I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?
Red Hat announced that they are no longer providing updates to the downstream repo at git.centos.org and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back, essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".
To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the future.
This move by RH is not proprietary per se but it does indicate that they are growing hostile towards open source as a whole because it is affecting their business model, and since they were acquired by IBM, now they only really care about the revenue RHEL generates.
> essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".
I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro.
Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream.
On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats move, and I'm kinda on their side. Why is it that we're unhappy with Red Hat wanting to be paid for their work. You're getting all the open source benefits, if you don't like RHEL, or Red Hat that's fine, you can still benefit from their work, but you might want to pick a different distribution.
And I can see the point, people are upset that Red Hat would like to get pay and yet they expect to be able to profit from a SaaS platform they build on CentOS or Rocky Linux. For some unknown reason, Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.
> and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back
Yet when commercial entities take code and don't contribute back, it is “just how things work”.
While I appreciate that RedHat has been a good player overall compared to many others, this comes across as the kid at school happy to throw icy snowballs at everyone else moaning because they got hit by return fire. How unfair of the open source world using open source licenses the same way the commercial world does.
They chose a business model built on open source, and now they don't like it because they can't suck enough profit from it. Maybe they should just build their own proprietary operating system from scratch.
> […] essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".
Thereby creating an eco-system of RH-based systems that people learn about and get familiar with, so when it comes to going into production the natural default is to just purchase the official RHEL for those systems.
I think RH/IBM are being short-sited on how useful the free eco-system is.
xinayder|2 years ago
To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the future.
This move by RH is not proprietary per se but it does indicate that they are growing hostile towards open source as a whole because it is affecting their business model, and since they were acquired by IBM, now they only really care about the revenue RHEL generates.
mrweasel|2 years ago
I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro.
Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream.
On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats move, and I'm kinda on their side. Why is it that we're unhappy with Red Hat wanting to be paid for their work. You're getting all the open source benefits, if you don't like RHEL, or Red Hat that's fine, you can still benefit from their work, but you might want to pick a different distribution.
And I can see the point, people are upset that Red Hat would like to get pay and yet they expect to be able to profit from a SaaS platform they build on CentOS or Rocky Linux. For some unknown reason, Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.
[1] https://coder.show/525
dspillett|2 years ago
Yet when commercial entities take code and don't contribute back, it is “just how things work”.
While I appreciate that RedHat has been a good player overall compared to many others, this comes across as the kid at school happy to throw icy snowballs at everyone else moaning because they got hit by return fire. How unfair of the open source world using open source licenses the same way the commercial world does.
drumhead|2 years ago
throw0101c|2 years ago
Thereby creating an eco-system of RH-based systems that people learn about and get familiar with, so when it comes to going into production the natural default is to just purchase the official RHEL for those systems.
I think RH/IBM are being short-sited on how useful the free eco-system is.
saw-lau|2 years ago