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: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) goes closed source. Well—no, not really; but IBM’s lawyers are accused of skating so close to the edge of legality that they risk violating the GNU Public License.
Analysis: Stick a fork in Red Hat—it’s done
Legal nuances aside, this is the proverbial last straw. Red Hat’s entire existence is built upon the unpaid work of FOSS contributors.
Yes, Red Hat adds to the state of the art, and contributes those additions back to the community—as it should. But what appears to be greedy corporate behavior isn’t a good look—and will surely come back to bite.
Matt Asay investigates: Red Hat ends the RHEL clones’ free lunch
“Very difficult”
For decades Red Hat has led the enterprise Linux market, but as popular as its eponymous Linux distribution might be, CentOS 7 is … 20 times as popular. … Red Hat announced that CentOS 7 will be end-of-lifed in June 2024 [and] that CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.
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Red Hat, of course, would like you to stick with Red Hat, and offers a straightforward way to migrate CentOS 7 instances to RHEL in the cloud—something that becomes very difficult if you opt for would-be clones like AlmaLinux. … For enterprises that are serious about infrastructure, it pays to support the company that is best placed to support you.
Liam Proven has the other side of the story: Red Hat strikes a crushing blow
“Very bad news”
Red Hat has decided to stop making the source code of RHEL available to the public. … Only paying customers will be able to obtain the source code … and under the terms of their contracts … they can’t publish it.
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This is very bad news for downstream projects … such as AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, EuroLinux, and Oracle Unbreakable Linux. … CentOS Stream is upstream of RHEL: … it’s a sort of continuous rolling beta of the next version. [And] Fedora is upstream [of] CentOS Stream.
But but but—that’s not legal! Yes and no, says Bradley M. Kuhn:
IBM’s Red Hat … contract clearly states that … if the customer [exercises] any rights to copy, modify, redistribute and/or reinstall the software … that Red Hat reserves the right to cancel that contract. … Red Hat’s lawyers clearly take the position that this business model complies with the GPL (though we aren’t so sure: … It’s just so murky that any tweak to the model … seems to definitely violate).
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When most of us were distracted by … the COVID-19 pandemic, Red Hat unilaterally terminated all CentOS Linux development [and then] ended CentOS Linux entirely. … This completes what appears to be a decade-long plan by Red Hat to maximize the level of difficulty of those … who wish to “trust but verify” that RHEL complies with the GPL.
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Due to this ongoing bad behavior by IBM’s Red Hat, the situation has become increasingly complex and difficult to face. … In the late 1990s … Bob Young [and] Erik Troan … wanted to build a company that respected, collaborated with, engaged with, and most of all treated as equals the wide spectrum of individuals, hobbyists, and small businesses that make … the FOSS community.
Even if it’s legal, it’s unfair. So thinks phpisthebest:
RHEL is not possible without the wider ecosystem. And to say Rocky Linux is a “dirtbag” for repackaging RHEL, would be like saying RedHat is a “dirtbag” for packaging any number of free software projects.
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It is completely antithetical to the free software movement. … However it is perfectly on brand for the “Open Source” corporatist movement that seems to be supplanting free software.
And counter-productive, argues ids1024:
In addition to whether or not it’s “fair”, I have doubts that this will actually increase Red Hat’s sales. Maybe it will, but I suspect … potential customers either are already paying or still won’t. And this may drive away some paying customers or future customers.
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If Red Hat keeps changing their policies, that is also going to raise concerns for anyone looking for something they can rely on. … People may not have as much trust in them as they used to, pre-IBM.
“People”? Perhaps people such as geerlingguy:
I develop Ansible roles that I know have been used by thousands … of RHEL enterprise automations—and are cited in official Red Hat training materials. How did I build those roles and test them? CentOS. And then Rocky Linux.
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I hate how there’s this feeling that [we’re] leeches, and there was no value in having a downstream distribution. Offering the ‘carrot’ of a Developer Subscription with 16 free [CPU] sockets is insulting.
ElizabethGreene expresses a “Surprise Opinion”:
Of all the big names that could have screwed up Open Source—in the spirit if not the letter of the law—I would not have guessed it would be Red Hat.
However, an always curious jzb sees both sides:
I’m always curious that people get angry at Red Hat profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their business and pay nothing and contribute nothing. Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it’s not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.
It’s all corporate BS, complains andyprough:
Weren’t they the ones making all kinds of … claims about a commitment to the community, back when they pushed their way into ownership of CentOS? Just be honest: “We’re taking ownership of it in order to shut it down.” … That’s a lot more digestible than all this obvious manipulation and scheming.
Meanwhile, sjames cuts to the chase:
I’m thankful for RH’s latest moves. … They gave me enough ammo to convince enterprise support gigs they should upgrade to Ubuntu.
The Moral of the Story:
Every moment is a fresh beginning
—TS Eliot
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or [email protected].
Image: Kadarius Seegars (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)
