Red Hat Tries To Address Criticism Over Their Source Repository Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Tries To Address Criticism Over Their Source Repository Changes

Upsetting many in the open-source community was Red Hat's announcement last week that they would begin limiting access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and publicly would be limited to the CentOS Stream sources. In turn this causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux moving forward. Red Hat today issued another blog post trying to address some of the criticism...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Open-Source-Commitment

[panikal]

Tend to agree? I've been using CentOS for literally more than a decade - professionally - for large publicly listed billion dollar+ companies. At every one I've encouraged them to get a license simply to have a decent fall back for supporting some critical things 24x7 lifeline sort of things. Not one big company has paid. Not one.

On the other hand....The one time I did manage to get a smaller non-profit to pay for a license due to crazy openldap replication issues, and we got support, and were told that Redhat wouldn't support our issue and we ended up having to build and maintain our own version with patches and then couldn't convince management to pay for it on renewal (we're talking thousands of dollars, not more.) Non-profit and all.

I absolutely adore the work Redhat has and continues to do for the open source world. Their IDM stack is top notch and the only serious competitor to active directory.

Their support stinks (or did in 2012->2014), their KB is decent, their licensing tools are awkward, their best tools are free anyway, and yet I still cheer for them even with passive aggressive (though justified) blog posts like this showing the color of their recently adorned IBM underwear.

[Pawlosek]

Tend to agree?[...]

HOW DARE YOU?! IT'S AGAINST OPENSOURCE SPIRIT!

This alike comments incoming. Get some popcorn, I feel there's gonna be a lot comments.

[stan]

What prevents Red Hat customers from downloading RHEL sources periodically (ie. daily) and uploading them to a public server? All you need is one customer to make the latest sources available to everyone in real time.

[darkbasic]

At SUSE they're rubbing their hands, what a stupid move

[ids1024]

Tend to agree? I've been using CentOS for literally more than a decade - professionally - for large publicly listed billion dollar+ companies. At every one I've encouraged them to get a license simply to have a decent fall back for supporting some critical things 24x7 lifeline sort of things. Not one big company has paid. Not one.

On the other hand....The one time I did manage to get a smaller non-profit to pay for a license due to crazy openldap replication issues, and we got support, and were told that Redhat wouldn't support our issue and we ended up having to build and maintain our own version with patches and then couldn't convince management to pay for it on renewal (we're talking thousands of dollars, not more.) Non-profit and all.

I absolutely adore the work Redhat has and continues to do for the open source world. Their IDM stack is top notch and the only serious competitor to active directory.

Their support stinks (or did in 2012->2014), their KB is decent, their licensing tools are awkward, their best tools are free anyway, and yet I still cheer for them even with passive aggressive (though justified) blog posts like this showing the color of their recently adorned IBM underwear.

Interesting. And do you think these moves will make those big companies finally pay for RHEL licenses, or will they just use one or another of the free distros (RHEL-adjacent or otherwise)?

In addition to whether or not it's "fair", I have doubts that this will actually increase Red Hat's sales. Maybe it will, but I suspect (without any particular experience to back it up) that potential customers either are already paying or still won't. And this may drive away some paying customers or future customers too.

If Red Hat keeps changing their policies, that is also going to raise concerns for anyone looking for something they can rely on, either for free or cost. People may not have as much trust in them as they used to pre-IBM.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Well nice articulated post... I appreciate the clear and honest reasoning instead of some corporate bullshit that dances around the issue, very refreshing actually.

Then again, they literally threaten customers to not use their rights under the GPL in their contracts. Is that necessary?

If it is, is RedHat entitled to a business model that apparently only works if they threaten their customers to not utilize their rights under the GPL? I feel this is just a really bad path to go down and will lead to far more companies feeling entitled to all sorts of special exceptions, if even the "open source friendly" RedHat thinks that is fine.

Just to be clear, I currently don't use any of this rebuilds.

[Nuc!eoN]

Well yes, it is definitely A THREAT TO REDHAT's UNDERSTANDING OF OPEN SOURCE.

But open source was born from a totally different source, and it does not need companies like RedHat to survive.

However RedHat might need this change to survive. Nothing wrong with that, but be honest about it, come on! Open source's survival doesn't depend on you. It never did. You survive because of open source

[riklaunim]

Interesting. And do you think these moves will make those big companies finally pay for RHEL licenses, or will they just use one or another of the free distros (RHEL-adjacent or otherwise)?.

If this causes a need to change or migrate then it will depend on cost but also - if you are already spending/changing you may be inclined to do a bigger change - maybe migrate to a cloud provider/hyperscaler, change software stacks, OS etc. On the other side, it may spark a company or organization that would start its own RHEL-alike distro that would become its own thing while pulling some of existing RHEL customers and stopping Rocky/Alma users from going RHEL.

[WiR3D]

I dunno, without redhat we would all feel the impact, to think otherwise is understating the sheet quantity of contributions they make.

Look I don't like this, we spent 10 years of building on centos, and we can't afford the licences, we have a ton of servers but not the revenue to cover licences for that scale... So I'm screwed but tbh I'd probably want to do something similar. Ironically my sales team would probably be the ones blocking me from that because of the Customer Experience impact.