Red Hat Working Against the Sharing Ethos of the Linux Community

[buster]

Their new policy of not sharing code appears to be legal, but not ethical. It appears that a number of developers who have supported the RH community may not keep contributing because there is going to be less feedback into the whole Linux world.

Interesting article. RH may find out that so may thing are connected that we can't know what damage we do to ourselves by making a 'simple' decision.

https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20230703#qa

[Jason]

The Register has a different take on it:

The door has not been completely closed. If we understand it correctly, in effect, Stream is periodically resynchronized with RHEL when there is a new major release. So, when RHEL 11.0 is released, Stream will briefly be in sync with it — which means that downstream distros could grab a copy of the code at that exact point in time, and build a new version compatible with that point-zero release of RHEL. The problem for the downstreams is that from that point on, they won't be able to get ahold of usable source code of each subsequent point release and the various ongoing updates.

So downstream distros will be able to get RHEL-compatible distros some of the time, but not all. But since RHEL is downstream from CentOS Stream, they'll likely have to build onto that. Red Hat is probably just sick of people creating RHEL distros to avoid licensing fees. I don't care for it, but I get it. Your company's lifeblood is the software you make. You can't just give it all away.

I do hope other Linux distro companies like Canonical don't get the same idea, though. I'd have to have to find an alternative for our webserver.

[Jason]

A post from Red Hat addresses what the community is saying and why they're making this move. There are lots of other points, so read the post to get the details and explanation of what code is still available and always will be.

We have to pay the people to do that work — those passionate contributors grinding through those long hours and nights who believe in open source values. Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable. That includes critical backporting work and future features and technologies under development upstream. If that work becomes unsustainable, it will stop, and that's not good for anyone.

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response-gitcentosorg-changes

[buster]

Saw an interesting comment on building on the work of others. The person wondered how Red Hat felt about using the collaborative efforts of the multitudes who create and keep improving the kernel.

Someone else commented that many of the RH offshoots feed back improvements to Red Hat. Don't know if that's true or not, but do know that Suse criticized Red Hat for their change.

[fox]

Thanks Jason for posting a link to the Red Hat blog. This is the first time I've read the counterargument, and I can now see that there are two sides to the story. I don't think that McGrath's blog gives the full story for the reasons given by Buster. But still, I can't think of another example where a distro uses the binary code of another, bit by bit, and distributes it as their own. The closest I can think of are distros that take a base distro code and only change the DE or some element of their appearance. (And I'm not talking about Mint, which does a lot more than that to the Ubuntu code.) But even there, I can't think of a case where the distro they are using is a commercial one, like RHEL.

[buster]

RH is also not going to work on LibreOffice. They will use a flatpak version. Maybe the maintainer of the flatpak version should suggest Red Hat, and only Red Hat, pay for it, because it's going to be used to help RH make money.

[Jason]

Saw an interesting comment on building on the work of others. The person wondered how Red Hat felt about using the collaborative efforts of the multitudes who create and keep improving the kernel.

Someone else commented that many of the RH offshoots feed back improvements to Red Hat. Don't know if that's true or not, but do know that Suse criticized Red Hat for their change.

Red Hat put a lot of code back into the Linux community, too, including kernel patches, and I expect that they will continue to do so. If you look at Rocky Linux and Alma Linux they are clones of Red Hat, they even say that. They haven't added any value. They took the exact source code that RHEL builds from and built their own.

Red Hat took a basic Linux distribution back in the 1990s and added value to it. Since then they've added a lot more value. Go to their website and look at the list of enterprise features they've added to Linux over the years, much of which has been given back to the Linux community, like Kubernetes.

As pointed out in the blog and even the Distrowatch link, the GPL lets anybody make modifications to the code and provide it within their organization or their customers. But the GPL requires them to also make the source available wherever those binaries are distributed. They're doing this. I'm not sure what this balderdash is about the "spirit of GPL". The GPL was never intended to require companies to give away their work for free and to everyone.

As for the Flatpak for LibreOffice, that's something the Document Foundation would have to decide and would involve changing their license. Flatpak is a distribution format. Anyone can make a Flatpak. They tell you how to do it at Flathub. LibreOffice lets you download their source code and build LibreOffice yourself. So I'm not sure if they could tell Red Hat they couldn't make their own FlatPak.

[Jason]

From what I read just now, it's not that Red Hat isn't going to work on LibreOffice, but that they won't be providing the product with RHEL. In other words, not building it for Red Hat and including it in a base install. But users can still download the Flatpak which is provided by the Documentation Foundation. It will also work on most Linux distributions. Flatpaks are pretty cool even though they seem to be unpopular amongst our membership. One Flatpak provides everything a program needs to work, distro-independent. Great for developers, and great for users who might have duelling libraries or want to have the most recent release of software without having a rolling-release distro.

Btw, Red Hat still builds RHEL from Fedora and contributes code to the same, I believe. Or maybe it's from CentOS Stream now. Upstream, downstream, it confuses me sometimes. Fedora has listed Red Hat's contributions to the Linux software community but I don't know how recent they are. In some cases, I remember Red Hat, and other big distros like SUSE, have paid employees to work on specific projects like the kernel.

https://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

If I feel compelled enough, I might look at the software we know and love and see which companies contribute or sponsor them. Any interest in that?

[Jason]

Someone else commented that many of the RH offshoots feed back improvements to Red Hat. Don't know if that's true or not, but do know that Suse criticized Red Hat for their change.

This post from SUSE is interesting:

https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/

At first, I didn't understand why SUSE would be building a RHEL-compatible distro since they already have SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). It seemed like it would be pulling people away from their main product. Then I learned SUSE provided support contracts for more than just SLE (SUSE Linux Enterprise) such as RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) so now I see their reasoning.

Regarding Red Hat's contributions to the Linux community: Red Hat is the largest sponsor of the GNOME desktop environment and they have four employees working on the Evolution PIM (according to Wikipedia).

Oracle also has a free RHEL-based distro and they plan on continuing it. Oracle developers say it's better than RHEL for servers with a more-optimized kernel and stability. Of course, it's designed to work with their database.

[fox]

Speaking of Oracle's plan, have a look at this.

[buster]

Liked the oracle article Dr Mike. Well worth the read:

https://linuxiac.com/oracle-jokes-with-red-hat/

[Jason]

Here's a good summary of the actions other companies including Alma Linux are doing because of Red Hat's move. It also pokes a bit of criticism at Oracle for throwing stones (and living in a glass house). That's just a small bit, though. From the article:

Oracle isn't actually saying anything very technically specific at all, just general statements about openness, to which we'd respond: let's see you open up OpenSolaris again, then, and while you're at it, all the other Sun code that you no longer sell.

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/17/almalinux_project_switches_focus/?utm_source=pocket_saves

Oracle has also messed around with Java availability for developers by previously charging significant fees for using their development kit ($30 per installation of programs using Oracle Java).  IBM, the owner of Red Hat, recommended people use OpenJDK instead which didn't have any licensing restrictions. At least Oracle reversed course on that move although it took a few years. Perhaps IBM will reverse course on their Red Hat decision, too. Or maybe not.

https://www.itjungle.com/2021/11/15/oracle-jdk-is-free-again-but-openjdk-still-recommended/