Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.
Forget about Red Hat, they’re gone, they’re not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.
RHEL ultimately comes from Fedora (plus Redhat has a great say in where Fedora is headed), so… RHEL won’t become sort of an AIX or HPUX anytime soon.
That said, Redhat’s move opens up the position of “enterprise-like distro for scientific/technical shops and other people who do their own support” (think, from CERN to small software houses) that so was the reign of RHEL clones (together with Ubuntu, of course).
Those are people who will probably never buy RHEL licenses for all their machines no matter what, so in a sense it stands to reason that RH doesn’t care about them (if you think their move is about money rather than falling for the “value to the community” PR spin), but those same people are also trend setters whose choices, in time, trickle down to universities and then companies, and to me it looks like there’s a huge opportunity there (and that Alma is currently in the best position to harvest from it in the long run).
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done
Except they’re not. Almost nobody in their customer base (enterprises) is going to care one bit about any of this drama. They’ll have their support contracts and software certified for RHEL and they’ll keep paying Red Hat for the privilege, and RHEL will remain the dominant distribution in the enterprise market.
The danger is that if we stop caring, and let Red Hat have their way, distros like Rocky and Alma will become endangered and access to a free and unencumbered RHEL compatible distribution may eventually be cut off entirely. This would give Red Hat a de facto monopoly and a stranglehold on the enterprise market, and eventually it may even drift so far away from mainstream Linux that due to incompatibilities you just can’t run the same workloads on a Debian system anymore. This would land us right back to the situation where we started in the 1990s, where a select few companies (i.e. IBM, Sun, Microsoft, HP,…) controlled the market with their closed source mutually incompatible operating systems.
Saying things like “forget about Red Hat” is defeatism and running away from a fight that should be fought.
That’s exactly what’s already happened. Rocky and Alma are already no longer an option for a free version of Red Hat since Red Hat code is not allowed to be shared, it can only be viewed. Read their own words from Alma and Rocky, what they themself said about oing forward.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement further to include anyone proven to have published source code of Red Hat branded material agrees to pay a fee to Red Hat of no less than $10 million, or whatever price they want to put on it.
Everyone can scream about Red Hat, all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars, BOOM! Red Hat becomes a proprietary system built on open source software.
SUSE says they will fork RHEL, but Alma and Rocky are over in terms of being a clone. People have asked for years why there is no free 1 to 1 clone of SLES and SLED. IBM is free to choose to turn all of RHEL in a proprietary development and lock it down, unless you can get a court order that says Red Hate’s code must be made public, but I don’t dare test IBM lawyers over any code that is not released under AGPLv3, only then I would.
It’s not a license agreement, it’s a terms of service agreement. The license of the software is still the GPL (or any of the other FOSS licenses that apply).
all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars
The point where they introduce punitive terms to the terms of service agreement in response to redistribution, is also the point where their argument that “they’re free to choose who they do business with” breaks down because they’re no longer just ending their business relationship with you, they’re imposing a punishment. They wouldn’t just be skirting the GPL, they would be blatantly violating it.
I would love to see IBM lawyers try to get that fee enforced when a customer exercises their GPL granted freedom to distribute a piece of software that Red Hat didn’t create and own to begin with.
The GNU/Linux GPLv2 does not apply to any software developed and owned by Red Hat like all of the Red Hat security programs, that is not covered by the Linux license. If Red Hat never modifies or changes a single line of code in GNU/Linux, they are free to run closed source programs on top of it. They own .rpm file format so they have the legal freedom to make the system and all RH software proprietary.
That’s how Rocky and Alma are now permanently locked out from accessing the code.
I really don’t care about RHEL. Unless companies want to buy their services to be allowed access to the software it, everyone should forget about Red Hat. It’s done, it’s gone. And there will never be a free version of Red Hat, so look at other long term alternatives.
It checked a lot of boxes for corporation use. SELinux isn’t/wasn’t on debian either. But it’s not any ‘better’. Debian has been rock solid for me. ZFS is the only thing I’d like to see in Debian feature-wise.
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.
Forget about Red Hat, they’re gone, they’re not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.
RHEL ultimately comes from Fedora (plus Redhat has a great say in where Fedora is headed), so… RHEL won’t become sort of an AIX or HPUX anytime soon.
That said, Redhat’s move opens up the position of “enterprise-like distro for scientific/technical shops and other people who do their own support” (think, from CERN to small software houses) that so was the reign of RHEL clones (together with Ubuntu, of course).
Those are people who will probably never buy RHEL licenses for all their machines no matter what, so in a sense it stands to reason that RH doesn’t care about them (if you think their move is about money rather than falling for the “value to the community” PR spin), but those same people are also trend setters whose choices, in time, trickle down to universities and then companies, and to me it looks like there’s a huge opportunity there (and that Alma is currently in the best position to harvest from it in the long run).
Is there a reason that Alma and/or Rocky shouldn’t try to release their own version of SLES and SLED?
Except they’re not. Almost nobody in their customer base (enterprises) is going to care one bit about any of this drama. They’ll have their support contracts and software certified for RHEL and they’ll keep paying Red Hat for the privilege, and RHEL will remain the dominant distribution in the enterprise market.
The danger is that if we stop caring, and let Red Hat have their way, distros like Rocky and Alma will become endangered and access to a free and unencumbered RHEL compatible distribution may eventually be cut off entirely. This would give Red Hat a de facto monopoly and a stranglehold on the enterprise market, and eventually it may even drift so far away from mainstream Linux that due to incompatibilities you just can’t run the same workloads on a Debian system anymore. This would land us right back to the situation where we started in the 1990s, where a select few companies (i.e. IBM, Sun, Microsoft, HP,…) controlled the market with their closed source mutually incompatible operating systems.
Saying things like “forget about Red Hat” is defeatism and running away from a fight that should be fought.
That’s exactly what’s already happened. Rocky and Alma are already no longer an option for a free version of Red Hat since Red Hat code is not allowed to be shared, it can only be viewed. Read their own words from Alma and Rocky, what they themself said about oing forward.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement further to include anyone proven to have published source code of Red Hat branded material agrees to pay a fee to Red Hat of no less than $10 million, or whatever price they want to put on it.
Everyone can scream about Red Hat, all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars, BOOM! Red Hat becomes a proprietary system built on open source software.
SUSE says they will fork RHEL, but Alma and Rocky are over in terms of being a clone. People have asked for years why there is no free 1 to 1 clone of SLES and SLED. IBM is free to choose to turn all of RHEL in a proprietary development and lock it down, unless you can get a court order that says Red Hate’s code must be made public, but I don’t dare test IBM lawyers over any code that is not released under AGPLv3, only then I would.
It’s not a license agreement, it’s a terms of service agreement. The license of the software is still the GPL (or any of the other FOSS licenses that apply).
The point where they introduce punitive terms to the terms of service agreement in response to redistribution, is also the point where their argument that “they’re free to choose who they do business with” breaks down because they’re no longer just ending their business relationship with you, they’re imposing a punishment. They wouldn’t just be skirting the GPL, they would be blatantly violating it.
I would love to see IBM lawyers try to get that fee enforced when a customer exercises their GPL granted freedom to distribute a piece of software that Red Hat didn’t create and own to begin with.
The GNU/Linux GPLv2 does not apply to any software developed and owned by Red Hat like all of the Red Hat security programs, that is not covered by the Linux license. If Red Hat never modifies or changes a single line of code in GNU/Linux, they are free to run closed source programs on top of it. They own .rpm file format so they have the legal freedom to make the system and all RH software proprietary.
That’s how Rocky and Alma are now permanently locked out from accessing the code.
Why do people care about RHEL? Is it really any better than Debian based stuff?
I really don’t care about RHEL. Unless companies want to buy their services to be allowed access to the software it, everyone should forget about Red Hat. It’s done, it’s gone. And there will never be a free version of Red Hat, so look at other long term alternatives.
It checked a lot of boxes for corporation use. SELinux isn’t/wasn’t on debian either. But it’s not any ‘better’. Debian has been rock solid for me. ZFS is the only thing I’d like to see in Debian feature-wise.