this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Potentially this means that Fedora and CentOS stream do not get timely updates implemented in RHEL.

Canonical must be throwing a party, and I bet SUSE is not hating it either

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

I think Fedora will continue to be fine for the foreseeable future as it's an upstream OS. It gets changes before they go into an RHEL release, which means a Fedora user is essentially beta-testing future RHEL changes. There's nothing inherently wrong with that and if you're happy on Fedora then you can stick with it and be confident it's going to continue to operate the way it does today (barring any future licensing changes from IBM that affect upstream distros).

This change will really affect the downstream distros like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. I think those distros have a valuable place in the FOSS ecosystem, as they allow FOSS contributors a low-friction way to test their code on an RHEL-compatible distro without having to agree to a Red Hat license. The fact they IBM / Red Hat is making this change must mean that they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms for downstream distros, and I have to imagine that their gain will be at least partly at the community's expense.