What do you think about the move of RHEL ?

Probably makes some sense for them? I personally just don't care (at least not beyond the issue what should be the "next" default/ported Linux userland for FreeBSD ... something must replace c7 eventually....)
 
Rocky already outlined a few ways around this. They are smart people and REL is still GPL'ed, so the overall impact of this move is probably less than it appears at first.
 
This is nothing new. RedHat has been trying to optimize its distribution mechanism for decades. It started out with a single product, which you could get "for free", and their initial business plan was to make money by selling support. The next step was splitting the paid enterprise product (often used on servers, sometimes on desktops) which was still called RedHat, from the free product with community support (mostly used on desktops) called Fedora. Then came the renaming of the supported / supportable product to RHEL. In all this, RedHat made very good money from selling support, and they re-invested much of it into developing Linux (kernel and base infrastructure) and enterprise applications (for example clustering, sys management, better installation and support frameworks, and so on). Since some of that add-on software and their packaging of the distribution is not GPL'ed, they have been keeping that closed, which is probably really good for business. But other companies and volunteer groups have been re-constructing the RHEL distribution (most importantly CentOS), and for folks who want a high-quality Unix distribution but don't want to buy support, those were a very good choice. Then they were bought by IBM, but are still being run quite independently (to a large extent, RedHat actually bought IBM's software business, not the other way around). So today they're trying to restrict access to RHEL to make the cloning harder. This seems like a very reasonable thing to do from their viewpoint. Since I personally don't use any RHEL machines, it doesn't affect me. And, as cracauer already said, other distributions will fill the gap left by CentOS and other RHEL clones.

oops said:
Makes me glad for choosing FreeBSD. No GPL - no drama.
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The drama here is not caused by the GPL. It is caused by a business model of giving away your product, and then trying to make money supporting it. It turns out this doesn't work well, so RedHat is improving that model.
 
Alain De Vos said:
fedora , alma-linux, rocky-linux are possibly impacted.
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Alma and Rocky are impacted. Fedora is the development branch of RH, it's not impacted. This move by the parent company(IBM) makes complete sense. IBM bought RH to make money, they have no incentive to give away their source code for free. It's ironic and sad that IBM was the champion of Linux years ago and now they've moved to a closed source model like Microsoft.
 
yuripv79 said:
While Microsoft now has a lot of open source projects, who could expect that some 20 years ago.
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Indeed! I remember when Ballmer characterized Linux as a cancer. IBM bought their operating system(DOS) from Bill Gates back in the day, they needed something to run their PCs. And they've purchased RH. They're a successful business aimed at being profitable.
 
If everyone kept their little bits of work private, the entire open-source platform would not exist as it does today. Quite disappointed in Red Hat.

But also particularly disappointed in all the Linux newbies avidly defending Red Hat as "protecting" its work. They completely overlook the fact that 99% of Red Hat's "work" is the work of small individual developers. Some people really do put companies on pedestals because they can't believe that normal people can achieve things. A bit sad really.

Ultimately nothing much to see here. Just another large machine exploiting resources in order to generate revenue as part of an automatic process.
 
kpedersen said:
If everyone kept their little bits of work private, the entire open-source platform would not exist as it does today. Quite disappointed in Red Hat.
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Exactly. Development works best in BSD and Linux when code is freely shared. It's sad that Red Hat has chosen profit over open source ideology(I get it though). This form of thinking will spread (Suse is going to have their own enterprise version of Linux).
 
We've seen this "movie" before. RHEL is going to be dead or dying in 5-10 years, just like Microsoft Xenix a.k.a (SCO UNIX/SCO Open Desktop/SCO OpenServer/Xinuos OpenServer), SunOS (Sun Solaris/Oracle Solaris), Digital UNIX (Tru64 UNIX), etc., and if is not dead or dying, it will occupy an extremely small niche in the enterprise market, just like Solaris, HP-UX, AIX.

LE: One good thing come from IBM acquire of RH, the GNU/Linux is free of Poettering experiments.
 
I must admit it was surprising to me that GPL apparently doesn't prevent a company from taking software with that licence and develop it behind closed doors - a pay-wall - and then prohibit their customers from sharing that source code. I thought this was only possible with permissive software licences. I thought the right to redistribute the source code was inherent in all copyleft licences.
 
kpedersen said:
They completely overlook the fact that 99% of Red Hat's "work" is the work of small individual developers.
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For non-Linux what matters are upstream contributions, not the sauce used by RHEL to give "certified" flavor. This drama (unlike systemd and intensified by GPL) destabilizes vendor lock in Linux, making it easier to adopt FreeBSD.
 
Linux is more than RHEL.
Raise your hand if you ever audited the source code.
Yes it's important to be open source, community contribution ready code, but if it's not and it works just fine, why not?
Windows is not open source, MacOS is not open source, so if RHEL decides the same, it's alright.
Fedora and other RHEL based distros may be affected.
But Linux will still go on open source and there are several other distros, Debian, Suse, Arch.
I just recently moved to FreeBSD in a way of testing it if I can use it as a workstation.
I've now a stable FreeBSD setup but there are still somethings I can't make it work.
Can't watch Netflix or Prime movies/series nor listen Spotify streams and that's really bad. It's a show stopper for me.
Not because I depend on this but of that feeling of can't do what every other system does, even Android can do it.
I know there are ways but I really wish I could use pure FreeBSD for everything.

I once read something like this:
- I resolved all my Linux problems when I bought a Macbook.
No, it's not free and no, it's not open source.
But it's the BSD closest parent right?
So this guy must be right.

Back to RHEL news, it will have zero impact to me.
 
With apologies to Mark Twain, reports of the imminent death of Red Hat are exaggerated. IBM owns the big end of town, and history suggests that they know how to stay there.

RHEL has significant impact on many Unix people, because that's where most of the jobs are.

I'm completely unsurprised by IBM's move to freeze out Oracle and the other freeloaders. It's business. I expect that they care about open source about as much as Microsoft do.

However, most big sites have moved development away from central servers and onto VMs resident on the developers' desktops. RHEL server licences are expensive. Doubly so if you try to run M$ and RHEL clients on the same VMware server.

So there's a lot of Java jockies using Centos VMs under Hyper-V on their corporate Windows PCs, laptops, and notebooks in the development stage, before switching to the licensed RHEL servers for testing and deployment.

I'll be interested to see how IBM manage that. I expect they'll just make their clients purchase even more licences.
 
kpedersen said:
But also particularly disappointed in all the Linux newbies avidly defending Red Hat as "protecting" its work. They completely overlook the fact that 99% of Red Hat's "work" is the work of small individual developers.
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About 80% or 90% (or more) of Linux development is done by paid software engineer staff at large companies. Companies such as IBM, Intel, Google and Oracle each have hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of Linux developers on staff. RedHat (when it was independent of IBM) was probably the largest of the companies that was creating Linux software. The idea that Linux is developed by individual amateurs (who don't get paid for their work on Linux) was probably true 25 years ago, and hasn't been true since. And: these programming efforts is not what RedHat is protecting right now. By the way, I've been using Linux since about 1994.

But that's just Linux, the large ecosystem of kernel, system environment, and software packages. In addition to using all that, RedHat (or any distribution) also puts in a lot of work into assembling software, packaging it, and testing the result for commercial sale. That work is not open source, and it is exactly what RedHat is trying to protect here.

BobSlacker said:
Yup, the marketing sector of the FBSDF (and all others BSD's foundations) should take serious advantage of this situation and bite a big chunk of the market share from RHEL.
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The "marketing sector of FBSDF"? Does such a thing even exist? Is FreeBSD marketed to potential users? Just as a reminder: The last published revenue of RedHat (before it was bought by IBM) was about four billion $ per year. The total budget of the FreeBSD foundation is a few million $. The market share of Linux in both desktop and servers is probably 100x or 1000x larger than FreeBSD.

Even if the current RedHat fracas leads to a small hickup in the use of Linux (I doubt it), it is unlikely to lead to large-scale adoption of other OSes. Perhaps a few more people will move from the various RedHat clone distributions (such as CentOS) to Debian or other distributions, but the net effect on the BSDs (or MacOS and Windows) will probably be non-existing.
 
ralphbsz said:
The idea that Linux is developed by individual amateurs (who don't get paid for their work on Linux) was probably true 25 years ago, and hasn't been true since.
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I'm not sure. For the kernel, perhaps (looking at commits, around 75% commercial) but looking at the entire Gnome desktop "cruft" (and vim and coreutils, etc), much of that is very much amateur /hobbyist and that makes up a lot of the distribution.

ralphbsz said:
In addition to using all that, RedHat (or any distribution) also puts in a lot of work into assembling software, packaging it, and testing the result for commercial sale. That work is not open source, and it is exactly what RedHat is trying to protect here.
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For the package scripts, many of these come from Fedora (licensed under MIT) and many are written by amateurs / hobbyists. RH then integrated them with their downstream.

Of course a "guesstimate" but, I would say that RHEL is made up of 99% other people's work, (mostly hobbyist). Yes, they test and polish their integration scripts but so do most distro projects.

I also suspect that companies hire committers for exposure / great skills whereas those committers were going to work on Linux anyway.
 
Well, first Scientific Linux started to rival CentOS. RH quickly hired Troy Dawson, SL's main developer, and that pretty much put CentOS as the main clone. In 2014, RH took over CentOS, promising only good. In 2020 they basically killed CentOS. So, it sort of seems they're playing a long game. There is also the situation, apparently not rare, where a wealthy company would have a bunch of CentOS servers and one or two RH ones, and use those to get RH support if they wanted it. (I haven't worked in such a company, and my evidence is just stories from friends and acquaintances). So for them to not care about the spirit of the GPL and do this, if it's within the letter of the law, isn't surprising. It seems that they just played a very long game.
 
I've worked for relatively large companies that use CentOS systems as their fundamental backbone of their existence, but they have struggled with support. Sure, you can hire a few people in house to support and upgrade the system, but this then puts the onus of the criticality of the system on the manager accountable for that particular system.

Managers don't like that, they want scapegoats and excuses, and will pay handsomely for it. To have an external corporate entity like Red Hat or whatever to deflect to when you're standing in front of the board explaining why the business has ground to a halt due to the system failing is worth the money in a lot of places.

As for the product themselves, I've used a lot of different distributions on the Linux and BSD side, it's all the same packages, makes no difference to me on the product. More than likely, either system is being used as a host for in-house Kubernetes/containerd platforms these days.
 
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