Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?
Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?
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?
Since Fedora is upstream of RHEL I'd like to think it'll be unaffected from the move. But only time will tell
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".
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.