I’m curious about what you think on how it will affect the Linux community and distros (especially RHEL based distros like Fedora or Rocky).
More detials found here: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream?sc_cid=701f2000000tyBjAAI
Seem more accurate that their public repos will be closed, so now only centos-stream will be public. You will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a paying customer.
Thanks, by reading “RHEL going closed source” first thing I thought is that would violate the GPL license, but the article you linked seems to indicate that’s not the case.
CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?
CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?
No, CentOS is no longer a RHEL clone, but a beta version of stuff that goes into RHEL.
I’m going to continue running Debian as I did since 2003 or so.
I’m happy for you. Some of us have commercial software that needs a RHEL like distro to run.
supposedly you pay for this software. might as well pay for RHEL too then.
We are, but some orgs are more cash strapped than mine.
With all the new updates happening around all the Linux peripherals, I wouldnt like to stay behind for the next 2/3 years on Debian
Anything that is old on Debian is even older on RHEL so I don’t understand your comment.
Except not everything, as RHEL has selection of software updated to newer versions. Debian just keeps everything old.
Debian has great backports support. And if you need fresher software use nix, flatpak, etc, or run testing or unstable.
What is happening?
You don’t have to use stable for the entire duration of debian 12, switch to testing after say about six months, I’m running testing right now (by accident, forgot I was tracking testing and not bookworm/bullseye) only found a tiny bug with libvirtd.
Debian is lovely os.
Someone has no idea how Debian works.
Arch?
RHEL hasn’t gone closed source, it still complies with the GPL. If they provide you a binary, they must and will continue to provide you with the source code. I feel like this is like when they announced Centos Stream as a “rolling distro”, their messaging is awful, and the optics are bad. I feel this is more to stick it to Oracle and unfortunately, Alma and Rocky are just getting caught in the crossfire.
It has me conflicted. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, we need projects like Alma and Rocky.
Yeah, I’m conflicted too. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, fuck IBM.
This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There’s been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.
IMO that’s the main driver behind this change: don’t feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.
So then Oracle just gets 1 dev account and pulls the source.
This was my initial thought as well, but I imagine that would violate the terms of their subscription and Red Hat could just revoke their access going forward.
I doubt it would legal to make that against the terms. It GPL code, Oracle is allowed to access it as they please.
Very true for the GPL code, but Red Hat adds code that isn’t GPL to the distro. So your downstream distros would have to cherry pick that code out.
I wouldn’t expect it to impact Fedora, but this will probably be significant for Rocky/Alma.
Great, I’ve got an alma ec2 instance with like 5 different services at work, I wanted to avoid changing it for at least a while =/
Well, users and contributors of Fedora might stop doing said things…
My immediate thoughts as a fedora user: Fedora is looked at as a bleeding edge testing distro for what eventually goes into red hat. By using fedora, I am sort of a beta tester for ibm, and am in some ways contributing to the improvement of a distribution (red hat) that goes against what I believe a Linux distribution should do. Given that, should I distro hop?
Or is my brain just trying to make me distro hop again?
Edit: spelling
I would never consider Fedora bleeding edge, but that being said, after the Red Hat lawyers forced the removal of H.264 I did end up hopping after 5 very great years with Fedora. If you’re up for learning something new NixOS is a lot of fun.
NixOS is actually what I was considering! I like the immutable aspects of it but the setup will require me to find some downtime in order to get started.
That’s great to hear! It took me a few evenings wrap my head around it, but now I’m really enjoying it. There’s a great community as well!
You have to make up your own mind. Personally the association with IBM or Oracle would put me right off a distro. But you can find evil in all these big companies, so pick your poison.
How does Oracle play into this?
You aren’t the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I’m not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.
Not to revive any lame memes, but have a look at Arch Linux! I’ve been daily driving it for 10 years. It’s way more “updated” than fedora is.
does it have same interface? Fedoras gnome is unmatched (…to me, as far I tested around distros).
Or is there any other equivalent, similar to fedora and its gnome?
Fedoras gnome is just default gnome lol
Arch doesn’t come with an interface, the idea is you build it up from the bare minimum yourself
Wouldn’t recommend if you just want a usable desktop os
As for gnome, gnome is gnome you can get it on any distro
undefined> Given that, should I distro hop?
Yes
Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.
Do it, you coward! Hop with me!
OpenSUSE maybe?
Yes, distro hop.
You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.
It’s nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy…but usually some compromise is required.
I think it’s time to distro hop again
Go NixOS man it’s the one that finally convinced me to ditch windows entirely and stop hopping
Since Fedora is upstream of RHEL I’d like to think it’ll be unaffected from the move. But only time will tell
Absolute L move from them. Atleast it makes the choice easier if future distrohopping urges will haunt my zoom zoom brain.
My thoughts exactly; One less distro to hop to.
Blueification of Red Hat . . . sad times
Well, I just hope they ARE thinking. Gotta be a good reason -I have no read anything about this- for doing this.
I guess a few people might be looking at other distros now.
They won’t say it, but the reason for this is 100% to kill downstream distros based on RHEL. They already effectively killed CentOS, the downstream distro they controlled, by moving it from downstream to upstream. With this change they’re now coming for other downstream distros that they don’t control, like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Upstream repos like Fedora (and CentOS once it changed to CentOS Stream) will not be affected… for now at least.
I think downstream repos are important to the ecosystem because they give the FOSS community contributors an easy way to test against RHEL-compatible binaries without being encumbered by an RHEL license. IBM seems pretty hellbent on ensuring that people won’t be able to do this without agreeing with their license, and as soon as they achieve that I think they’ll tighten the screws on their own licensing in ways that aren’t to the benefit of anyone but IBM. It seems pretty obvious to me that IBM is making this change because they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms, and my guess is that their benefit will come at the community’s expense. Yes, you can get a free (as in beer) developer account and test using that but now you have to register VMs, keep track of your number of registered systems, and you have to worry about possibly violating the not free (as in freedom) license that you have to agree to in order to access the Red Hat developer program. I think this change will be bad for RHEL in the long term, but time will tell.
I guess we’re in a bit of a waiting game then. Too much stuff is tied to RHEL to easily switch for us, but TBH we’re starting to see more people wanting Ubuntu (ugg) / debian because ML seems to be there. Also most commercial software I’ve seen tends to offer .deb and .rpm or just .deb actually so more and more it’s RHEL that isn’t packaged for - and that’s been for years now.
I need to understand… Given its GPL because of the kernel, how could they change the terms of the license suddenly? Doesnt GPL forbid you from replacing it with a different license? How are they managing to get this through?
They’re not changing the license that governs the open source code, they’re changing who receives the source code directly from them. The GPL requires that if you distribute binaries based on GPL open source code, you also have to distribute the source code as well. If you modify GPL’d source code and produce and distribute binaries using that modified code then you also have to distribute the modified source code as well. However, the important point is to who the GPL requires them to distribute the source code. The actual requirement in the GPL is that you have to distribute source code to the same people that you distribute binaries. You’re not required to distribute source code to anyone and everyone.
For Red Hat’s enterprise customers, they’ll still have access to the source code that makes up the distro. Source code packages will still be a thing and licensed RHEL customers (including the free-as-in-beer developer license) will still be able to install source packages. Red Hat cannot do otherwise as it would put them in contravention of the GPL license. What is changing is that Red Hat is no longer publishing the same source code publicly. They used to do that on git.centos.org but have now stopped. The general flow of code changes used to work something like this:
Fedora (and now CentOS Stream) -> RHEL -> git.centos.org -> downstream distros (Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, formerly CentOS before it become CentOS Stream)
By breaking the link at git.centos.org, Red Hat makes it harder for downstream distros to create versions that are one-for-one binary-compatible with corresponding RHEL versions. Doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and certainly both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have put out statements saying that they will work around the problem and continue as per usual.
Hopefully this simply becomes the new status quo. Downstream RHEL-compatible distros have a harder time of it because they have to reverse-engineer each RHEL build to some extent rather than receiving the exact updates directly from Red Hat themselves. However I do wonder whether this is IBM / Red Hat’s first step toward an attempt to kill downstream distros, and if there are changes coming to the Red Hat license that make it less free-as-in-freedom. I hope that’s not the case because at that point things become very contentious and there will likely be litigation as to whether Red Hat can legally lock down what mostly amounts to a curation of open source software.
Thanks. So theyre not closing it completely just “hiding it” kind of, and making it harder to access it. I wonder what Linus has to say about this… Or Stallman
I’m newish to Fedora and admit I don’t understand the whole developer/governance structure of it vs RHEL, but the news did make me wonder about continuing to use Fedora.
Reading some comments here, maybe it’s a non-issue. Guess I’ll have to dig more.
It’s a complete non-issue. Sensationalist headlines are so easy to make about this.
Anybody who has a FREE developer account can access the source code.
Thanks for more information.
Fellow Fedora user here. I find this is a little concerning, but overall, I’m not too worried. Fedora is their test bed for stuff, although it is a very stable, well maintained test bed.
Aren’t there poison pill clauses in a lot of OSS licenses that prevent moves like this? Could they face legal repercussions?
Technically none of the open source licenses require you to publish the source to everyone. They just require you to publish the source to the same people who get binaries from you.
But they are free to redistribute it again if I understand it correctly
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Rocky & Alma were easy targets. Next up thumbscrews on systemd!
Great response to the discussion, as this 2012 article lays our their path many years ago. Lots of very economically valid reasons for changing, and it seems to have worked even if it is a shame to see. It makes me wonder if the changing economy is going to put more pressure on other favorites to monitize or fail. I say this given that volunteers are showing a decline so without people spending free time, then open-source software will face further challenges.
I don’t want to digress too much, but I can’t help but juxtapose the slow change and monetization RH has done very well as compared to the idiocy that Reddit is doing.
Big Blue asserting their dominance. Unfortunately at the cost of some very fantastic community projects.
