I’m curious about what you think on how it will affect the Linux community and distros (especially RHEL based distros like Fedora or Rocky).
My immediate thoughts as a fedora user: Fedora is looked at as a bleeding edge testing distro for what eventually goes into red hat. By using fedora, I am sort of a beta tester for ibm, and am in some ways contributing to the improvement of a distribution (red hat) that goes against what I believe a Linux distribution should do. Given that, should I distro hop?
Or is my brain just trying to make me distro hop again?
Do it, you coward! Hop with me!
You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.
It’s nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy…but usually some compromise is required.
Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.
Edit: spelling
I would never consider Fedora bleeding edge, but that being said, after the Red Hat lawyers forced the removal of H.264 I did end up hopping after 5 very great years with Fedora. If you’re up for learning something new NixOS is a lot of fun.
NixOS is actually what I was considering! I like the immutable aspects of it but the setup will require me to find some downtime in order to get started.
You aren’t the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I’m not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.
Not to revive any lame memes, but have a look at Arch Linux! I’ve been daily driving it for 10 years. It’s way more “updated” than fedora is.
does it have same interface? Fedoras gnome is unmatched (…to me, as far I tested around distros).
Or is there any other equivalent, similar to fedora and its gnome?
Arch doesn’t come with an interface, the idea is you build it up from the bare minimum yourself
Wouldn’t recommend if you just want a usable desktop os
As for gnome, gnome is gnome you can get it on any distro
More detials found here: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream?sc_cid=701f2000000tyBjAAI
Seem more accurate that their public repos will be closed, so now only centos-stream will be public. You will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a paying customer.
Thanks, by reading “RHEL going closed source” first thing I thought is that would violate the GPL license, but the article you linked seems to indicate that’s not the case.
CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?
CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?
No, CentOS is no longer a RHEL clone, but a beta version of stuff that goes into RHEL.
Since Fedora is upstream of RHEL I’d like to think it’ll be unaffected from the move. But only time will tell
Someone enlighten me. What are we talking about? The whole distro? Isn’t almost all of it GNU stuff under GPL or similar licenses?
Or is it just about some in-house made RH applications and patches done without any collaboration from outside people?
I don’t get it how a Linux-based project can go closed-source after ~30 years.
Ed: Oh ok so I guess they’re just closing their own fork repos to outsiders? That’s quite a different thing than “closed source”, dammit
To comply with GPL, RedHat simply has to provide source code to anyone they provide binaries to.
Yea, so why is everyone misrepresenting these news so damn hard? I’d think people who report on Linux would understand the core basics of GPL.
This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There’s been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.
IMO that’s the main driver behind this change: don’t feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.
RHEL technically isn’t going “closed source”, the source code will just be paywalled now. Despite being a dick move from RedHat, it is perfectly legal to do under GPLv2, as far as I understand anyways…
I wouldn’t expect it to impact Fedora, but this will probably be significant for Rocky/Alma.
Great, I’ve got an alma ec2 instance with like 5 different services at work, I wanted to avoid changing it for at least a while =/
Well, users and contributors of Fedora might stop doing said things…
They still give all the code to their customers and as it is still GPLed code, noone can stop redistribution. So I’m wondering who will be the first RHEL customer which runs some “open mirror” of the RHEL codebase.
From what I’ve read redistributing it is against the EULA. So you could share it once.
How does that restriction not violate the GPL?
It doesn’t. The GPL is satisfied as long as they provide you with the source code for the version of RHEL that they distributed to you. But they’re not obligated to continue distributing later versions to you.
I’m referring to their further restrictions on redistribution. I.e., why can’t the subscriber then redistribute GPL code they received?
They absolutely can, but
RHELRed Hat will likely stop doing business with them if they find out (and thus stop giving them new versions), hence why they would only be able to do this once.It doesn’t seem likely that would be allowed, as it would arguably constitute a restriction on distribution, which the GPL explicitly forbids.
There’s no restriction on distribution. You’re free to distribute the GPL software you got from Red Hat.
They’re under no obligation to ship you other, different software in the future. You’re only entitled to get the source for the binaries they distributed to you. If they never give you the next version, you have no right to its source.
Some additional information from Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, since many people (including me) are confused about the implications of this:
https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/ https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
Interestingly, Rocky Linux claims to be largely unaffected by this, while Alma Linux is desperately looking for alternative solutions.
It seems like no one really knows what the implications are, and we will just have to wait and see.
Rocky’s reaction seems the same as Alma, current long-term solution is they don’t know. A more businessly optimism in the post doesn’t really make up for a clear technical plan going forward.
I’m going to continue running Debian as I did since 2003 or so.
I’m happy for you. Some of us have commercial software that needs a RHEL like distro to run.
supposedly you pay for this software. might as well pay for RHEL too then.
We are, but some orgs are more cash strapped than mine.
RHEL hasn’t gone closed source, it still complies with the GPL. If they provide you a binary, they must and will continue to provide you with the source code. I feel like this is like when they announced Centos Stream as a “rolling distro”, their messaging is awful, and the optics are bad. I feel this is more to stick it to Oracle and unfortunately, Alma and Rocky are just getting caught in the crossfire.
Have they given a reason? The blog post doesn’t list one.
Reduce effort. They say there’s duplication between hosting RHEL and Centos, so they’ll just do Centos. Since Redhat becomes Centos anyway it seems neither here nor there.
I’m newish to Fedora and admit I don’t understand the whole developer/governance structure of it vs RHEL, but the news did make me wonder about continuing to use Fedora.
Reading some comments here, maybe it’s a non-issue. Guess I’ll have to dig more.
It’s a complete non-issue. Sensationalist headlines are so easy to make about this.
Anybody who has a FREE developer account can access the source code.
Thanks for more information.
As someone who admins around 200 Rocky 8/9 and Centos 7 servers, this is a little concerning.
But I have a lot of faith in Rocky and Alma, who are reportedly working together, in coming up with a solution to ensure they continue getting security fixes and updates.
Redhat are steadily turning into every bit as anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be. It’s a shame as they used to do a lot for the FOSS world. Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.
Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.
This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.
To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn’t undo everything else Red Hat does.
The enshittification brought to you by IBM.
It seems like what I’ve read from GPLv2 and GPLv3 as well as RH’s EULAs, contrary to some people here, Red Hat technically didn’t violate the GPL, but they are already not following the spirits of GPL and free software/open source (People expect free/open source software as in they can easily find the source publicly accessible in GitHub, GitLab, CodeBerg, or whatever Git, Subversion,… repos of your company or organization). And I think they don’t believe in free marketing either, many other companies are aware that people are pirating their softwares, or compiling the software themselves (if it’s open source) and give them as if it’s from them for free; especially when you’re dominating a market segment, it can make people exposed and relying on your softwares, so that anyone will mandate to use your softwares because it’s “industry standards”.
