Give it to me straight. How worried are you for Fedora's future after Red Hats recent anti user decisions?
Give it to me straight. How worried are you for Fedora's future after Red Hats recent anti user decisions?
I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It's only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that's what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it's time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn't go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal... is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about "hey we are considering this, what do y'all think?". Well, they're certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it's a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like "does anyone even use this" or "how reliable is this feature" can help them prioritize their efforts.
I'll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there's problems. I'm sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points... or you think I'm on Red Hat's payroll (I'm not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I'm a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I'm not planning to change that anytime soon.
Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I'm honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I've used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
I think it will be fine, but I'd personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.
This is the way
I use Arch btw
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
You might not be worried for the code, but the project is a different thing. Red Hat has done some serious damage to its image (centos stream, lay off with record profits, lay off of fedora program manager, nasty circumvention of common open source practices). This will affect fedora. I am a long time debian user, but I often suggest fedora as distro for newcomers. I am not doing it again, and I believe many won't do as well.
At this point it is difficult to trust red hat on their long term commitments. At work we still use rhel, because all our sys admins are used to it, we have licenses, have been using it for ages. So there will not be a big impact for rhel on existing contracts. But on the future, I will actively try to persuade my whole department at least to move out. It is not easy for us, it will require work, but on long term I do not trust red hat/ibm.
Open source market is a difficult market for IBM's MBAs. Because trust is more important than money. This ibm problem to understand open source world has always existed. And the recent actions proves they haven't learned yet. It is a pity that rhel and fedora are the only victims here
just
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free,
...for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Many people gave up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It's always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
It's amazing how a 130-odd year-old company watched how apple put its ][ in front of school kids to great success, and then intentionally stops making it easy to run EL when faced with the same opportunity. But, if you've read cringely, you'll get the impression that IBM has been sucking for decades, grabbing anything that floats and standing on its head to remain afloat until that thing suffocates.
As a long-time RH customer, it's hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it's been hobbled and impaired so much. Really, the only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don't see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
Not remotely.
Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.
Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little "cloned distro + support" business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what's basically (not entirely) a loophole.
The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I've seen this perspective. It's the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?
Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).
Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.
If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).
Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux for example.
I think we haven't seen this perspective is because it's not a good take on things. After IBM bought RH they killed CentOS which was bug compatible with RHEL. A lot of devs used CentOS to be able to easily ensure compatability with RHEL. RH replaced CentOS with CentOS stream which is not bug compatible with RHEL. The community was able to move past this blunder thanks to Rocky and ALMA "rebuilding" RHEL in the spirit of the old CentOS.
Now RH has killed off the ability for the community to build a free bug compatible distro and instead want devs to register for 16 (free) RHEL testing licenses. No other major distro that I know of does this.
I'm not a dev but it seems like a good way to lose support for your platform. If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
Red Hat controls Fedora, anyone saying Fedora is independent is just spouting nonsense.
I've been on Fedora all this time because I loved Red Hat. Oh, how wrong I was.
Fedora is community owned, it's just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don't really think there's a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I'm not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn't being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Non free firmware specifically, since it's a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don't have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don't bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don't run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I've switched from elogind to seatd. I'd like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven't.
I'll stop now. So /rant
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole "Opt-out" telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and "open" nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.
super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.
Making and arguing for "Opt-out only" telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.
But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I've done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.
I don't give a shit about fedora but I'm very worried about the future of Linux as a whole, red hat has an undisputable importance in the Linux ecossistem and these movements maybe are a signal that IBM don't give a fuck about that
When kernel-0.96 came public, i checked it out on my Amiga as it was released for Motorola chips as m68k .. and still is :)
Then RedHat came with their first distro, so i had it running on a Motorola 68060 for some time. It was the swap from i386 to i686 and later, with Vesa local bus, my Amiga lost the performance race. Then, a good friend gifted me an i686 PC. WindowsXP was on it and boah, what a crazy shit that was. Filenames and libraries had stupid names and in a file hirarchy, everything was just dumb there, so installed RedHat on that and since then it was all good.
Fedora came, RedHat closed their enterprise buisness sector and then we had Fedora. Up until doday im using it and enjoy the community, wich has a very scientific and innovative spirit. Fedora was always one of those distros, going new ways on a stable and solid base, thanks to RedHat.
Even if RedHat would drop out completely with their Fedora support - wich will never happen - Fedora would be mature enuff to survive. Should Fedora nontheless go for another path wich im not happy with, ill change, but it does not look like that
So nope, im not worried a single bit^^
Single users really don't need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it's not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?
If you're a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.
Only a little. The only thing I'm really worried about is IBM (maybe secretly) forcing Red Hat to reduce or cut its involvement with Fedora to save money. Without Red Hat's help, Fedora might struggle, but I don't think it will die or be corrupted as a result of whatever's going on.
Also, while I don't have the full picture, I heard that the whole "closed source" thing was an exaggeration in the first place. So maybe there isn't really much to worry about. We'll just have to see of course. I like Fedora a lot, but I can just switch if I need to, so I'm not really letting this worry me.
@shapis
I'm gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don't want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I'm at least paying enough attention to what's going on that if they do something I see as to far I'll switchStill not sure what too though
If the time comes, that Fedora doesn't fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.
IDK, I don't use Fedora anymore and all the redhat problems lol using RPM sounds meh
I don't see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That's on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn't I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it's not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn't I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I've almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it's just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that's just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say "opt out" it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
As someone who hasn’t really been following, what anti-user decisions are those?
Source code distribution change is the big one now, on top of getting rid of traditional centos: https://news.itsfoss.com/red-hat-restricts-source-code/
I don’t really see them as anti-user, in the sense that if you are a subscriber your position has never changed and they are happy to provide support in exchange for money. They do restrict your ability to redistribute (they threaten to cancel your subscription) which I am not a fan of.
Fedora is also looking at adding telemetry. They are calling it opt-in but also defaulting the checkbox to “on”, at least in discussions.
You know what's funny? Most of the time, when something asks me to opt in for telemetry, I strongly consider doing so, then look into what's collected and end up deciding I'm okay with it.
But when I have to opt out, or the default is selected to opt in, I just lose trust entirely.
And I'll jump through hoops to block anything I can't replace that doesn't even ask.
Like, I totally understand why some telemetry is necessary for continued development. I'm down with that. But the shadier it is, the less willing I am to allow it.
i use arch btw
I'm choosing to divest and look for more opportunities to help community ran distros to better fill that niche. Maybe NixOS or Guix as system os and rke2 and flatpak for the rest of services and apps.
I don't care about it at all. If you want freedom from corporations, use community owned distros.
It inspired me to move on. I'm running OpenSUSE now. I don't really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I'm out.
I switched after getting into a boot stuck after an update. Don't regret it until now.
By default you can always roll back to the last working version from boot menu.
Red Hat going full IBM mode, Fedora implementing telemetry.
Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.
Not really Fedora is Red Hat's upstream, and about 30% of contribution comes from Red Hat. It is a community project after all.
Any source for the 30/70 split?
I think I heard it from the latest Linux Unplugged Podcast
Not at all. There are many many projects out there which should be killed anyway. Just stop using them.
Personally, at this point I don't fully understand why someone would choose to use Fedora over something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's such a fantastic, rolling-release distro, that's super stable, easy to work with, has some amazing tools to work with it for more experienced users (YaST), and now it also means you aren't involving yourself in the chain-of-FUD that is arising due to RHEL's incompetence.
I was using Fedora because I needed Appgate for work, and a Mullvad rpm was a bonus. Neither of those are compatible with openSUSE, so I'm back on Arch (btw). Tumbleweed was my first distro, and I'm always looking for an excuse to go back.
I need to use fedora because it's the near OS with bleeding edge, aside from RHEL that I work daily. Just matter of convenient. I don't know, SUSE/OpenSUSE seems not for me.
Very
I am more worried about them dropping packages to push users to use flatpaks.
I'm conflicted on this. I 100% think CLI applications should remain as packages but Flatpak IMO is superior for GUI. It just has a lot of "step in the right direction" sorts of things that address some of Linux's faults.
The big two positives for me are:
- Makes it easier for developers to publish their own software and reach many distros at once. This has really helped with software availability and updates.
- Sandboxing (although not perfect and Flatseal is kind of essential here, I hope this gets rolled into software centers or something).
I am on Fedora Silverblue and the concept of a base OS + Flatpaks just feels right for workstations. OCI containers (podman/docker/distrobox) as a bonus for development environments without borking your host.
But with this recent Fedora news (I know nothing has changed YET but I am just sussed out tbh), I am considering switching to OpenSUSE Aeon/Kalpa.
Your 2 big positives are stuff I agree with wholeheartedly. But I'm still holding out on using flatpak because it feels like an incomplete solution still. There's many things with it I could work around, definitely, but it feels annoying and with NixOS I don't have to worry about those issues because stuff just works for me.
As for FS, I wanted to love it, but doing some stuff with it is annoying. I wish it let you install stuff with dnf to /usr/local (like how it is on bsds or also macs with brew iirc).
Organizing my thoughs: I would love a future where flatpak just works, the sandboxing is nice and all you need is to click "yes" or "no" when an app wants/needs something, where you don't even need to use your distro's package manager (or you can't even use it because the distro is immutable and it updates on its own), but we're not yet there. Installing fonts on FS was a nightmare, and I had to layer stuff like powertop and other stuff I don't remember right now. Also flatpak isn't yet a good solution for development with VScode or similar stuff.
I am not conceded but keeping an eye in things.
My needs for a work station and my needs for a server are different. For a work station it needs to work without getting in my way, and my metric to compare it to is Windows.
Does it crash?
Does it force me to use a (Microsoft) account?
Can I use it and install it offline?
Does my software work?
So far their decisions do not impact these questions for me, nor change the answers to them.
Their decisions have impacted my servers though, and I am waiting on Alma to see how they move forward. Sticking with them so long as its binary compatible with another distro. But if they can't do that I'll migrate over to Debain for the stability.
Desktop, I feel I would need to go into the weeds more than want to, to get arch configure like Fedora, or to move back to a Debain base OS and get my usability back.
Not at all.
I don't care about fedora.
