this post was submitted on 20 Jul 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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[–] [email protected] 259 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I haven't been really keeping up with this RHEL drama, so I'm probably going to regret making this comment. But about this bug merge request in particular, you have to remember that RHEL's main target audience is paying enterprise customers. It's the "E" right there in RHEL. So stability is a high priority for their developers, since if they accidentally introduce a bug to their code, then they'll have a lot of unhappy paying customers.

The next comment that was cropped out of that screenshot basically explains exactly that. While the Red Hat developers probably appreciate the bug fix, the reality is that the bug was listed as non-critical, and the Red Hat teams didn't have the capacity to adequately regression test and QA the merge request. But the patch was successfully merged into Fedora, so it will eventually end up in RHEL through that path, which is exactly what the Fedora path is for.

The blowup about this particulat bug doesn't seem justified to me. Red Hat obviously can't fix and regression test every single bug that's listed in their bug tracker. So why arbitrarily focus on this one medium priority bug? if it were listed as a critical bug, then yes, the blowup would be justified.

[–] [email protected] 133 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn't care. They just don't want community contributions.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (5 children)

CentOS Stream is the staging ground for RHEL. It isn't a bleeding edge distro that can accept any merge request willy-nilly. For the reason why, reread my original comment about the nature of enterprise support.

Fedora is the distro that is more bleeding edge in the RHEL realm. This merge request was more suited for Fedora, and the fix was successfully applied to Fedora. So, I fail to see any irrational actions from Red Hat here.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn't be as much fuel to the fire.

Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don't want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Except that they are not expecting to merge this into RHEL. They are sending it to CentOS Stream.

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[–] angrymouse 48 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don't engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.

What actually red hat wants?

Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I'm not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

That could have been better communicated though. What you said is reasonable, what Michal said isn't as much.

[–] FlexibleToast 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That's been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.

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[–] PhysicsDad 173 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Wasn't Red Hat just complaining that Alma and Rocky didn't add value because they weren't submitting fixes upstream?

[–] cleric_splash 105 points 1 year ago

There goes the narrative. Didn't last very long, did it?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Its funny how podcasters and commenters seem to have taken Redhat's spin about "contributing value to the community" seriously, while to the rest of us the whole thing was obviously only about money (same as all the follow-ups from other parties... I would say "including Alma" but that would probably deserve its separate debate).

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[–] [email protected] 147 points 1 year ago

"Your code has an issue here's a fix for that".

Corporate: no.

[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Alma should use this as advantage for them. Now market it as "Alma Linux is more secure than RHEL".

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot 14 points 1 year ago

Fuck it, let's go Alma!

[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (17 children)

As someone interviewing for Canonical's Security team (they make you do like 10 interviews, I'm like 5 deep over 3 weeks), I cannot imagine anyone security-minded writing that comment. It either:

  • Comes from higher up
  • Michal doesn't think security is important
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[–] ZombieZookeeper 66 points 1 year ago (1 children)

2023: The Year of the Assholes

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Truth! I wasn't shocked that all the social media and entertainment companies all decided to treat the Covid years as if that growth was organic/normal (all retail stores started doing this much faster). As if people were just going to keep having the same amount of time to spend on them. Or in the case of sites like Reddit, they think that they are the creators of content instead of the location to get it. Companies like Red Hat are more jarring and seem like they would've been more realistic.

The next two paragraphs are just a rant about companies and the government not really caring for stability long-run. Feel free to ignore.

Of course people were going to start unsubbing now that they need to focus on actual things needed for just living. Covid has shown that all these greedy folks running (or holding shares) companies in all sectors refuse to just be focused on stability. They act like all the crazy large profits were all because of their "genius innovative ideas and leadership." Of course that was going to happen to all the publicly traded companies, due to their literal legal obligation to always make numbers go up. But shit is beyond a bad way to handle the real material conditions of life. It also doesn't help that the US did a worse job at doing things like monthly stimulus money compared to other places.

A capitalist economy requires that people keep buying both needed and wanted things in order to keep things moving around. But instead of putting money into the hands of people, which would then likely buy more things or even have finally something to save for when things normalized (which would be helpful for making the falloff less dramatic). We barely got two total $2000 payments. Fuck, even just making sure folks could have money to finally get out of various debits would mean people could more easily justify keeping things like Netflix.

[–] Secret300 60 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Alright, at first I was like okay red hat wants to make money to keep IBM happy. Now I just realize it's not red hat anymore. Fuck that I'm moving to suse

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Red Hat literally became the first ever billionaire FOSS company (iirc), their pre-selling out business model was working perfectly fine.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (14 children)

Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.

Forget about Red Hat, they're gone, they're not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It still requires a substantial amount of time to review the fix. Depending on the circumstances it might require more time to review a piece of code than to write it.

[–] penguin_ex_machina 40 points 1 year ago

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago

Debian posted fixes for this at about the same time this fix was proposed.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe I just don't get it, but how does this work in any way that doesn't make them liable for some company being exploited by something that they were aware could've been prevented?

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

This makes me much more upset than Red Hat asking people to rebase on CentOS Stream.

This is ridiculous.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I'm sure on CentOS/RHEL7 this will be irrespectivly classified a CVE score of 7.8 so they don't need do security updates for it.

[–] akash_rawal 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's too much effort. Just advertise the CVE fix and let a paying customer do the effort.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

"You code has an issue, here is a fix for that issue ready to be used."

Corporate: no.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago
[–] ghariksforge 10 points 1 year ago

Redhat is going full IBM

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