Yeah, Red Hat wasn't the one that called them "freeloaders", this was language The Register used in an article:
>> Having given the move time to successfully eliminate most of the clones, Red Hat then killed off its own official free version of its paid-for flagship product. Instead, it switched to offering a free test version, an announcement which it made accompanied with lots of positive-sounding language about community involvement, and so on. In fact, what it was really doing was cutting off those that might be seen, from its perspective, as a bunch of freeloaders. The move was accompanied with free production deployment of RHEL for developers – but only up to 16 machines.
And there are a number of examples in public comments (one recently in the Fedora mailing list[1]) where you can easily substitute the phrase 'freeloader' for a longer description of the downstream communities. The same sentiment comes across either way.
[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]...
> this was language The Register used in an article
So, in response to that, I'd like to point out a few things.
1. This is, I feel, now widely and well-established language in this discussion. For example, note its use in the comments to this article about the discontinuation of CentOS Linux three years ago: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/
2. Others are using it in the context of this story; for example, here: https://fosspost.org/red-hat-is-shooting-itself-in-the-foot-...
3. The direct personal reason that I used the phrase "a bunch of freeloaders" is that this is a Douglas Adams quotation, or rather, paraphrase. I am not an especially big name, but those who do know my name may recognise it: I was once the president of ZZ 9 Plural Z alpha, the official Douglas Adams appreciation society. I was interviewed quite widely in media around the world at the time that the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy film came out. I used the phrase in order to refer to the Douglas Adams line about "a taxi service for a bunch of degenerate freeloaders." For reasons which I trust are obvious I removed the adjective.
Yes?
There's an infinite number of monkey outside, who want to share a single digital watch.
Many NeXT machines have had their hostnames after Hitchhiker characters. My favourite name been “zaphod”.
I understand the red hat distro itself has stricter terms
Not sure how they will fare under IBM, but the history of this company is pretty cool. I'd love to read more, if somebody knows of a really good article or writeup
You shouldn’t be. Fedora is a community project. RedHat, while a huge contributor, does not maintain all the packages therein.
In the end, RHEL is a fork of Fedora so it’s reasonable for the contributors to Fedora to annoyed by this change in the ability to make OS rebuilds of RHEL.
AFAIK RHEL came out of Red Hat Linux and Fedora came later, then at some point they made Fedora the upstream. But it has never been a "fork"[0] and there was no clean cut, it just transitioned around.
[0]: OK, debatable - depends on the way you use the word fork. They're still Linux distros with common roots and packages were first introduced here or there. My main point is just that it's not like "Here's Fedora, and then later someone forked RHEL off" but more like RHL -> RHEL -> Fedora -> RHEL
That pretty much sounds like freeloading to me. Copyleft open source licenses allow freeloading [1], but they also allow Red Hat to gate source code. As long as they fulfill the license obligations towards their customers, it's fine.
Red Hat puts enormous amounts of money in the FLOSS ecosystem, I think it's completely fair for them to nudge customers with deep-enough pockets to pay for subscriptions. For other users, there are plenty of other options.
[1] For non-copyleft licenses, Red Hat are of course not obliged to provide source code.
So what? There is no obligation to contribute back in any way.
But even if it where illegal, the only people in a position to sue would be the contributors of the upstream projects that get packaged into RHEL. And I don't see anyone having the appetite for that.
I contribute a lot to QEMU and there I'm practically working side-by-side with redhat devs. They contribute so much (maintainership, code review, testing infrastructure and much more), suing them wouldn't occur to me in the slightest.
I adamantly agree with GP. There are important projects that wouldn't exist without Red Hat, or if they did they would pale in comparison to the proprietary solutions and wouldn't be seriously used. Qemu/KVM is a big one. Without Red Hat's investment, it would all be VMware and anyone wanting to (seriously)_virtualize on Linux would be using VMware.
AFAIK, the current kerfuffle is about providing RHEL source packages through git.centos.org. They currently only provide RHEL through a subscription and they fulfill the GPL if they offer their RHEL subscribers the source code.
The fact that the subscription agreement does not allow this is exactly what we're discussing here.
The entire point of the GPL is to let you own the software you have bought and, examine, learn and change.
The rule Red Hat have brought in is that if you exercise that right then they don't want to continue selling their software to you. That is totally within their rights, it's not like they are suing you for illegal distribution.
The intent of the GPL to allow distribution to third parties seems pretty clear, and a company refusing to deal with you after you exercised a right explicitly granted by the licence definitely seems like a 'dick move', despite being legal.
There's nothing to discuss. What Red Hat is trying to do IS ILLEGAL and GPL explicitly grants the right to all their subscribers to gave RH the finger.
From GPL Section 8 "If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term."
It is obvious that the "subscription agreement which denies the right to redistribute" is a "further restriction" that GPL legally allows users to simply ignore.
Also Red Hat violating GPL is unquestionably clear from the Preamble: "To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights. Therefore, you have certain responsibilities if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it: responsibilities to respect the freedom of others."
RH asking users to surrender their rights and revoking any subscription for redistributing is clearly violating its responsibilities as demanded by the GPL.
You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and *will automatically terminate your rights under this License*. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
This cannot be stressed enough. If we are unhappy with this outcome, maybe we should be taking another look at the licenses we choose when we release our work to the world.
Increasing proliferation of usage is a huge factor in driving growth.
That is an extremely incorrect premise. There are tons of things in production that people don't make money on. Tons of new products don't make money for many years. And even if it is profitable, profit margins are often thin and RHEL is not cheap.
I have about 10 services in public-facing production right now (on Alma), and only one is profitable, and that runs in a container anyway (the host is not RHEL, just my container). I also have about a dozen or so personal/private services that I use for myself and my family. Those don't make any money either, I spend about $80 per month to run them. If I had to pay for a RHEL license for each of those, I'd just have to shut them down.
Which seems more reasonable to you: move my life to a different base that does support my niche, or shut everything down?
As for your “personal/private services”, aren’t those covered for free under the RHEL individual developer subscription?
Are you sure that is really a supported RHEL configuration?
As far as I know, to get support unless you have a pretty special (and more expansive and expensive) support contract you're supposed to run a RHEL host and a RHEL base layer for the container images.
Your configuration looks like running standard RHEL over something not-RHEL, but without anything besides binary compatibility; so why not run RHEL UBI?
RHEL UBI has a much more lax license that you can almost pretty much use and basically redistribute freely, and you can get support for the RHEL components on it.
People have been doing this, or running Ubuntu LTS without Pro or other forms of paid support from Canonical.
I'll bite. The value in RHEL was supposed to be in the support. CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard that everyone targetted and prevent the development of another. I mean if Debian becomes the default that actual reduces RHEL's value proposition for their paying customers. Reinforcing a platform's dominance is contributing value.
Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride.
Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray with CentOS that involved some long gaps between updates, a whole kerfuffle about a founder disappearing and the domain ownership being in question...
CentOS, as a project independent of Red Hat, existed for about 10 years. This included several long periods of slow updates to minor versions and long waits for major versions of RHEL. (e.g. it took almost 3 months for CentOS to push out 5.6 after RHEL 5.6, and even longer to get CentOS 6 out of RHEL 6).
Before Red Hat took over CentOS a chief point of criticism was that CentOS took too long to update and the core group wouldn't let new folks in to contribute. (See: https://lwn.net/Articles/435744/ and https://web.archive.org/web/20190402181426/http://www.linux-...)
Now, users have Stream which is pretty much everything you'd have wanted except the ability to claim that it's exactly specific RHEL release. In my book a major improvement, unless what I want is the ability to get support for RHEL from vendors without actually paying for RHEL.
Additionally, CentOS Stream updates often lag behind RHEL updates. This is because Red Hat won't commit an embargoed security update to CentOS Stream until after it ships in RHEL, so the developers responsible for the update will sometimes forget to commit it to CentOS Stream until a week or two after it's shipped. You end up in a weird position where you get most updates faster than RHEL users, but you often have to wait to get critical security updates. I would be wary about using a system like this in production.
Or months, even. See httpd and php right now, and the CVEs solved this year. CentOS Stream doesn't have it, Alma has.
* httpd-2.4.37-54.module_el8.8.0+1256+e1598b50 (released 2022-12-08)
* php-7.4.30-1.module_el8.7.0+1190+d11b935a (2022-08-04)
Almalinux 8 is on:
* httpd-2.4.37-56.module_el8.8.0+3560+c8e5e57e.6 (released 2023-04-27)
* php-7.4.33-1.module_el8.8.0+3477+f828cbb0 (2023-01-13)
So meanwhile, for httpd the following was released:
* 2.4.37-56.6 - Resolves: #2190133 - mod_rewrite regression with CVE-2023-25690
* 2.4.37-56.4 - Resolves: #2177748 - CVE-2023-25690 httpd:2.4/httpd: HTTP request splitting with mod_rewrite and mod_proxy
* 2.4.37-56 - Resolves: #2162499 - CVE-2006-20001 httpd: mod_dav: out-of-bounds read/write of zero byte; #2162485 - CVE-2022-37436 httpd: mod_proxy: HTTP response splitting; #2162509 - CVE-2022-36760 httpd: mod_proxy_ajp: Possible request smuggling
* 2.4.37-55 - Resolves: #2155961 - prevent sscg creating /dhparams.pem
For php:
* 7.4.33-1 - rebase to 7.4.33, fix: due to an integer overflow PDO::quote() may return unquoted string
There are already issues filled in bugzilla:
Since before I became a Red Hatter, I have used CentOS for my personal servers and projects. I have struggled with CentOS Stream for that application, for example packaged kernel drivers from ELRepo. I can understand why many are upset about this. As a casual user, I am not upset, because I still have lots of options (RHEL Dev sub, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.) If I had given a lot of time and effort that benefited the EL community, and in turn, Red Hat. I would probably be more upset.
I find myself torn on this issue. On one hand, I really want there to be a vibrant Enterprise Linux community where nobody has doubts or trust issues in participating. On the other hand, I also want Red Hat to continue to have a viable business model around RHEL so that the community continues to be able to benefit from all of the expertise that it gets from all of the people who get to make it their main focus because they can rely on a steady paycheck by doing so.
I think that when Red Hat was growing fast, it was easy for them to have a laissez-faire approach to downstream rebuilds. Now that the business is contracting, people have had to start making hard decisions. There's no more difficult decision to make, than to lay off people. I would not want to have a leadership role at Red Hat right now. I don't expect it's much fun.
I really worry about the impact that this has on goodwill. I think most people at Red Hat are also concerned about this. The ecosystem around RHEL will not be the same. EPEL, ELRepo, and all of the other communities that have flourished around the downstream builds are going to be impacted. Trust, when broken, is very hard to rebuild. Jeff's comments ("fool me once...") underscore the rift that is driving away good people. I worry about the long-term effects of this. I hope that this will not "kill Enterprise Linux" as many have suggested. I do believe, though, that it has been wounded.
Disclosure: I am currently employed by Red Hat.
From an outsider’s perspective, they were merged with IBM, “killed off” CentOS, and restricted access to the sources of their distribution within a relatively short span. It just looks bad and makes everyone feel like they have to justify that Redhat is still a good company.
Fully agree on the "PR Problem". It's tough to "control the narrative" in OSS. Based on my observations, I think Red Hat's approach is: Deliver the facts, ride out the storm, pick up the pieces and move on.
Well, you answered yourself why it went as it did. Don't you think answering to your shareholders is what keeps the company competitive and on the right course?
https://opensource.com/article/23/6/new-developments-opensou...
They're the freeloaders.
There are customers who genuinely don't need and don't want support. And there are customers who do need support and should pay for it.
It's that simple. Don't bundle them together as all freeloaders.
GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop. You are allowed to charge a nominal fee for the distribution of source code. For example, back in the day it may have to be mailed to you via floppy diskette or CD's so you would be charged for the media and for the time for someone to put that together. Walnut Creek used to sell CD bundles of all source code for something like $20 back in the day and you'd get several CD's of source and all the make files needed to build it.
You added the word "nominal" but the GPL offers no guidance for how large the fee can be. RedHat appears to be breaking norms here but probably not breaking the license.
GPLv2: You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy, and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee.
GPLv3: You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.
> GPL does not allow for gating the source code. Full stop.
RedHat is getting around this by saying "If you ask for it, we'll give you the source code for a high fee. If the source code we give you gets released to others, that's totally fine! We'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever, if it does." GPLv3 has some language that very arguably might prevent this, but CentOS is licensed under GPLv2 and no one has found a clause which makes this behavior obviously improper, yet.
> Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
How does "we'll just immediately terminate all business dealings with you forever" not sound like a retaliatory restriction on the recipients' exercise of their rights?
A enterprise has the right to refuse customers if the reason isn't discrimination of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or nationality.
"I violated a contract I made with them" isn't one of those.
I do. A basic pedagogic principle is that conditioning works better the closer the consequence is to the action.
They should be afraid of backlash at every turn.
People must be ready to actually walk away, otherwise you get into a Reddit-type situation in which everything ends up just like before.
> They should be afraid of backlash at every turn.
> People must be ready to actually walk away, otherwise you get into a Reddit-type situation in which everything ends up just like before
I actually agree with all of that, but I don't think the hot take gets us there. You can have backlash and people walking away, while staying fact-based and even tempered. In fact I think that's far more effective because then (Red Hat in this case) will see the logical connection. If it's just emotional stuff then it's easy to dismiss the quitters as irrational fringe people that aren't reasonable anyway (and I don't think that's far off from the reality).
One guy? The sentiment of CentOS users being freeloaders is shared by a lot of people, inside and outside of IBM.
I remember when the original announcement came out that CentOS was being killed in favour of CentOS Stream. Lots of IBM (Red Hat) employees were defending the change by painting CentOS users as getting a paid product for free. Lots of people here on Hacker News and Reddit and other places were defending it as well.
Don't try to rewrite history.
I think it's great that Red Hat offers free dev subs and I applaud that, but I think they underestimate the friction that creates.
But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person's opinion. I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community. But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive. Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don't agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious.
What's the goal here? Is it to polarize into good and evil sides? Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the "other side" seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them?
I like a lot of OP's content, but I am a little worried that he's a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it's driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.