Thousands of sysadmins, open source devs, even Hatters themselves used CentOS as a proxy for RHEL where they didn't want to deal with licensing crap.
In the middle of the CentOS 8 lifecycle, they converted CentOS to CentOS Stream (nobody asked for this), forcing everyone who had migrated their tooling and infra from CentOS 7 to 8 to migrate instead to... what?
Rocky/Alma stepped in and saved the day for all those folks.
Then in the middle of the CentOS Stream 9 lifecycle, they hid some of the sources required for rebuilding a CentOS-equivalent (at least simply/easily) behind a Red Hat account and told the community they should be happy with 16 dev licenses for RHEL if they truly needed RHEL compatibility.
As I said then, "no thanks."
Doesn't mean they were right.
The lovely RHEL people and CentOS people didn't have a say. We kept hearing and believing that the CentOS stream change was never intended to break CentOS users until they hid the sources.
RHEL is built on open source products, and support is sold. To innovate in open source by coming up with ways to get around GPL (we'll retaliate if you publish our legally publishable sources IIUC) is evil. In direct violation of what every other contributor to linux/GNU/anything GPL ever released their software under.
Disclaimer: I was part of other projects, not this directly, and I had nothing, but respect and love for everyone I worked with. We were in denial then too.
Hate bandwagon? I'm not a huge follower of Jeff's but I have never seen a single thing from them that I would consider "hateful" or jumping on a bandwagon.
What I can gather is that you disagree with those who did not like Red Hat's actions w.r.t. CentOS and RHEL updates, but just because you side with Red Hat here doesn't really make the argument less valid, neither does unjustly categorizing it as hateful. (Or false. I'm not seeing the reams of false claims. I see some accurate ones though, like that Redhat had promised not to change access to the sources previously[1].)
[1]: https://www.learnlinux.tv/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/red_hat...
I'll just address this bit. Yes, it was a hate bandwagon and it wasn't jumping on one, it was leading it. It was all over his LinkedIn and everywhere else he could post at the time.
(And I say this as an open source developer myself, who has spent thousands of hours writing code for free.)
If you want to side with Red Hat on this, fine, but it's not necessary to exaggerate the actions of those with an opposing view to the point that you're trying to make them look bad.
I also in general think it's silly and unnecessary to defend a giant corporation (remember, IBM owns Red Hat now, and it's not like RH had been a scrappy little Linux company for a long while before the acquisition, even) over regular ol' community members and IT sysadmins who have a beef.
The sources are all still there, they just need to work a little harder to get it. Forgive me if I shed no tears.
Generally speaking, the people who did the work to found RESF weren’t doing so in order to have someone else do their work for them and just rebrand it. There was a terrific amount of work that happened because a huge community of users had just had the rugged pulled out from under them.
(To be very clear, on a personal level I have some deep and stringently opposed views to some people in the RESF/CIQ ecosystem. I’m not offering any unconditional or personal defenses.)
Jeff’s takes were some of the most measured of the disagreement with Red Hat’s moves that I’ve seen.
I've reviewed my comments and this is mostly false. Not sure why you felt you needed to put this one in here.
> Does he not also have the right to call out IBM/Red Hat?
"Calling out" does not mean distorting facts to kickstart a rage-fuelled campaign against the company that offers, to this day, the most to the Linux ecosystem, free of charge, freely licensed.
To wit, he is an influencer, I am not, and should be much more careful with how he wields his influence. That was what I have re-iterated, comment by comment.
The only companies that need ten year lifecycles are the same consumers Red Hat caters to with RHEL.
Red Hat is continuing to honor all its licensing terms. It just isn't doing its freeloading competitors any favors. And yes: they're freeloaders.
Red Hat's choice never touched the community in any way. As a hobbyist who uses Red Hat stuff, I'm not using RHEL, and even if I was, Red Hat gives generous licenses for hobbyists like me.
Jeff (and everybody else) jumped on the hate bandwagon. It wasn't kind, it was mob behavior, and it completely lacked any nuance.