Not surprised. A for-profit corporation wanting more money. Especially as we enroach further into late stage capitalism where corporations struggle to find more territory to profiteer from and squeeze more profit out of us.
The era of free services being profitable is ending rapidly, and we see this across many areas in the world.
Part of the Capitalist mythos for sure, "if you're not growing, you're dying." There's a rejection of the idea that you could reach a healthy equilibrium of size and just remain there.
And because of the way the rest of the market works, it forces everybody to act like that or get beat out completely. Vicious feedback loops.
They announced the discontinuation of CentOS in 2020. That's when it started for me. This is just more of the same crusade against people "using RHEL for free" (which I'm sure none of the suits at IBM even begin to understand the value of, the real wonder is that RH managed to resist this move for so long).
Certainly in retrospect. Back then they defended the decision by saying they wanted to shift their resources to centos stream, and that would be fair enough. But now it's clear that wasn't their motivation at all. They wanted to kill the free RHEL fork in the hope to attract more customers, as a lot of people already suspected.
I don't know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don't think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it's easy to blame IBM, but I don't think it's that simple.
They were dying and they needed a cash cow to milk. The only way that was gonna work is if they didn't kick the cow and spoil that milk like they've kicked every cow before it. And they can't stop, so they're just kicking away.
. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.
It's a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.
But this new one is QUITE the departure. It's not 'red hat' stupid but a little further on the spectrum.
Jeff Geerling consistently has the most compatible, tested, updated, and well documented Ansible rolls out there. If I need to get some niche software installed and there is a geerlingguy role for it - I breathe a sigh of relief.
If he is considering stopping support for RedHat and it's various distros - that is massive.
you'd be surprised how many comps use RHEL just for the "I'm completely fucked and I need corporate level support" or "we need a data center completely off the rack" or "we wanna throw money at this problem" or "we need somebody to sue or point our finger at if we get majorly fucked" or "we need an OS that meets compliance" use cases. many comps won't just use some random community built OS to run their shit regardless of the community support. at the end of the day, many corporations with very complex requirements don't have many legitimate data center OS options available.
Last place I worked was all of the above and ran the jankiest proprietary server software on a swarm of Windows Server VMs for those exact reasons. There was also the reason of "how are we going to find an admin that knows both Windows and Linux around here? They'll be impossible to replace" and while yes it was a bank serving primarily farmers in a county with less than 50,000 people, I'm still skeptical that's a good reason to run such a messy stack
I have seen IBM do this multiple times. When they buy a company, they leave it pretty much alone for a year or two. Then they start to make their IBM changes to it, and change it enough to make anyone that knew the product before them hate it. IBM buying RedHat was the beginning of the end. I told my boss about it the day I read the news of the IBM buyout, "We need to stop using CentOS for any new systems."
I am basically in the same boat, interacting with RHEL mostly because some of our customers insist on using it. It is already a giant pain with its tiny number of packages and the whole license tool struggles. At least so far we could build our internal tooling and the software we build for our customers on simple Centos or Alma Docker containers and use those for test systems as well. But now dealing with RHEL at all suddenly became an order of magnitude more painful, especially as others will also reduce support for it in their third party software we use.
the whole stream debacle was a massive red flag for me. at that point the decision was made to completely transition the tiny number of remaining RHEL based systems to debian and be done with it.
red hat has contributed much to the FLOSS ecosystem and some may require the corporate backed walled garden, but stream was (and this is) exactly the sort of unhelpful drama no one needs right now.
I highly doubt this would affect Fedora. Thankfully, it's community driven and self-goverened so Red Hat execs can't go and tell them what to do. (Though I don't know how many ties the Fedora council had to Red Hat)
Let's wait and see, what it actually means for Fedora. The common parts are still open source, most probably GPL, I would assume anything wihout sources freely available wouldn't be in Fedora, anyway? So, mainly Fedora remains available the same it always has, but might not be as strictly aligned with RHat linux anymore?
I used to avoid debian due to past trouble with outdated packages, but I just found out that debian+flatpak provides a nice user experience, with a stable system and up-to-date user apps.
Has been the primary option, especially after the glowing reviews I've seen for the latest release.
Is there a better... "looking" frontend for apt I could use? I got really used to how well organized dnf's output feels, and I remember apt from my last time using any apt-based distro (about 5 years ago) as being really sloppy looking.
Too troublesome for me. I have too little time on my hands to configure stuff, and want things that mostly "just work" and will continue "just working" indefinitely (but isn't an immutable distro).
I also know there are Arch variants that fit the bill, but it's just not my thing.
Running Arch right now on laptop and desktop. Best documented distro by far, does precisely what you tell it and no more; is efficient, fast and cutting-edge.
Of course, you need to know precisely what to tell it in order to get it installed in the first place, but once you've crossed that almighty hurdle, it's great.
IBM: We poured money and resources into Linux before 99% of the business world had even heard of it. We helped make it great. Why shouldn't we require a return on that investment?
PLEASE UNDERSTAND, I think IBM/RH is bone-headed as heck and are now inexcusable violators of the GPL, and other licenses.
I knew they were going to *break* RH and make it something abominable.
But they *were* there at the very beginning of the 2000s, promoting Linux heavily. (Not altruistically, of course)
This is not a violation of the GPL. They are allowed to charge for access to the source. If you provide binaries/images to a customer, you also must provide source. However, anyone who doesn't pay isn't entitled to it.
But anyone with access to source code licensed under GPL can legally redistribute said source code. One of the fundamental freedoms is that if you are given GPL-licensed source code, you can modify and redistribute it as much as you like.
I think the real problem might be that some of the work from Red Hat doesn't fall under the GPL, hence this wouldn't apply, but I'm not sure.
Or what if they only distribute it to companies that sign an agreement not to redistribute? Then they have the right to redistribute according to the GPL, but if they do, Red Hat will kick them out. This would seem like a way to circumvent the fundamental ideas behind the GPL and free software. If they do this, I can no longer be supportive of Red Hat in any way, and will likely have to distro-hop away from Fedora due to this misalignment of ideology.
While Jeff's support for ELs has been imperfect - I marveled at the supply-chain issues gleefully baked into the drupal vagrant stuff - I came here to really say:
IBM's not really the poster-child for preserving the sanctity of source code in the past (coughcough Monterey cough), and I'm surprised they're even suggesting everyone respect their own demands around that.
The chatter around the water cooler at my office is that this may kill Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux (at least as downstream forks of RHEL). It will be very painful for companies that want RedHat support for their production systems but don't want to pay for RHEL licenses for developer test beds.
Wow what the hell, this is the first I'm hearing of this change. I use Rocky Linux for my server atm and I was thinking I liked it for server use quite a lot more than Fedora, but if they're going to do this then I'm going to have to jump ship unfortunately. Maybe I'll go back to Debian. Or even better, maybe I'll try using Devuan in a prod server setup for once?
I'm super not happy to have to jump ship again though when I JUST settled into something I'm comfortable with that works near perfectly well for my usecases, after multiple years of jumping around undecided.
E: Although I did just read that statement from the Rocky Linux team, and maybe it'll be fine? But I'm still gonna prepare to move just in case this fucks over the Rocky Linux ecosystem anyways
I use Fedora, but I'm very uneasy with the fact that they are married to Red Hat. If things go south for Fedora, I hope a community driven fork can survive if not Fedora itself.
It's ultimately because of capital. Capital controls resource allocation, so any project that requires resources will have to align with capital interests
What's to stop the CentOS-like distributions from each purchasing 1 copy of RHEL? Wouldn't that copy still be under GPL, with the software freedoms intact -They can then change and give away anything based on RHEL - they might have to strip out any artwork that is RHEL-specific but they have to do that anyway. Would Red Hat be able to stop them under GPL? Could Red Hat just refuse the sale?
Well that's annoying. I use Fedora for my desktop and rocky for homelab. This would essentially kill 2/3rds of my servers and remove a lot of application support for Fedora.
Well, I was already considering getting rid of my Fedora installs; this just cements that. I'm thinking Debian 12 for base, and then do nix for userland, like how FreeBSd does it.
Users looking to run an EL-like linux that pre-dates RedHat's derivation and meddling will want to look at PCLinuxOS .
Its pedigree is mageia, so Mandrake and Conectiva.
While it's got a horrifically bad PXE install, and while that means Vagrants and templates are ghetto and thin on the ground, it's otherwise a very fine OS with a wide compatibility range that RH couldn't even match with this AppStream bullshit (ohai, /etc/alternatives).
Oh man, I dont really have any input on this toopic, but it's so nice to see a PCLOS recommendation! I used PCLOS for years as my daily driver, had my home network all PCLOS, even jad the wife and kids on it. Great distro.
I’ve noticed much better post syncing on 0.18. 0.17.4 still relies websocket for syncing post comments and was constantly behind. I’m not mostly seeing that on instances that haven’t quite upgraded yet.
Though if I was running a larger instance i probably wouldn’t upgrade quite yet until ironing out any kinks in a non-prod.
Idk it makes sense to me. Companies using your source and work to directly compete against you is bad. Forcing competitors to use upstream is an ok solve.