AlmaLinux Figuring Out Path Forward Following RHEL Source Code Policy Change

[karolherbst]

Why not? That's one of the points of open source, being able to rebuild and redistribute it, no? It has always been argued that while of course you can sell open source software for whatever amount you want, nobody can stop someone else in just redistributing it for free. I really just see Redhat being greedy here. They can continue all the expensive subscriptions and whatever they want, but I don't see them having any right to limit others from redistributing all the free components, in identical form or otherwise.

While they certainly have invested a lot of money in open source, it still doesn't belong to them.

it's source code to the rpm packages not source code to the actual projects. The amount of downstream patches is insignificant.

[jabl]

It has always been argued that while of course you can sell open source software for whatever amount you want, nobody can stop someone else in just redistributing it for free. I really just see Redhat being greedy here. They can continue all the expensive subscriptions and whatever they want, but I don't see them having any right to limit others from redistributing all the free components, in identical form or otherwise.

RH is not preventing anyone from redistributing the GPL'd sources of software they ship. The GPL explicitly gives the users the right to do that. But RH is free to terminate the RHEL subscription if they catch a customer doing that. I haven't read the RHEL ToS, but I'm sure it spells it out clearly what the consequences of redistributing the sources are.

[dekernel]

So it clearly states that the accompanying license is what counts. Where do they get the idea from that they can't republish the source code?

Please note that I am asking this as an uninformed person when it comes to just what is required to produce a working distribution. Could they be placing resrtictions on the SPEC files that they use to create the packages and not the source files that are pulled down that contain the source? Even in this case, I believe that Red Hat is still well within their rights to place such restrictions on the build files.

[panikal]

Redhat is well within their rights to restrict access to SRPMS and spec files for releases and updates to releases. They contribute back and make available 100% of their sources and patches. What Alma/Rocky will have to do is start to build their own build and srpms and etc from scratch after people report back the exact versions available in each release of each package for CentOS 9.3.1xxx etc. It will be slow and tedious for thousands of packages and very much human labor driven due to the nature of the licensing and redistribution of the information.

And Redhat does not gain people 'knowing how to use RHEL' from people using Rocky/Alma, they get people who know how to not use RHEL tools and services but instead just the open side of the tools. I've successfully Not Used RHEL enterprise for 8 yrs due to organizations realizing they can not pay a (relatively cheap) license and instead run their fleet of a few thousand VMs on CentOS for free, adding in some additional labor for things like IDM -> FreeIPA mgmt etc.

[evert_mouw]

There are not many alternatives if you want both stability and SELinux. But maybe one can do without SELinux with more aggressive virtualization / containerization and in that case there are _many_ alternatives.

[CurveMcGerve]

I sense IBM has muddied the waters with this. Time to adapt and move on. The RHEL ship has sailed.

[npwx]

RH is not preventing anyone from redistributing the GPL'd sources of software they ship. The GPL explicitly gives the users the right to do that. But RH is free to terminate the RHEL subscription if they catch a customer doing that. I haven't read the RHEL ToS, but I'm sure it spells it out clearly what the consequences of redistributing the sources are.

Well I have and it does not. In any case, while terms like these might be valid in the US, I assure you they would not be valid in any european jurisdiction, and suspending a customer for generally allowed behaviour would bring you on the losing end of a lawsuit or both the customer and consumer protection agencies.

(While I haven't checked, I presume that european customers actually have contracts with their local RH branch).

[ZeroPointEnergy]

RH does profit indirectly. More people are able to learn RH. the bugs and how to solve problems.
in the long term this means they have a bigger potential userbase.

This is something even their previous CEO acknowledged. CentOS basically prepared the field and once the companies who used it grew and got demand for support in case something goes wrong, RedHat was the natural choice, because it meant zero effort to change tooling around your system.

Now it's probably Ubuntu that will make business that way with their LTS. I have seen multiple companies already going that way since the whole CentOS thing.

[evasb]

I agree that killing CentOS as the downstream of RHEL was a misguided decision.

Now Red Hat has 0 control of the three main downstream clones and they can provide support for themselves.

But I have a feeling that Red Hat is most preoccupied with Oracle Linux.

[You-]

There are not many alternatives if you want both stability and SELinux.

Centos Stream gives precisely this. I use it and it works well.

However if you want the precise rebuild with the precise binaries released in a RHEL release, you have to do more work as centos stream builds are "ahead" of potentially the same release in RHEL and you would need a mechanism to hold back that binary until released in RHEL.