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Red Hat, their goal is to make money. Nothing wrong about that. I run a company, my goal is to make money. How you make money is what matters to people: is it ethical, or not. Are you selling your soul, lying, selling your community out, or not.
And now, it's pretty clear that Red Hat IS doing that. They're enforcing the signature of a license agreement when you create the account that lets you access RHEL, and that agreement is definitely against the values of free software, as it prevents you from redistributing or building your own product based on it
By the way, the legality of this is not something I can discuss, I'm not a lawyer, but there's clearly a potential contradiction between the license of the code, and what the license of the developer portal lets you do, so I guess someone will look into that
Red Hat lied, and they disrespected the open source community by saying "we contribute a lot, our 1:1 rebuilds don't, so we're going to prevent them from easy access to our work". That's completely against the spirit of open source and free software, there's no 2 ways about it
You can't build your own distro on the backs of upstream's work, and then refuse to do the same with downstream. Even if you don't see any value in it, someone does, it's not up to you to decide that, or you have missed the point of open source entirely
That's what companies like Microsoft do, or what Apple does: they prevent competitors from even existing, or from being as good.
The truth is, I think Red Hat just has lost the plot. Like Canonical did when they basically abandoned the desktop and all the projects they were working on.
They're acting like a rational capitalist company, which is NOT what the open source community wants. We hold companies that work in our sphere to a higher standard, and these companies are now failing to meet them
And the real problem isn't really how Alma or Rocky will survive, they'll have more work to do, but they'll manage with the CentOS Stream code. The real issue is that acting like that will in the end, harm Red Hat's business.
Why? The advantage of Linux is that it's open source. In enterprise, you want to combine that freedom to customize and tweak, and have many resources accessible to do what you want, but you also want support from a company that knows what they're doing, and can help in case of a problem.
And Red Hat flat out lying about how they'll handle things in the future makes them utterly untrustworthy for businesses: are you going to base your business decision on what a company said today, when they already screwed you over twice? No.
And you're also probably not going to stay in the ecosystem around these distros, because with these kinds of moves, you don't know if Alma or Rocky will still exist as-is in 5 years.
So, you move to community-run distros, and you start getting used to Debian, or Nix, or whatever else for your own stuff, you want to use that at work as well, and if you're in a position to push that, you'll do so.
Except in the long run this also hurts Linux. Because if Red Hat starts making less money, they'll hire less people, and contribute less to the linux kernel, GNOME, systemd, and other various systems
And this makes the experience worse for everyone, not just Red hat and red hat clones users. Everyone.
So, Red Hat: stop acting like a capitalistic company. You're not that, you work in a very specific industry, with very specific expectations, and a very specific feedback loop where the community, contributors, users, hobbyists, enterprise and companies all depend on each other. If you break the link somewhere, you're breaking it for everyone, not just you.
Start acting responsibly. Make your code public again. We expect better from you.
Isn't there a free developer license for exactly that?
Also: it is an exceptionally bad idea to target exactly one Linux distribution and version. Any software should be sufficiently well tested on a wider range of distributions.
Yes there is, but it's a pain to setup licenced test environment, and with only 16 free licence you don't go far.
You've obviously never run large research focused systems, such as HPC. There are lots of custom niche software that only target and certified for say CentOS 7 that were planning on pivoting to Alma 9.
The free licenses are simply not enough and the paid for costs are far too high for many public orgs. Cent OS was a way for many people to run and contribute to the RHEL ecosystem without it being cutting edge breaking.
The worrying side is that the interim progress we're seeing is that people are preferring to bring their own CentOS 7 containers with their tooling instead of migrating them to Alma/Rocky and allowing the systems to run them native.
Ultimately this potential GPL breach may be the undoing of RH.
I am aware, but to me this sounds like a house of cards built on the goodwill of Red Hat. I don't think we can really blame Red Hat here, when the real problem lies elsewhere. If this results in important research software being able to run on a wider range of systems and academia manages to get their own purpose build Linux distribution running (and thus actively contribute to the ecosystem) instead of freeloading off Red Hat, I consider this a good thing and wouldn't shed a tear for RHEL or any of the rebuilds of it.
There used to be a specialist HPC Linux called Scientific which was based off RHEL. The issue is that certification of results takes years, the 10 year stability and support was the primary driver, most Distros including Debian are much too volitile.
Although RH are perfectly within their rights to require the account and a fee for the source, disallowing redistribution is a possible GPL breach and is really bad intent on a good faith of the license.
The main issue is that IBM paid far too much for RH and continue to push to get the expected returns out of RH. I'm positive that if the license for RH were significantly cheaper they'd sell much more especially if they tier the pricing to reflect the overall support you'd receive directly. Similar to the gitlab model. I do however feel that RH are not trying to disrupt Rocky/Alma but rather Oracle as they do directly profit as an org. It's just that is mere mortals are in the crossfire.
I definitely agree with your second point, but unfortunately there are big software companies which don't.
The main software package which we have to use for our electronics courses only supports RHEL as one example - and currently only RHEL 7 at that.
Maybe you as a customer of that software should complain about this with them instead of blaming Red Hat for something that is not really their fault?
Oh I am more than capable of complaining about both. Like RedHat again fucking over the community and making our life even more troublesome, or the electronics software company using the RedHat ESR duration as their release timeline due to support requirements for their certifications.