RedHat Becomes Closed Source (Who Didn't See This Coming?)

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has decided to no longer make its source code publicly available. That's right...RHEL will become closed source. What does this mean? Should you care?

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[Xray_OS]

i finally can see why it is important to have a lot of Linux Distros

[esra_erimez]

My firm is required to have commercial support for our production Linux deployments due to audit requirements. Years ago we were a CentOS/(paying) RHEL shop for our data centers. We completely migrated to Ubuntu when RedHat killed CentOS since we didn't trust RedHat to do exactly this.

[MrLast]

The biggest problem is that RHEL was the best example that Open Source could work in an enterprise environment, so basically, there were money for OpenSource stuff.

[stevet]

There are other distros. It's kinda sad to see redhat head in this direction, but linux will survive.

[antonycoulson]

If you're looking to depart from RHEL and still want paid for support, SUSE would also be a good choice, since you would still have a distro that runs on RPM.

[locatemarbles]

Yes. Fedora users are Redhat's beta testers. Always has been this way. The idea, way back then, was that Fedora users would willingly become Redhat labrats and Redhat would invest some of their profits to vastly improve the Linux experience. That was the idea, at least.

[CaribouDataScience]

Well, MySQL went there someting similar after Oracle purchased it. First they made it closed sourced, then after all the complaints from the developer community they released a "community" version. And sometime after that the source was forked and Mariadb was born.

[prajhualak]

How can they make additional restriction over GPL? GPL states that you can redistribute copies of software along with source and also it says you can't add additional restrictions on top of it. Also this is annoying to see redhat doing this

[bulldogcraft]

When Centos was killed I started migrating my servers in my workplace to Debian whenever they were scheduled for an upgrade. (13 servers) Any Linux can run our services, but I have to respect the organization that makes it and RedHat lost my respect years ago!

[Henk]

How is this even legal? If you have a GPL licensed source code you can freely distribute it because the license gives you that right, right? So no matter the NDA I am pretty sure they can't do much about it.

[jongeduard]

Really looks like the old Oracle way of things. How they close-source many project in the past, with Solaris as the most notable example.
It also was the practical death of many the projects where they did it. These all got forked and those open source forks continued and became succesful.

[waynefoutz]

This make me wonder what the future of CentOS and Fedora is going to look like.

[OcteractSG]

There is also OpenSUSE, if having a RPM-based server distro is super important to some people.

[thetapheonix]

Does this mean Fedora is still open source and basically since Fedora is beta testing for Red Hat that they are using the open source community to test and fix their closed source software upstream?

[MichaelMantion]

Maybe NixOS will make a server version. That seems like the best option for servers.

[Gornius]

I'm switching from Fedora to Ubuntu. Not gonna be lab rat for free for Red Hat's profit.

[ScottVargovich]

I'm right with you on this. I kinda saw RHEL going closed source when IBM got their hands on it because of what happened to Caldera when Oracle took them over. I also agree that we as Linux desktop users have nothing to worry about. As a long time Funtoo and recent Gentoo desktop user, I'm not affected by it at all. You have a way of giving me a new perspective on things that I haven't thought much about before and I thank you for that.

[knfhwbc]

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux has decided to no longer make its source code publicly available."

More or less, yes.

"That's right...RHEL will become closed source."

No. That's not what "open source" means.

There are two types of open source. Permissively-licensed open source doesn't require anyone reusing or distributing it to make the code available. Windows, Amazon, your TV - all of these have lots of permissively-licensed open source in them. None of them will give you the source. That code is still open source.

Copyleft licenses, like the GPL, require that, if you distribute a binary, you distribute the source code *to the person to whom you distributed the binary*. Copyleft licenses do not and have never required anyone to distribute the source to the general public. If I write some GPL code and give it to you, I also owe the source code to *you*. Not to your neighbour, not to Joe from down the street, not to anyone else. Only you.

RH has never been obliged to publish the source code publicly, it has just chosen to. It is only obliged to provide the source code to people to whom it provides binaries. It still will do so - if you have an account to download RH binaries, you can also download RH source from the same place. This is entirely in accordance with both forms of open source licensing (in fact, it goes far beyond the requirements of permissive licenses).

The title and summary of this video are simply inaccurate.

[Nomad-qmzf]

I know you said it shouldn’t affect Fedora but it wouldn’t surprise me if ibm wants to cut spending and decides to no longer sponsor fedora.

[notjustforhackers]

Lets hope its the kick up the backside Blackmagic need to release a flatpak version of Resolve.