It seems pretty mad. Apparently Redhat doing all of their work as GPL'ed OpenSource and upstreaming everything so that everyone benefits, and anyone can take the software and build their own, sell it, etc, isn't good enough.

Is literally the only thing that would make people happy is to give away RHEL for free for people to run their production servers on?

Part of the open source social contract is downstreaming too. You can't just take, promise to give back, and then hoard what you've built.

There is no hording though.

What changes have they made to RHEL that isn't available?

downstreaming ? How is the open source social contract anymore than making source code available?

That's what I mean. Not putting up a EULA dam. They don't have to build CentOS or assist anyone, but they can't block the code from flowing downhill.

According to Red Hat the source of RHEL is publicly available on CentOS Stream Gitlab, without a EULA.

It's the upstream source, not the source used to build RHEL. RHEL is downstream of CentOS stream. Much like linux kernel's source is available, it does not help you much.

However, it is "exactly" that code, isnt it.. thats been my understanding.

It may incidentally be in some cases, but isn't guaranteed to be. Things don't flow back up from RHEL to CentOS stream. Someone else mentioned that they were not able to build RHEL packages from CentOS stream.

Do you have an example of this, since the project I work on definitely has its code synced to gitlab..

I believe that would be actuall evidence of gpl non compliance, not this dismisive current interpretation that people have.

I don't think that most people who commented have a subscription.

Pushing things back to CentOS stream is not a requirement of GPL. GPL's role ends once RHEL customers get the source. Do you mean evidence of CentOS stream not being enough ? The post talks about it. Rocky needs to collate sources from several places now to create 1:1 RHEL rebuilds.

> Do you mean evidence of CentOS stream not being enough ?

I think this is what I mean, yes.

The rhel trees are synced from the centos trees. If centos git trees couldnt build, rhel couldnt build. Afaics the only time this seems to be in conflict is for important and critical cve's , which are built on a rhel specific branch. After package release these branches are merged with centos, and the local rhel branches deleted and business continues as normal.

This is an attempt not to break embargo agreements with researchers who ask for it.

According to Red Hat it is. If you don't believe them you can get a Developer subscription to get a RHEL ISO to compare with a CentOS Stream ISO. I imagine a lot of people, myself included, would be interested in the analysis of that.

So you do that analysis. Two downstream distros of RHEL have said that they cannot continue to offer RHEL rebuilds/updates without substantial changes. That means that it is not possible to use CentOS stream to build RHEL packages. You are free to do all the analysis in the world.

The damage is corporations could now determine whether they classify downstream use of open source code as "valuable" or "not valuable", and determine (according to their own rubrics) whether to effectively end the open source gravy train in their own ecosystem, or be a member of the open source community and share alike.

Despite every attempt by Red Hat employees to call out CentOS Stream as being "Red Hat sources", it is not. If they wish to participate in the open source ecosystem, they can't coerce customers (paid or not) into a particular (very proprietary) usage pattern with their software. No matter how many tens/hundreds/thousands of employees they hire to code for open source projects.

So Red Hat is saying that CentOS Stream is how RHEL is built, you are saying it is not. Can you show the difference in packages from CentOS Stream and RHEL? Rocky says they pull packages from CentOS Stream, and with their project goal remaining 1:1 binary compatibility then that must be the case.

So far I have talked to two individual developers who have not been able to reproduce a RHEL 9.2 build only using what's available in Stream.