A lot of people suggested moving away from rhel and rhel based... I did not listen and now...
this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Yeah, the writing was on the wall as soon as IBM acquired Red Hat. IBM is going to end up hollowing out Red Hat in their drive for more revenue. They started by destroying CentOS, which used to be a community-supported binary-compatible RHEL analog but is now effectively RHEL Beta and thus useless for enterprise work. Now they're closing the source so they can kill the other RHEL analogs, like Rocky Linux.
It's such a short-sighted move though, so many things got built on RHEL and compatible because those FOSS options existed. IBM seems to think that some significant percentage of those free installs can be converted to a paid install, and they might be right in the short term but I think the long-term impact is gonna be dire. Over time RHEL could became a closed-source ghetto in the FOSS world because fewer developers will be able to test their open source projects on RHEL without paying the IBM tax. Once RHEL starts to fall behind it could cause enough friction that enterprises will start looking to other distros, and then Red Hat's primary revenue stream starts to dry up.
IBM apparently didn't learn their IBM-compatible lesson.
I’ve been a happy fedora user for some time now. Maybe it’s time to start distrohopping again.
I think Fedora will continue to be fine for the foreseeable future as it's an upstream OS. It gets changes before they go into an RHEL release, which means a Fedora user is essentially beta-testing future RHEL changes. There's nothing inherently wrong with that and if you're happy on Fedora then you can stick with it and be confident it's going to continue to operate the way it does today (barring any future licensing changes from IBM that affect upstream distros).
This change will really affect the downstream distros like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. I think those distros have a valuable place in the FOSS ecosystem, as they allow FOSS contributors a low-friction way to test their code on an RHEL-compatible distro without having to agree to a Red Hat license. The fact they IBM / Red Hat is making this change must mean that they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms for downstream distros, and I have to imagine that their gain will be at least partly at the community's expense.
Is this the beginning of yet another corporate enshitifcation? Or are we already further in the process? I haven't been paying that much attention to Red Hat.
Is this the beginning of yet another corporate enshitifcation?
I hadn't actually thought of this as enshitification, but upon reflection... yeah, it truly is! Red Hat allowed the existence of downstream distros, and even made one of their own in CentOS, because they understood how supporting FOSS dev/test on their enterprise product ultimately increased the overall value of that product to their paying customers. Now that IBM has bought Red Hat they don't care about any of that, they just want to squeeze as hard as possible to maximize the return on their investment. I'd say enshitification started in earnest when they killed CentOS six months ago, so the current announcement is the second phase of enshitification.
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cause enough friction that enterprises will start looking to other distros
Highly unlikely IMO, unless someone else enters the market of commercial support.
I've been working for big enterprises for decades, not IT companies but big nonetheless.
The reason why Linux could "break the barrier" and enter the enterprise market (at least in EU) is that one day Red Hat became a company capable of guarantee support by means of support contracts.
Big enterprises don't care a product is the best in the world IF they cannot have a contract with some entity capable of commercially supporting it every time there's a problem.
I believe it's very stupid on IBM part to make this move, but as long as they maintain their contracts, big enterprises will stay on Red Hat, they won't care about what will happen to independent developers, they wouldn't be using their software anyway.
Very sad, but at enterprise level there are not many choices when it comes to opensource software.
A lot of people suggested moving away from rhel and rhel based… I did not listen and now…
Alma and Rocky Linux both said it's not a change that will dramatically impact them. They'll have to adapt the existing workflows but they'll both continue.
It's not closed source technically, but it is a little suspect at the very least. It's not violating GPL, but we should be striving for better than the bare minimum.
Pure Debian is the way.
Debian has always had a primary focus on being open source and adhering to good open source principles. It's a rare trait in the modern Linux ecosystem sadly, with so many corporate distros just trying to make a buck. Arch seems pretty good about open principles as well. I'm always going to stick to community-powered distros over ones backed by corporations and I suggest everyone who cares about FOSS do the same.
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Dammit I just got used to Fedora too. Guess I have to go pure Debian now
Fedora is upstream from RHEL, it won't make the slightest bit of difference.
It's not going to have a direct material effect, but it's going to affect perception. There are already people cautious about corporate influence on Linux, and a Linux distro getting closed like this is going to be seen negatively. While Fedora and RedHat are separate entities, they're close enough for one's perception to rub off on the other.
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That's good to know, thank you!
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openSUSE Leap or Tumbleweed is an option if you wanna stick to RPM-based.
Yes, SUSE have always been great.
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As I understand the situation Red Hat will just release the sources on centos.org. Much fuss about a domain change. They'll still comply with the GPL. Nothing is going closed source.
This is especially painful since it means you can't easily use any RHEL downstream distros like Alma or Rocky for testing or build servers for RHEL anymore. I suspect this will lead to even worse third party software support to complement RHEL's tiny selection of available packages.
Seems like another good company is being sacrificed to corporate greed.
Redhat is pulling a Reddit!
Has anyone got a source on this? The video doesn’t have any more info linked…
We need to make "Arch Enterprise Linux".
What??? Is there an article rather than a video?
here's the exact post right from RH themselves
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
Am I missing something? Nothing there says anything about becoming closed source?
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Man I'm glad I never picked up Fedora. Rocky has already put out a statement that they should be fine at least.
https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/has-red-hat-just-killed-rocky-linux/10378/3
What does this have to do with fedora? Fedora is actively supported by redhat I doubt you're going to see any changes with this. This really only affects redhat alternate distros like rocky.
Fedora's deeply related Red Hat. Every decision affects Fedora in some way. It's just another negative change IBM is doing to RH.
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However, the open-source developer GloriousEggroll mentions that the developer subscription to RHEL is free. So, access to RHEL source code is still possible but inconvenient?
Just want to to note here the Developer subscription is completely free and still allows access to RHEL and its source code if you want exact package sources. CentOS stream basically serves as a RHEL upstream so I understand this change. It may seem confusing for some people.
— GloriousEggroll @gloriouseggroll@fosstodon.org (@GloriousEggroll) June 22, 2023
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