> And IMO, was it worth it?

I suspect they're playing with unintended consequences now.

One of the nice "features" of buying CentOS, is that it meant CentOS was never going to compete - there was a clear line between community and professional, and CentOS were never going to sell you professional services.

Pushing everyone to non-RH builds has removed that line, and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling professional services, is going to have a higher opportunity-cost than publishing CentOS did.

That wasn't relevant in buying CentOS, plenty of people were selling personal services for CentOS. IBM itself was doing it, and perhaps Kyndryl is still doing the same for the newfangled RHEL rebuilds.

And even now, technically RESF is the one producing the distro and it's also not selling professional services. Who produces the distro has no effect on who sells the services.

"technically" is a really thin veneer though. The founder of Rocky is also the CEO of CIQ. That's not exactly six degrees of Kevin Bacon.

(to be clear: I don't consider this a problem. But I do consider that for RH, this may be an unintended side-effect.)

> and there's a strong chance that non-RH builds selling professional services, is going to have a higher opportunity-cost than publishing CentOS did.

Could you clarify what you mean by opportunity cost here? Who faces this cost and why?

IBM faces this cost. Before they created this fracture in the EL community there wasn't all this interest and support behind centos alternatives. People just used centos for free or rhel for support. now you could potentially use EL with support from another vendor without IBM seeing a dime.

My guess is that they will be content with:

1) having something to show their customers who has the actual expertise

2) making it clear that the Red Hat of today is significantly more open than the Red Hat of 2014 when neither CentOS Stream nor UBI existed and CentOS releases were months late despite the SRPMs being on ftp.redhat.com

3) making it obvious that they are respecting the GPL, and that no one gives a flying f**k about "free as in freedom" because all the uprising was always about either the free beer or the clicks/likes.

It's cute how many people think the uproar is about whiny freeloaders or clickbait influencers.

No it's mostly from people with a commercial interest. I can't take Rocky seriously when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle.

According to Rocky Linux devs they aren't: https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/vague-accusations-about-shad...

Does it matter if Rocky and CIQ are separate organisations? Would your or anyone elses opinion be different if the flow went client -> paid support -> Rocky rather than client -> paid support -> CIQ -> donation -> Rocky?

That's one guy saying he doesn't know what's up. I have no doubt he doesn't get paid. What counts though, is this:

https://rockylinux.org/support

I think you misread the post. He's clearly saying that he doesn't understand how the conclusion was drawn that there was anything shady going on. Willing to bet that the RESF builds rocky linux and CIQ does all the "shady" business dealings, which is out of their control.

I'm one of the board members who replied on the forum thread. Rocky has never sold support or any other product. We make an OS for the community, that's it. The link to the support providers page simply is that, a list of other third party providers who offer paid support services.

So a "founding partner" is now a third party provider? Frame it as you may, but there is in fact commercial interest here. Even if Rocky were a separate entity, it depends on the sponsors selling support.

Open source projects with sponsors and partners are pretty commonplace. Naturally, projects depend on having some support from others. You can frame that as a "commercial interest" but I maintain that is an inaccurate description of our sponsor and partner relationships.

Rocky is absolutely a separate entity, both legally and in practice. In fact, the project and foundation board bylaws limit undue influence in a number of ways including maximum number of board seats per employer. We try to show our values both in our words and actions.

So why is Rocky Linux as the 'project?' trying to indicate they still go to space: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]/1106244765..., referring to the 3 person seat, 2 year premium support 'they' sold to NASA?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view

Developers? What do they develop? If they have upstream contributions great, but if they are just adjustments to their build pipeline they are not developing... That is tweaking.

They demand that Redhat pay for what they take in the only coin that the original producer ever asked for.

Redhat are the parasites, not Centos.

If Redhat don't agree to the deal that the gpl makes, they are free not to use any gpl code.

Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft, and it's an incredible expression of the art, when something is free, and yet you still manage to steal it.

> Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft

No, it's not, and I've seen your comments elsewhere. I don't think you even know what the "free" in "free software" means.

You are COMPLETELY allowed to SELL free software. "Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Red Hat is still distributing full corresponding source code to anyone they distribute a binary to. That is what the GPL class of licenses require, and that is what they are doing.

You are free to get the software elsewhere. You don't have to get it from Red Hat. And if Red Hat wants to charge you for it, you can take it or leave it.

Yes, and anybody who buys RedHat product, even for a few minutes on a shared cloud provider, is entitled to the source code, and is also entitled to redistribute the source code as they see fit. Which is what Rocky is doing.

Which is both brilliant and surprising that RH didn't see it coming

I'm still not convinced that 'hiding the source code' was the final end game to this.

I never said you can't sell free software. You have picked the wrong argument to try to make thinking I conflate the frees.

It's always been a fact that RH can't actually prevent a Centos-alike from reproducing the binaries from the same source, since RH are obligated to make the source available to anyone they hand a binary to. So you are right, they are still doing that. Congratulations on something that was never contested.

The problem is simply that they are trying, and HAVE at least issued statements asserting policies that they don't actually have the right to make. For instance they said that users can not legally redistribute the source they have access to, because it has RH trademarks in it. Well, fortunately that doesn't actually fly. The GPL isn't nullified by just including your cooyrighted or trademarked logo into the package. If anything, it just creates a derivative work and you just gave away all rights to your logo. Presumably they were'nt that stupid and carefully only do that to software they wholly wrote themselves, or things that are MIT and not GPL.

>when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle

So just like RedHat and IBM?

Just like Canonical asks for Ubuntu, and SUSE for SLE/Leap they make. Rocky/CIQ are not 'making' RHEL, ...

IBM/RHEL doesn't make most of RHEL either. It's repackaged FOSS projects. Some they contribute to themselves as well, but most not.

You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.

What more should they do?

Also note, Red Hat pays engineers for the extended support, the compliance https://access.redhat.com/articles/2918071, etc that customers expect from RH. Engineers contribute both upstream (first) and backport those changes to older releases.

>You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.

They're paid to work on FOSS projects. Gnome isn't a RedHat project. Nor is the kernel. And they're IBM projects even less.

And most of those projects started without RedHat and RedHat stepped on them to become what it is first. Plus, there are thousands of essential projects they don't have anything to do with, still in the distro.

You avoid answering: "What more should they (Red Hat) do?"

Don't be a dick to Centos - and anybody picking that torch.

> Gnome isn't a RedHat project. Nor is the kernel.

Because Red Hat wants to work with the community, it doesn't start just projects and slap a CLA on top of it.

https://redhatofficial.github.io/ is only a small part of what Red Hat has contributed to.

There was time today's big distros were small and they mostly took from community, packaged it and sold support for it. Rocky is small now so needs to take more from community. If it becomes big later it can also contribute back.

That's one of the benefits of open source. It helps small guys to get started and make it big. Once they become big, they can contribute back.

But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.

But that's a large part of the appeal. "Binary compatible with RHEL" sells Rocky, not "another Linux".

Regardless of the reasons, Rocky Linux does not contribute a single line of useful code to the world.

Red Hat has benefited from previous contributors, but then added a ton of open source work of their own.

RH are open source contributors; Rocky Linux are mere users.

TIL Nothing I write is useful.

Carl George, a principal SWE at Red Hat, claimed to have found exactly one code contribution from the Rocky Linux or Alma projects back to RHEL - a two-line bugfix in a .spec post script.

https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/red_hats_co...

(Which is only what I, an ignoramus, would expect - if the project aims for "bug-for-bug compatibility", then it doesn't really gain much value from fixing bugs, while a fork would.)

If you think his evaluation of Alma/Rocky contributions is incorrect or incomplete, I'd be interested in hearing your POV as a Rocky engineer.

Yes, I am aware of Carl and his biases.

Out of curiosity, what makes you say that Rocky Linux have never contributed a single line of code to the world?

Looking at their GH profile https://github.com/rocky-linux seems to show some public repos with code in them?

I'm trusting Carl George's words here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/red_hats_co...

Those Rocky Linux repos are either not code (website, wiki, etc.), and a few are tools for repackaging/rebranding an existing Linux distro's source code bug-for-bug - an activity which, by definition, does not and cannot offer anything more than the original code already did.

If I'm reading that reddit comment correctly it referred to contributions to RHEL not contributions to open source, which if I'm reading it correctly was what your original comment stated.

It seems that Rocky Linux have contributed code as open source, just not directly to RHEL.

... or related upstream.

not migrate2rocky, or almalinux-deploy. But if you look closely, they are mostly 'infrastructure' tooling to sync sources or deal with build nodes.

Note: I am not talking about 'individual contribs' but those representing the projects.

Alma at least addresses this: https://almalinux.org/blog/our-value-is-our-values/

Rocky?

Rocky routing around Redhat's attempt to hack the GPL is itself a useful contribution to the world.

The majority of value comes from noncommercial activity with commercial interest. More songs sell after people hear it for free on the radio. More people buy a package only after the free samples. More license seats sell, but only after 100x more seats were free. Contribution to FOSS is not just the (SS) code, but the act of making/keeping it genuinely Free and Open. I don't care about McDonalds or Burger King when someone's going around with free hamburgers handouts - but if I'd been eating free Burger King burgers all along, it's a pretty clear choice where I'll go to buy my business burgers on the VC's dime. "Mere users" know very well, with less confirmation bias or sunk-cost rationale, what makes a good product. I trusted Red Hat more when they supported CentOS - these recent actions are clearly user-hostile and eschew the main value of FOSS being its network effects.

First, you are making a completely unrelated argument. "Rocky helps sell RHEL": assuming it to be true, that is not a contribution to the open source world. It does not bring new software into the world. It is only a marketing help to IBM's balance sheet, and it helps only insofar as the open source world benefits from IBM making money from RHEL.

Second, the sole direct beneficiary of this hypothesis, IBM, apparently thinks it isn't true, and from what little comments they have released appears to have come to this conclusion after quite a bit of analysis.

Third, from my position of ignorance, I think IBM is probably correct. Why? Because the free burger in your analogy isn't Alma/Rocky, it's Fedora. A user who runs Fedora on workstations or small production servers is very likely to consider RHEL when choosing an enterprise distribution for large deployments, because they are already familiar with the ecosystem but they want stronger stability guarantees than Fedora Server. But a user who is running Alma/Rocky has much less reason to move to RHEL: they gain nothing but the license hassle.

Except, we are?

Then it may be worth asking yourselves "how do we get this fact publicised more widely?" since I don't recall reading about Rocky's contributions either.

(I'm not a heavy user of RHish distros, mind, I only ever anticipate using Rocky if somebody else already decided to deploy a particular project on it so you probably shouldn't put significant energy into whether -I- notice, but there seems to be a perception issue here that's sufficiently widespread that you might get a decent ROI in terms of community growth from doing something about it and I'm pretty much always in favour of community growth whether I anticipate being one of the happy users of the project or not)

> If it becomes big later it can also contribute back.

Contributing starts from day one https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/red_hats_co...

You can't all of a sudden expect you to have gained respect and trust, just because you are part of something 'big'.

I'd appreciate a small community more when they reach out, to grow them, than for a big one to lend them a hand with the basics.

What are you talking about?

What is Redhat demanding for free? They spend more than anyone else on developers for all of the Linux stack.

>What is Redhat demanding for free

Their whole business started and grew on FOSS stuff people wrote for free...

You recognize a clickbait influencer when you see it.

If "they" was Red Hat then I might agree with you. But "they" is now IBM, which has lawyers like a gas station bathroom has bacteria.

Interesting how you seem to know more about the relationship between Red Hat and IBM than the people who actually work at Red Hat and IBM.

What's the term for those paid actors placed in audiences to cheer for patently terrible things? Found one.

What's the term from name-calling when facing some argument one doesn't like?

"Free software contributor of 25 years"?

RedHat themselves are a free software contributor of 25 years. So the point still stands.

I was a hobbyist contributor for 10 years before joining Red Hat and still do occasional contributions to random projects I use.

> making it obvious ...that no one gives a flying f*k about "free as in freedom" because all the uprising was always about either the free beer

Indeed - Red Hat is making it obvious that IBM (like most large companies) views open source as free beer - or rather free labor.

It's great when they get other people's labor for free, as long as they don't have to give away any of their own.

* * *

I've seen plenty of posts on Twitter, Medium, on the Fedora mailing list, and elsewhere by individual contributors and industry veterans (some of whom had storied careers at Red Hat) who are not happy with Red Hat's decision.

Lots of free beer in Linux exist because Red-Hat and IBM made it happen in first place.

As did some of the other beloved giants over here.

Here's a thought, maybe Red Hat was being honest when they said that they were not under an obligation to make it easy for rebuilders, and that's it? Maybe they weren't out to immediately kill the clones because they know that they can't? We have actually heard very little communication from Red Hat most of it has been speculation from people on what they might or could do, but as you point out there are ways around the changes Red Hat made.

Honestly this from this post Rocky conflicts with the "RHEL is closed source/proprietary/paywalled" narrative that people are trying to push. If RHEL was truly any of those things Rocky wouldn't have been able to continue on, but they were able to quickly find a solution, though to me it seems a bit hacky. If Rocky is pulling packages from the supposedly untested, beta of RHEL CentOS Stream, and UBI and some EC2 instance, why would I use that over something that was build cohesively in one place like Stream?

If they don’t care, then why make it more difficult?

Because it is extra effort on Red Hat's part that corporate backed projects can compensate for if they choose to ?

There is no extra effort here. The binary comes from the source. You don't have immaculate conception for RHEL. RHEL uses the source, and use to provide a link to the said source. Now they don't. There is no cost argument. Internet bandwidth isn't one. That's just noise. And nobody is even asking for RH's bandwidth. People will happily take that burden off of them. They don't have to post the source, they can let their customers do so. So this argument fails.

RHEL source according to Red Hat is CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream is publicly available. Red Hat cannot deprive you of your right to sources and to redistribute them under the GPL. But Red Hat can also determine who they want to do business with.

That interpretation of GPL is the main reason for this post. You have not stated anything new here. Your argument started with something about effort and fell back to their legal line.

Mike McGrath has been very explicit about this in his comments on the Ask Noah Show podcast episode[1] and a number of responses in the r/Linux subreddit.

[1] https://podcast.asknoahshow.com/343 about 20 min in

All I heard in that segment was Red Hat stopped taking extra steps to debrand and push packages from RHEL, and now clones will have to build their software from CentOS Stream. I did not hear anything about additional actions that Red Hat will take or plans to take. Did I miss something?

The users in question don't want a clone of CentOS Stream, though, they want a replacement for classic CentOS.

Just like users who're choose to run Debian Stable want Debian Stable, not the somewhat stabilised rebuild of a snapshot of Debian Testing that underlies Ubuntu.

(I'm not endorsing any specific set of preferences here and my own are sufficiently complicated they don't really fit in a comment about what sets of preferences -do- exist)

They are actually under exactly that obligation. It's very explicit in the gpl not only what the terms are, but what their intent is, precisely so that no one can ever claim any other possible interpretation.

But according to Red Hat in the interview linked below all of RHEL is built from CentOS Stream, is having the source code available in CentOS Stream Gitlab not adhering to GPL ?

Nope. Centos Steam is merely upstream of RHEL. GPL stipulates that when you give someone else a binary, you also give them the source to that binary, not something similar.

Isn't that the whole issue here? Customers and people with Developer licenses can get the exact RHEL binaries "behind the paywall". And even then if something is upstream does that not mean that the same code flows down stream?

No. CentOS stream is irrelevant here. RHEL customers cannot meaningfully distribute the sources of RHEL. This has been the issue since the beginning, it's just that RH has tightened the knobs progressively over the years.

RHEL source according to Red Hat is CentOS Stream. If the source of RHEL is CentOS Stream then how is it irrelevant? Red Hat cannot deprive you of your right to sources and to redistribute them under the GPL. But Red Hat can also determine who they want to do business with.

centos stream is not the source of rhel binaries. it's upstream of rhel.

Could they not just leave these alternate channels a few weeks or months behind the current release that only the subscribers have access to? That would keep them as the most current, up-to-date source over Rocky Linux.

"Approximately the same lag as you used to get with CentOS" would seem pretty fair to me - I'm aware people grumbled about it and understandably so, but it was still a relatively stable and relatively co-operative situation.

I feel like returning to that apparent Schelling Point could quite easily be an improvement over the Red Queen's Race that I worry is developing here.