Red Hat, you're harming the entire Linux ecosystem.

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Red Hat, their goal is to make money. Nothing wrong about that. I run a company, my goal is to make money. How you make money is what matters to people: is it ethical, or not. Are you selling your soul, lying, selling your community out, or not.

And now, it's pretty clear that Red Hat IS doing that. They're enforcing the signature of a license agreement when you create the account that lets you access RHEL, and that agreement is definitely against the values of free software, as it prevents you from redistributing or building your own product based on it

By the way, the legality of this is not something I can discuss, I'm not a lawyer, but there's clearly a potential contradiction between the license of the code, and what the license of the developer portal lets you do, so I guess someone will look into that

Red Hat lied, and they disrespected the open source community by saying "we contribute a lot, our 1:1 rebuilds don't, so we're going to prevent them from easy access to our work". That's completely against the spirit of open source and free software, there's no 2 ways about it

You can't build your own distro on the backs of upstream's work, and then refuse to do the same with downstream. Even if you don't see any value in it, someone does, it's not up to you to decide that, or you have missed the point of open source entirely

That's what companies like Microsoft do, or what Apple does: they prevent competitors from even existing, or from being as good.

The truth is, I think Red Hat just has lost the plot. Like Canonical did when they basically abandoned the desktop and all the projects they were working on.

They're acting like a rational capitalist company, which is NOT what the open source community wants. We hold companies that work in our sphere to a higher standard, and these companies are now failing to meet them

And the real problem isn't really how Alma or Rocky will survive, they'll have more work to do, but they'll manage with the CentOS Stream code. The real issue is that acting like that will in the end, harm Red Hat's business.

Why? The advantage of Linux is that it's open source. In enterprise, you want to combine that freedom to customize and tweak, and have many resources accessible to do what you want, but you also want support from a company that knows what they're doing, and can help in case of a problem.

And Red Hat flat out lying about how they'll handle things in the future makes them utterly untrustworthy for businesses: are you going to base your business decision on what a company said today, when they already screwed you over twice? No.

And you're also probably not going to stay in the ecosystem around these distros, because with these kinds of moves, you don't know if Alma or Rocky will still exist as-is in 5 years.

So, you move to community-run distros, and you start getting used to Debian, or Nix, or whatever else for your own stuff, you want to use that at work as well, and if you're in a position to push that, you'll do so.

Except in the long run this also hurts Linux. Because if Red Hat starts making less money, they'll hire less people, and contribute less to the linux kernel, GNOME, systemd, and other various systems

And this makes the experience worse for everyone, not just Red hat and red hat clones users. Everyone.

So, Red Hat: stop acting like a capitalistic company. You're not that, you work in a very specific industry, with very specific expectations, and a very specific feedback loop where the community, contributors, users, hobbyists, enterprise and companies all depend on each other. If you break the link somewhere, you're breaking it for everyone, not just you.

Start acting responsibly. Make your code public again. We expect better from you.

[Perennial_Curiosity]

The only things RedHat could actually claim to own are their brand, and their community. With this one move they damaged the reputation of their brand and shrank their community. Real smooth move guys.

[thierrybo]

What really is frightening me is the time when Linus Torvalds will retire. All the major companies in the Linux Fundation will try to put a man they can control.

[hopelessdecoy]

They could still be capitalist, that's the dumb part.
They could charge other businesses and be free for the community.
They could charge for technical support.
They could charge for professional setup.

I'm not against people charging for software, but there is a right way to do it

[MarkTarsis]

You're always going to be at the mercy of the whims of these companies if you use them on your infrastructure. I've been a Linux user since the early 90's and can say that Debian has always been the most stable distribution out there both from a technical stand point and when looking at the organization managing it. It's been rock solid for the last 30 years and you can depend on it still being a secure, stable, and free distro 30 years from now.

[arshkhanlm]

If EA was a Linux Distro, that would be RHEL

[prajhualak]

I think this contradict GPL as well. GPL specifically says that after you purchase and get the source code, you can re distrubute however you want. Then it also states you can't add any other restrictions than the ones in the license

[jotapi]

There is no way back for them. They will more likely double down rather than walk this back. Very unfortunate. The glass is broken, the milk has been spilt. Let's move on.

[miket.]

I think this is an excellent opportunity for Debian, with their new great release, to start promoting themselves and the true 'FOSS' version of Linux. With Ubuntu going to Snap, RH doing this...I think Debian really have a chance to step up. I'm sticking with Mint for now, but I may do Debian in the future.

[krtirtho]

Remember the infamous Rust Foundation move?
RedHat managing board took inspiration from there

2023 is such a bad year for FOSS 😢

[fabiandrinksmilk]

I am very curious as to what this means for Fedora. Not too long ago it seemed like Fedora was the go-to distro for the desktop and we heard about Red Hat contributing to very important parts of Linux, including HDR, VRR and color management support. Truly sad to see things going down like this.

[gigalodon]

You know Red Hat had a very very easy way to prevent all those clones: Keeping CentOS alive. Killing it was the only reason Alma & Rocky were even created. And CentOS didnt have paid support so it wasnt even a competition to them

[JeffGeerling]

As a downstream member of the "rebuilder" community, I took offense to the way Red Hat killed CentOS. Then again when they killed the CentOS replacements the community built.

[kernelcortex]

I don't think they'll step back. I hope I'll be wrong.

[DavidEsotica]

When Red Hat and RHEL have been a sound business model for decades, it takes incredible short-sightedness from IBM to dismantle this legacy within a few years.

[Lync]

With IBM at the helm. It was only a matter of time.

[Robotta]

If this stuff keeps getting worse and starts affecting Fedora in some capacity I'll definitely switch to openSUSE. It's probably the most similar (rpm packages, rolling release without being like vanilla arch) and the community is pretty welcoming.

If suse fails, I can always go back to endeavourOS.

[Alias_Anybody]

I feel like the fat days in the IT industry are over and one company after another wants to milk it as long as they still can.

[pettycrimesandmisdemeanors]

even fedora mailing list was clowning on red hat when announcement dropped

[mrbloodyhyphen-]

RHEL thinks that them using other people's work is fine but if someone else uses their work, they get mad

[Mr-Clumsy]

Nothing can ever undermine the entirety of Linux, shaking and the wind just make the tree more robust. All they did is they just shot themselves in the foot. And that's good - what is healthy on the tree it will continue to grow, what is not it will dry and fell off.