Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: SUSE announces a Red Hat Enterprise Linux fork after Oracle said a similar thing, and Sarah Silverman says OpenAI and Meta have stolen her words.
1. IBM Takes Incoming Fire
First up this week: Red Hat continues to be shamed and disgraced by the open source community. Now—finally—SUSE has spoken.
Analysis: More momentum for IBM’s ignominy
Enterprises don’t care which distro they use, so long as it works and they get great support. Oracle is the least likely alternative they might choose; SUSE is the first credible firm with enterprise Linux chops to offer an alternative.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: SUSE will fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux
“Linux’s winners and losers”
When Red Hat changed how users and companies access its … RHEL source code, [it] likely never expected the move to blow up the way it has. First, the RHEL clone distributors — AlmaLinux [and] RESF — objected. Then, Oracle, which has its own RHEL clone, came after Red Hat. And now, SUSE, the European Linux powerhouse, is forking RHEL.
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SUSE declared it would invest more than $10 million toward the development and maintenance of an RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions. … According to Linux’s fundamental license, the GPLv2, no restrictions can be placed on distributing the source code to those who’ve received the binaries. In the view of many … that’s exactly what Red Hat has done.
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[But] businesses care about compatibility, support and stability — not about open-source licensing. … Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure may be the companies that determine business Linux’s winners and losers.
Wait, what was that about Oracle? Thomas Claburn: Oracle pours fuel all over Red Hat source code drama
“Trying to profit”
Oracle claims IBM is trying to kill open source competition. … Yes, the same Oracle that in January 2019 ended free public updates to Oracle JDK.
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Oracle launched what’s now called Oracle Linux back in 2006, and the plan was to provide an RHEL-compatible Linux distribution. … In an essay shared on Monday, [Oracle] laid into IBM for trying to profit at the expense of the open source community.
The cognitive dissonance is strong in this story. igxqrrl speaks for many:
My brain is exploding. First I find myself rooting for Facebook, with Threads challenging Twitter. Now here I am actually rooting for Oracle.
Who cares? throwawaaarrgh cares not for karma:
Enterprises don’t care what distro they use, and SuSE knows that. Enterprises care about the reputation of their professional services provider.
RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable. … Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term than RHEL will. Time will tell who provides more value, but SuSE does appear to be out-IBMing IBM.
Can’t we all just get along? markdavis would really like to see that:
I would like to see … a joint effort/collaboration by all four—Alma, Rocky, SuSE, and Oracle. If they pool their resources and work together, not only could they come out far ahead of RedHat, but instantly guarantee that a new, community-driven enterprise linux distro is supported by everyone. [Although] generally, I detest Oracle.
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I would hate to see triple redundant work being done … when it could be done so much better and faster if they cooperated to a common goal. … I would prefer SUSE just work with Alma/Rocky instead. … There is a great opportunity here to cooperate and rip the enterprise Linux standard right out pf the hands of IBM/RedHat. And I can’t say I would shed any tears, I am really pissed at them. … IBM/RedHat has really cooked their goose by going too far this time.
“Nobody” expected this. Cardinal Fang fetches the comfy chair: [You’re fired—Ed.]
I’m an ex-IBM employee. … If I hadn’t already retired, I’d have quit over this stupidity—some of that code was mine.
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If it ends up in court, IBM loses either way: They either lose the right to GPL code or if they win, someone more feral will come along and rip the carpet from under them. … IBM is screwed.
Meanwhile, ClickOnThis wants a divorce:
I would say Larry Ellison can go **** himself. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised if he married himself.
2. Sarah Silverman Sues OpenAI and Meta
Three book authors, including Sarah Silverman, are suing two big LLM creators for copyright infringement. Generative AI models are finding a place in many DevOps shops. But the burning question is, “What was it trained on and what’s our legal exposure?”
Analysis: Reply hazy, try again
My Magic 8 Ball has failed me. But when it comes to legal arguments that might set a precedent, rule nothing in nor out.
Alia Shoaib: Sarah Silverman is suing
“Bedwetter”
Silverman is one of three authors who are suing OpenAI, the company that created the AI chatbot, according to … court documents. [They] allege that when prompted, ChatGPT will produce a summary of their works. They claim this is copyright infringement.
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The work in question is Silverman’s book “The Bedwetter,” a memoir. … The other plaintiffs are writer Christopher Golden, whose copyrighted books include “Ararat,” … and writer Richard Kadrey, whose copyrighted books include … ”Sandman Slim.”
Isn’t it fair use? After all, my natural “intelligence” doesn’t need to ask permission to read a book. MMarsh isn’t so sure:
You can’t just take that material to do whatever you want with it and make derivative commercial products using it. … Using a book to train an LLM is probably not a “fair use,” because LLMs didn’t exist when the concept of fair use was invented.
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Something new is happening: … The law, as it currently stands, may or may not prohibit the new activity. We don’t know for sure. Thus, there will be lawsuits, with varying degrees of strength and merit, and they will lead to a new body of case law.
Sure, but hjf sarcastically illustrates the case for the defense:
Cannot wait for the future where I’ll be sued by a book publisher for using the knowledge learned from a book.
The Moral of the Story:
There are no mistakes, only opportunities
—Tina Fey
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi, @richij or [email protected].
Image: martin bennie (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)
