Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.
Forget about Red Hat, they’re gone, they’re not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done
Except they’re not. Almost nobody in their customer base (enterprises) is going to care one bit about any of this drama. They’ll have their support contracts and software certified for RHEL and they’ll keep paying Red Hat for the privilege, and RHEL will remain the dominant distribution in the enterprise market.
The danger is that if we stop caring, and let Red Hat have their way, distros like Rocky and Alma will become endangered and access to a free and unencumbered RHEL compatible distribution may eventually be cut off entirely. This would give Red Hat a de facto monopoly and a stranglehold on the enterprise market, and eventually it may even drift so far away from mainstream Linux that due to incompatibilities you just can’t run the same workloads on a Debian system anymore. This would land us right back to the situation where we started in the 1990s, where a select few companies (i.e. IBM, Sun, Microsoft, HP,…) controlled the market with their closed source mutually incompatible operating systems.
Saying things like “forget about Red Hat” is defeatism and running away from a fight that should be fought.
That’s exactly what’s already happened. Rocky and Alma are already no longer an option for a free version of Red Hat since Red Hat code is not allowed to be shared, it can only be viewed. Read their own words from Alma and Rocky, what they themself said about oing forward.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement further to include anyone proven to have published source code of Red Hat branded material agrees to pay a fee to Red Hat of no less than $10 million, or whatever price they want to put on it.
Everyone can scream about Red Hat, all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars, BOOM! Red Hat becomes a proprietary system built on open source software.
SUSE says they will fork RHEL, but Alma and Rocky are over in terms of being a clone. People have asked for years why there is no free 1 to 1 clone of SLES and SLED. IBM is free to choose to turn all of RHEL in a proprietary development and lock it down, unless you can get a court order that says Red Hate’s code must be made public, but I don’t dare test IBM lawyers over any code that is not released under AGPLv3, only then I would.
It’s not a license agreement, it’s a terms of service agreement. The license of the software is still the GPL (or any of the other FOSS licenses that apply).
all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars
The point where they introduce punitive terms to the terms of service agreement in response to redistribution, is also the point where their argument that “they’re free to choose who they do business with” breaks down because they’re no longer just ending their business relationship with you, they’re imposing a punishment. They wouldn’t just be skirting the GPL, they would be blatantly violating it.
I would love to see IBM lawyers try to get that fee enforced when a customer exercises their GPL granted freedom to distribute a piece of software that Red Hat didn’t create and own to begin with.
The GNU/Linux GPLv2 does not apply to any software developed and owned by Red Hat like all of the Red Hat security programs, that is not covered by the Linux license. If Red Hat never modifies or changes a single line of code in GNU/Linux, they are free to run closed source programs on top of it. They own .rpm file format so they have the legal freedom to make the system and all RH software proprietary.
That’s how Rocky and Alma are now permanently locked out from accessing the code.
There is much more GPL (and other FOSS licensed) software in RHEL than just the kernel, and for the vast majority of it Red Hat does not own the copyrights even if they made enhancements to it, so Red Hat is not at liberty to relicense it. Often if they did write the software they don’t own the copyrights to it. For example: systemd is largely written by but not owned by Red Hat, copyright belongs to the individual contributors so it’s near impossible to ever relicense it. Same with selinux, Red Hat owns parts of it, but not completely (it was originally created by the NSA), so they can never relicense it without completely ditching the parts they don’t own.
As for RPM, no they don’t own the format (which is just something trivial like cpio with text header files anyway), it’s even part of the LSB. They do own the copyright to the program, but it’s licensed under the GPL. Going forward, they could theoretically relicense it and make future versions closed source and incompatible, but they can never un-release or un-license the versions of the software they’ve already put out there.
Anyway, this relicensing of Red Hat owned sources is not what they have been doing, because they still want to reap the benefits of open source software (i.e. community contributions). So most of the software they hold the copyrights to is licensed under the GPL as well. The only immediate example I can think of is the anaconda installer, which you can find here: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda License: GPL v2.0
Until someone gives legal notice to IBM lawyers forcing Red Hat source code to be released pulicly, all of this debating over it means jack nothing.
If nobody takes IBM to court, the matter is settled and all developers must accept Red Hat’s choices.
If they dismiss the online talk, ignore all criticisms, and nobody pays for a lawsuit, the case is done and finished.
I’m not trying skip over your points, as I said from my first first, everybody can talk all they want, who has the power of persuasion or legal force to change IBM’s decision?
I may be wrong, but I believe only the Linux Foundation is a position to call IBM CTO, President, whoever, and say “We heard about the changes to with holding Red Hat’s source code, you will not be doing that, it shall remain public. If you want to discuss this further, please send your most expensive lawyers to our offices and we will explain in detail why you won’t be doing that.”
Until someone gives legal notice to IBM lawyers forcing Red Hat source code to be released pulicly, all of this debating over it means jack nothing.
That’s a misunderstanding. Even according to the GPL Red Hat doesn’t have to release their source publicly (though it would have been nice if they had kept doing that), they only have to give it to those who they give the binaries to (i.e. RHEL customers). The big issue is that they are trying to restrict their users from redistributing the sources that they are legally entitled to, which is a freedom they should have according to the GPL.
Section 6 of the GPL v2.0 says:
Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients’ exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
If nobody takes IBM to court, the matter is settled and all developers must accept Red Hat’s choices.
I believe it’s the other way around. IBM needs to take someone to court over this to enforce their rules. For example, a customer who re-distributes RHEL sources or the Rocky Linux developers if (according to IBM) they “illegitimately” acquire RHEL sources.
I may be wrong, but I believe only the Linux Foundation is a position to call IBM CTO, President, whoever
You would be wrong indeed. Technically, anyone who holds a copyright on any part of a GPL licensed program that is included in RHEL could sue IBM for GPL violations. So even a developer of something silly like for example, cowsay, could do this.
The likely retaliation RH/IBM would take is simply banning the account, not starting a lawsuit immediately. However, rights holders may attempt sue before or after such an event, but likely after.
RH thinks they have the right to distribute code in this manner, and they can keep doing so until challenged in court. You can do actions in general without asking the court every time, I think the same applies here as well.
I personally think it is a violation in a strict sense, but at the same time I don’t think it really matters too much realistically. Stream is upstream RHEL, and they are very similar, and at some points in time, should be identical. It’s also not clear what you get exactly by suing RH/IBM. The likely case is that they settle or rule to have that section removed from the ToS.
RHEL ultimately comes from Fedora (plus Redhat has a great say in where Fedora is headed), so… RHEL won’t become sort of an AIX or HPUX anytime soon.
That said, Redhat’s move opens up the position of “enterprise-like distro for scientific/technical shops and other people who do their own support” (think, from CERN to small software houses) that so was the reign of RHEL clones (together with Ubuntu, of course).
Those are people who will probably never buy RHEL licenses for all their machines no matter what, so in a sense it stands to reason that RH doesn’t care about them (if you think their move is about money rather than falling for the “value to the community” PR spin), but those same people are also trend setters whose choices, in time, trickle down to universities and then companies, and to me it looks like there’s a huge opportunity there (and that Alma is currently in the best position to harvest from it in the long run).
I really don’t care about RHEL. Unless companies want to buy their services to be allowed access to the software it, everyone should forget about Red Hat. It’s done, it’s gone. And there will never be a free version of Red Hat, so look at other long term alternatives.
It checked a lot of boxes for corporation use. SELinux isn’t/wasn’t on debian either. But it’s not any ‘better’. Debian has been rock solid for me. ZFS is the only thing I’d like to see in Debian feature-wise.
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.
Forget about Red Hat, they’re gone, they’re not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.
Except they’re not. Almost nobody in their customer base (enterprises) is going to care one bit about any of this drama. They’ll have their support contracts and software certified for RHEL and they’ll keep paying Red Hat for the privilege, and RHEL will remain the dominant distribution in the enterprise market.
The danger is that if we stop caring, and let Red Hat have their way, distros like Rocky and Alma will become endangered and access to a free and unencumbered RHEL compatible distribution may eventually be cut off entirely. This would give Red Hat a de facto monopoly and a stranglehold on the enterprise market, and eventually it may even drift so far away from mainstream Linux that due to incompatibilities you just can’t run the same workloads on a Debian system anymore. This would land us right back to the situation where we started in the 1990s, where a select few companies (i.e. IBM, Sun, Microsoft, HP,…) controlled the market with their closed source mutually incompatible operating systems.
Saying things like “forget about Red Hat” is defeatism and running away from a fight that should be fought.
That’s exactly what’s already happened. Rocky and Alma are already no longer an option for a free version of Red Hat since Red Hat code is not allowed to be shared, it can only be viewed. Read their own words from Alma and Rocky, what they themself said about oing forward.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement further to include anyone proven to have published source code of Red Hat branded material agrees to pay a fee to Red Hat of no less than $10 million, or whatever price they want to put on it.
Everyone can scream about Red Hat, all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars, BOOM! Red Hat becomes a proprietary system built on open source software.
SUSE says they will fork RHEL, but Alma and Rocky are over in terms of being a clone. People have asked for years why there is no free 1 to 1 clone of SLES and SLED. IBM is free to choose to turn all of RHEL in a proprietary development and lock it down, unless you can get a court order that says Red Hate’s code must be made public, but I don’t dare test IBM lawyers over any code that is not released under AGPLv3, only then I would.
It’s not a license agreement, it’s a terms of service agreement. The license of the software is still the GPL (or any of the other FOSS licenses that apply).
The point where they introduce punitive terms to the terms of service agreement in response to redistribution, is also the point where their argument that “they’re free to choose who they do business with” breaks down because they’re no longer just ending their business relationship with you, they’re imposing a punishment. They wouldn’t just be skirting the GPL, they would be blatantly violating it.
I would love to see IBM lawyers try to get that fee enforced when a customer exercises their GPL granted freedom to distribute a piece of software that Red Hat didn’t create and own to begin with.
The GNU/Linux GPLv2 does not apply to any software developed and owned by Red Hat like all of the Red Hat security programs, that is not covered by the Linux license. If Red Hat never modifies or changes a single line of code in GNU/Linux, they are free to run closed source programs on top of it. They own .rpm file format so they have the legal freedom to make the system and all RH software proprietary.
That’s how Rocky and Alma are now permanently locked out from accessing the code.
There is much more GPL (and other FOSS licensed) software in RHEL than just the kernel, and for the vast majority of it Red Hat does not own the copyrights even if they made enhancements to it, so Red Hat is not at liberty to relicense it. Often if they did write the software they don’t own the copyrights to it. For example: systemd is largely written by but not owned by Red Hat, copyright belongs to the individual contributors so it’s near impossible to ever relicense it. Same with selinux, Red Hat owns parts of it, but not completely (it was originally created by the NSA), so they can never relicense it without completely ditching the parts they don’t own.
As for RPM, no they don’t own the format (which is just something trivial like cpio with text header files anyway), it’s even part of the LSB. They do own the copyright to the program, but it’s licensed under the GPL. Going forward, they could theoretically relicense it and make future versions closed source and incompatible, but they can never un-release or un-license the versions of the software they’ve already put out there.
Anyway, this relicensing of Red Hat owned sources is not what they have been doing, because they still want to reap the benefits of open source software (i.e. community contributions). So most of the software they hold the copyrights to is licensed under the GPL as well. The only immediate example I can think of is the anaconda installer, which you can find here: https://github.com/rhinstaller/anaconda License: GPL v2.0
Until someone gives legal notice to IBM lawyers forcing Red Hat source code to be released pulicly, all of this debating over it means jack nothing.
If nobody takes IBM to court, the matter is settled and all developers must accept Red Hat’s choices.
If they dismiss the online talk, ignore all criticisms, and nobody pays for a lawsuit, the case is done and finished.
I’m not trying skip over your points, as I said from my first first, everybody can talk all they want, who has the power of persuasion or legal force to change IBM’s decision?
I may be wrong, but I believe only the Linux Foundation is a position to call IBM CTO, President, whoever, and say “We heard about the changes to with holding Red Hat’s source code, you will not be doing that, it shall remain public. If you want to discuss this further, please send your most expensive lawyers to our offices and we will explain in detail why you won’t be doing that.”
That’s a misunderstanding. Even according to the GPL Red Hat doesn’t have to release their source publicly (though it would have been nice if they had kept doing that), they only have to give it to those who they give the binaries to (i.e. RHEL customers). The big issue is that they are trying to restrict their users from redistributing the sources that they are legally entitled to, which is a freedom they should have according to the GPL.
Section 6 of the GPL v2.0 says:
I believe it’s the other way around. IBM needs to take someone to court over this to enforce their rules. For example, a customer who re-distributes RHEL sources or the Rocky Linux developers if (according to IBM) they “illegitimately” acquire RHEL sources.
You would be wrong indeed. Technically, anyone who holds a copyright on any part of a GPL licensed program that is included in RHEL could sue IBM for GPL violations. So even a developer of something silly like for example, cowsay, could do this.
The likely retaliation RH/IBM would take is simply banning the account, not starting a lawsuit immediately. However, rights holders may attempt sue before or after such an event, but likely after.
RH thinks they have the right to distribute code in this manner, and they can keep doing so until challenged in court. You can do actions in general without asking the court every time, I think the same applies here as well.
I personally think it is a violation in a strict sense, but at the same time I don’t think it really matters too much realistically. Stream is upstream RHEL, and they are very similar, and at some points in time, should be identical. It’s also not clear what you get exactly by suing RH/IBM. The likely case is that they settle or rule to have that section removed from the ToS.
RHEL ultimately comes from Fedora (plus Redhat has a great say in where Fedora is headed), so… RHEL won’t become sort of an AIX or HPUX anytime soon.
That said, Redhat’s move opens up the position of “enterprise-like distro for scientific/technical shops and other people who do their own support” (think, from CERN to small software houses) that so was the reign of RHEL clones (together with Ubuntu, of course).
Those are people who will probably never buy RHEL licenses for all their machines no matter what, so in a sense it stands to reason that RH doesn’t care about them (if you think their move is about money rather than falling for the “value to the community” PR spin), but those same people are also trend setters whose choices, in time, trickle down to universities and then companies, and to me it looks like there’s a huge opportunity there (and that Alma is currently in the best position to harvest from it in the long run).
Is there a reason that Alma and/or Rocky shouldn’t try to release their own version of SLES and SLED?
Why do people care about RHEL? Is it really any better than Debian based stuff?
I really don’t care about RHEL. Unless companies want to buy their services to be allowed access to the software it, everyone should forget about Red Hat. It’s done, it’s gone. And there will never be a free version of Red Hat, so look at other long term alternatives.
Because I have to use rhel7 at work 😬
It checked a lot of boxes for corporation use. SELinux isn’t/wasn’t on debian either. But it’s not any ‘better’. Debian has been rock solid for me. ZFS is the only thing I’d like to see in Debian feature-wise.