• … feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.

    Then remove all open source code from your code base. I don’t mean some, I mean all. Let’s see whose code you’re repackaging for your own profit.

      • It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.

        The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.

        In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.

    • Yeah this is an insane take (on RH’s part). There’s not a viable product left if they remove the FOSS code.

      don’t want to pay for the time, effort…

      It’s Linux. If RH didn’t want to contribute to a FOSS project and take advantage of the other tools therein, they could have been coding their own OS from scratch all these years.

  • When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it.

    So he’s saying that Red Hat intends to abide by licenses such as the GNU GPL, and yet…

    Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source…

    Red Hat is claiming that redistribution (which is explicitly allowed and encouraged by the GPL) is a threat to open source. They are also threatening to penalize customers who do exercise the rights granted to them by the licenses that Red Hat claims that they will “abide by”.

    According to Red Hat the GNU GPL is a threat to open source. And they think this won’t make people angry?

  • Contributing back is besides the point. GPL is infectious, so all of their code which they aren’t releasing the source of is also considered GPL. So unless they release all of the source code they are still non compliant and I have to imagine they’re wel aware of this.

    • I think they’ll still be compliant as long as they offer their source to customers. The GPL doesn’t require that you make source available to anyone, but to anyone that you distribute binaries to. From the GNU website:

      One of the fundamental requirements of the GPL is that when you distribute object code to users, you must also provide them with a way to get the source.

      Source: Quick GPLv3 Guide under the More Ways for Developers to Provide Source section.

      Of course the GPL also allows redistribution of source code, and Red Hat seems to want to threaten customers who do so.

      • Yeah, preventing your users from redistribution this is where they might get into trouble and the GPL license would be retracted and thus they would have pirated the software. But someone would need to prove it in court and IBM has a couple of good lawyers.

        • Which I imagine (though I’m not a lawyer) that cutting service agreements for redstribtion may violate. Even if a court wouldn’t see it as a violation, it certainly is in spirit.

          Red Hat’s definitely viewing libre licenses as a threat to them, since it allows distributions like Oracle, Alma, and Rocky to continue to exist.

    • GPL only says you have to give the users the source code when they ask for it and you can make them pay for the distribution and they are already doing that so I’m not sure what you mean here.

      • I’m not a lawyer, and I certainly don’t know the license to that degree, but if true then it seems reasonable for them to stop freely distributing source code and I’m not sure what people are upset about… Sucks to lose something you used to get for free, but hardly an injustice.

        Sounds like there’s nothing stopping these derivative distro’s from purchasing the source and continuing on.

  • From what i get,

    It seems like they are pissed at oracle specifically,
    Selling a oracle branded rhel clone with minor tweaks and a oracle certified sticker.

    And the other downstream distros are just collateral damage.

    Obviously wouldn’t make it better
    (But imo more understandable)

        • Then just write proprietary code. Open source philosophy to me seems about creation for a “greater good”. What’s the point if you’re not even going to be open? The organisation just becomes a massive corporation like any other at that point.

          • I think you should read up on Open Source vs Free Software. Open Source has been invented by Enterprise companies as a development model which saves them money. That is why they invented licenses like MIT and BSD where you can take what the community did and make it closed source.

            Free Software on the other side is more what you’re thinking about, a moral stance which is much older than Open Source and not created to make development easier and cheaper but to grant users freedoms.

  • Not surprising that RHEL is now trashing every FLOSS license it’s beholden to. They’ve violated the licenses and I genuinely someone over at GNU or something gets to goosing them with lawyers.

    • They’ve violated the licenses

      Did they? Because as far as I know they’re complying with the GPL and other licenses, since everybody that gets their RHEL license (and the software/binaries) also gets the sources. Or am I mistaken?

      I don’t think the license says ‘grant everybody a copy of your source code’, only the ones that actually bought access to the binaries RHEL provides

      • That’s fine, it’s the threats about terminating support agreements or dev accounts if you redistribute the source code that’s stepping really close or over the line. The license gives you the right (and in some cases the responsibility) to redistribute.

        • Yes. It seems like it would be illegal to make someone sign something that would be violated if you exercise the rights of the license.

          Would they be able to make you sign something that says you are not going to ask for the source code?

      • Yeah, thats just it. I realize people are at the least annoyed, but this was always in the books. It wasn’t guaranteed they would go this way, but the page was there and they decided to finally flip to it. After the centos things, it was really a matter of time

        You should have migrated from RH a long time. They aren’t with this breaking any licenses. Hurting souls and hearts, yes, but not licenses

  • any downstream RHEL clones were only allowed to exist as long as Red Hat allowed them to. thinking back, after centos debacle, it was only a matter of time.

    we’ve been migrating our infrastructure (nothing big, about 2000 VMs) to Debian for the last 9 months because it’s the only distro nobody can unilaterally take away from you. it was almost exclusively a centos shop before.

  • I stopped using rhel/centos after 7 personally, the rolling update seems weird. I’m fine with the AWX model of being the beta testers for the paid product. It is a little different for an OS though as AWX has many features that sometimes are randomly broken on each “release”, but at least there are defined releases. I’m sort of giving up on Redhat, it’s wildly expensive, they have good products but not worth the costs they sell at and I’m tired of trying to constantly navigate this song and dance.

    • We had rhel at university and I just really couldn’t get warm with it. By that time I’ve used SuSE, Debian and Gentoo at home but somehow it was just to weird :D. On the other side I have no problems with Fedora, so I guess it was just in my head.