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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.
This is not a matter of "seeing" value in what Alma and Rocky do, because their value is plainly apparent to anyone, undoubtedly including Red Hat: they're basically 1:1 RHEL clones, except you don't have to pay Red Hat to use them. It should also be plainly apparent to anyone why Red Hat would consider this a problem for their business; their main product is the effort that goes into producing and maintaining RHEL, so it is only logical that they would want to maintain as much exclusivity as possible on that product.
Alma and Rocky are competitors to RHEL in much the same way piracy scene groups are competitors to game publishers. It is obviously not a fair competition.
No it doesn't. Red Hat hasn't screwed over their customers, they've screwed over a bunch of people who aren't their customers. Why would any paying RHEL customer feel screwed over by this?
But that's exactly price RHEL agreed to pay by basing their operating system on open source software: "the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software". Instead of an exchange of capital, the GPL is an exchange of rights.
To use an analogy, imagine if Adobe demanded that artists license their work to them for free, or else they'd cancel their Photoshop license.