this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
I guess we're in a bit of a waiting game then. Too much stuff is tied to RHEL to easily switch for us, but TBH we're starting to see more people wanting Ubuntu (ugg) / debian because ML seems to be there. Also most commercial software I've seen tends to offer .deb and .rpm or just .deb actually so more and more it's RHEL that isn't packaged for - and that's been for years now.
I need to understand... Given its GPL because of the kernel, how could they change the terms of the license suddenly? Doesnt GPL forbid you from replacing it with a different license? How are they managing to get this through?
They're not changing the license that governs the open source code, they're changing who receives the source code directly from them. The GPL requires that if you distribute binaries based on GPL open source code, you also have to distribute the source code as well. If you modify GPL'd source code and produce and distribute binaries using that modified code then you also have to distribute the modified source code as well. However, the important point is to who the GPL requires them to distribute the source code. The actual requirement in the GPL is that you have to distribute source code to the same people that you distribute binaries. You're not required to distribute source code to anyone and everyone.
For Red Hat's enterprise customers, they'll still have access to the source code that makes up the distro. Source code packages will still be a thing and licensed RHEL customers (including the free-as-in-beer developer license) will still be able to install source packages. Red Hat cannot do otherwise as it would put them in contravention of the GPL license. What is changing is that Red Hat is no longer publishing the same source code publicly. They used to do that on git.centos.org but have now stopped. The general flow of code changes used to work something like this:
Fedora (and now CentOS Stream) -> RHEL -> git.centos.org -> downstream distros (Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, formerly CentOS before it become CentOS Stream)
By breaking the link at git.centos.org, Red Hat makes it harder for downstream distros to create versions that are one-for-one binary-compatible with corresponding RHEL versions. Doesn't mean it's impossible, and certainly both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have put out statements saying that they will work around the problem and continue as per usual.
Hopefully this simply becomes the new status quo. Downstream RHEL-compatible distros have a harder time of it because they have to reverse-engineer each RHEL build to some extent rather than receiving the exact updates directly from Red Hat themselves. However I do wonder whether this is IBM / Red Hat's first step toward an attempt to kill downstream distros, and if there are changes coming to the Red Hat license that make it less free-as-in-freedom. I hope that's not the case because at that point things become very contentious and there will likely be litigation as to whether Red Hat can legally lock down what mostly amounts to a curation of open source software.
Thanks. So theyre not closing it completely just "hiding it" kind of, and making it harder to access it. I wonder what Linus has to say about this... Or Stallman