Redhat goes CLOSED SOURCE?

This is a MAJOR development with Redhat NO LONGER giving public access to the base RHEL source code. .

[ChrisTitusTech]

We will have to wait and see how this plays out, but I imagine they want to make it very hard for RHEL 1:1 Distros like Alma, Rocky and Oracle.

[themistoclesnelson]

Was very disappointed by Red Hat's decision. Not completely surprised this happened after IBM took over.

[bialcus]

Moral of the story: EVERY publicly trading company goes to shit. No exceptions.

[JK]

I used to work at IBM... I predicted this as soon as the Red Hat acquisition was made. Everything IBM touches goes to crap.

[CristobalWatsonHernandez]

I'm picturing Debian and Suse getting decent boosts in popularity in the future.

[GafftheHorse]

One major company having so much control over Linux was always a potential issue.

[digitalsparky]

I'm honestly not surprised, Redhat is owned by IBM now. Another reason why CentOS was shut down.

[JeffGeerling]

Thanks for bringing this to my feed during a busy week last week. This is extremely saddening for me, as I was *this* close to being a Hatter myself 5 years ago (I was contracting with them, and had an employment contract ready for signing, but their laywer would not strike a noncompete, so I didn't sign).

I feel like Red Hat has fallen away from the open source ideals and foundations they built their entire business and goodwill from originally, and are trying to define some new "corporate friendly open source" world so they can protect their profits with some licensing quirks and subscription guidelines.

[Cdudz]

RHEL was bought by IBM years ago. this was expected to happen.

[PenguinRevolution]

I considered running Rocky Linux for my personal server, but I chose Debian for several reasons. Now this is making me glad I chose Debian, I just did a Dist-upgrade to Debian 12 on it and it still works great (I've been doing dist-upgrade on this server since Debian 9 and I've never had an issue).

[sjzara]

I find it hard to understand how a closed source system can be based on such vast amounts of open source. It must be a legal nightmare.

[Siskiyous]

Every Linux Programmer who ever contributed to the OS needs to sue Red Hat saying they violated the terms of their contribution, trust me, there is a class action lawyer ready to roll on this.

[bippaasama]

This is why the importance of having different distros cannot be overstated. Fragmentation is a good thing.

[thejoneseys]

I'd sooner give cash to Canonical than IBM

[lockhak]

The source code is still available to RHEL customers which is what is required by the GPLv2. That should allow the clones to continue.

[typhuseth]

IBM continuing to make the wrong call continuing their streak. I suspect they think this will make CentOS/Rocky/Alma business jump to RHEL whereas they'll likely jump to Debian, maybe Oracle or Ubuntu depending on who undercuts best/availability of budget to pay for support which is a big gamble.

[TheLittleAlien]

That has been coming since Red Hat Linux went fully commercial. Before that (pre-2003) practically all my servers were RHL. They tried to do an image correction with Fedora but it wasn't what enterprise / ISPs needed. Luckily I had some really good Debian guys in my company that brought Ubuntu to the desktop and Debian to our servers which apart from FreeBSD is driving all the racks. When Canonical forced the desktop users to go Unity and then Gnome 3 we moved to KDE and when they brought snap we went to Flatpack but that said Canonical isn't IBM and they do tend to learn from unpopular decisions that failed in the community. Generally, large corporations that strategically acquire user bases for sectoral footprint are rarely doing anyone a favor - no matter open source or not. Let's think of Oracle killing MySQL and Dyn - they just shut down millions of older devices still using their service. How about Internic becoming what Network Solutions is today? How about Macromedia products after Adobe took over or Solidworks after Systemes Dassault?

And yeah that will be the year of Debian since Debian 12 is awesome at the right time.

[xCaEe]

People say Debian has about 3 years of support (next release year + 1 year), but they provide an LTS, so you get 5 years, instead of the usual 3 years. So you can use Buster and be fine until 2024.

[jemag]

Canonical is already big in the Cloud. A move like that will reduce people's confidence in Redhat and will strengthen Canonical's position

[phoenixrising]

I could see OpenSUSE taking advantage of this by saying. With SUSE we keep the source loose. 😂