard. Sad for them, but there is always hope.
$ cat /usr/share/doc/redhat-release/GPL-source-offer
The accompanying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 release includes
copyrighted software that is licensed under the GNU General Public
License and other licenses. You may obtain the complete
machine-readable source code corresponding to portions of this release
by sending a check or money order in the amount of US $5.00 to:
VP, Legal - Products & Technologies
Red Hat, Inc.
100 East Davie Street
Raleigh, NC 27601 USA
Please write "source for RHEL 9.2" in the memo line of your
payment.
This offer is valid to anyone in receipt of this information and shall
expire three years following the date of the final distribution of
this release by Red Hat, Inc.
When I’ve found a problem with a CentOS package, I’d figure out a patch and post it to RH Bugzilla. (I’d post it to the CentOS tracker only if it was a website or CentOS re-packaging issue.) What’s my incentive now to share them to RH?
I believe ServeTheHome speculated this is a preemptive move to lock in a few more contracts before a potential license cost increase.
Short term profits to show the big three-letter bosses Red Hat was worth the billions, but long term loss as RH bleeds much of the talent that made them worth the billions.
Aren’t there a number of software packages used in RHEL that don’t fall under GPL but under a difference license such as BSD or MIT, for those packages(ie: Xorg Server) Redhat wouldn’t be required to share the sources?
This is great news because Gregory will definitely be more innovative. Am a die hard fan of Rocky Linux, but this will mark a new beginning. I choose positivity vibes.
Rocky Linux is an enterprise Linux distribution based on the sources available from Red Hat, Inc. used for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Rocky Linux intends to be binary compatible with the upstream vendor. Source code will be in our Git.
