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  • UrbenLegend@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlJeff Geerling stops development for Redhat
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    1 year ago

    Which means it’s not bug-for-bug which is quite frankly critical to any dev, enterprise or otherwise…They may be targeting other distros, but it affects all developers who just want to test their applications.

    With the free RHEL licenses, I don’t think developers targetting RHEL are going to be affected at all by this, short of having to signup for an extra account. I also don’t think that there’s going to be many situations where a dev would accidentally redistribute in a way that’s so detrimental to RedHat’s business that it gets their license suspended.

    You’re right that its mainly targeted at downstream distros and that’s where I think RedHat has a point. I think that it’s entirely fair for RedHat to be annoyed that someone can build a RHEL bug-for-bug compatible Linux distro and then sell support licenses off of it, which is literally RHEL’s business model.

    That’s just my two cents. There’s really not many ways for a company to survive entirely off of open-source development like RedHat does and if we start saying that bug-for-bug compatible versions of their software have to exist, then we’ve essentially turned their business model into donations and it would lead to them dying anyways.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am not entirely happy about RedHat’s changes, but I also don’t see anyone in this thread suggesting a viable alternative for RedHat to pursue and they’re just piling on the hate. It’s like saying, “Hey RedHat, sorry you’re dying. Thanks for all your hard work, okay good luck, bye.”









  • Except they’re aren’t violating the GPL at all. Their source code is still available to subscribers (and it isn’t behind a paywall because you can get a free license) and available to the public via CentOS Stream. Their code also goes into upstream projects as well.

    The GPL exists so that companies can’t just take the code and contribute nothing back. But that isn’t what Redhat is doing here so I find your accusations that Redhat is exploiting users to be very hyperbolic.


  • Don’t use regular Arch if you’re struggling. There are some arch-based distros that are more user friendly, though. Like EndeavourOS or ArchMan.

    Yeah, this 100%. Honestly, plain Arch isn’t all that hard to use. I’d argue it’s probably easier in a lot of ways compared to more mainstream distros…once you have it setup that is. Arch isn’t hard, Arch SETUP is hard, so having downstream distros do the hardest part of the work for you is absolutely key to a good experience if you’re just starting out.




  • UrbenLegend@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlJeff Geerling stops development for Redhat
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    1 year ago

    I get where Jeff Geerling is coming from, but I think RedHat has a point as well.

    I think a lot of people are coming at this from the perspective that RedHat themselves are just repackaging open source code and putting it behind a paywall, instead of also being one of the top contributors of software and bug fixes into the Linux ecosystem. Jeff mentions that Redhat is based on other open source software like the Linux kernel, but at the same time doesn’t mention that they’re also one of the leading contributors to it. I mean seriously, good luck using Linux without a single piece of RedHat code and see how far that gets you. If you’re entering the discussion from that perspective of “Redhat is simply just taking other people’s work as well”, it’s easy to have a biased view and start painting RedHat as a pure villain.

    I also think that people are downplaying exactly how much effort it takes to build an enterprise Linux system, support customers at an engineering level, and backport patches, etc. Having downstream distributions straight up sell support contracts on an exact copy of your work won’t fly or be considered fair in any other business situation and I get why RedHat as a business doesn’t want to go out of their way to make that easy.

    And it’s not like Redhat isn’t contributing the developments that happen in RHEL back into the FOSS community. That’s literally what CentOS Stream is and will continue to be, alongside their other upstream contributions.

    Does it suck that we won’t have binary compatibility between Alma / Rocky and RHEL, yes it is frustrating as a user! Does it suck that we once got RHEL source for free and now we have to resort to Centos Stream? Yes! But the reality too is that open source STILL needs sources of income to pay developers to work on the Linux ecosystem, which is getting bigger and more complicated every day. That money has to come from somewhere, just sayin.