Rhel 7 32 Bit

[Elisabet Schwartzkopf]

Thispast week, Red Hat took that knife and twisted it hard, when they published this blog post. Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away.

There were only two things that kept me around after Red Hat betrayed us the first time: First, instead of attacking the community of open source users, many Red Hatters reached out and asked, "How can we do better?" It didn't heal the wound, but it meant something, knowing someone at Red Hat would at least listen.

That's kinda the status quo because in open source, the source... is open! And it doesn't matter if someone who uses your source benefits from it too... that's kind of what it's all about! We all benefit from sharing our work, and in this case, the GPL license Linux uses legally requires us to share it!

But Red Hat decided to put the source code behind a paywall. Now, this is legal. Technically, the GPL allows it. But it's generally rude and annoying to do that when the code you're locking down is largely based on other people's open source code.

But... it's within their rights, so I won't argue that point. What I will argue is the current subscription agreement, which might not be legal. Red Hat currently says they can cancel any user's account if they download the source code and redistribute it.

Let's say someone downloads the source through a Red Hat subscription, and uses that to build a new version of Rocky Linux. If Red Hat retailiated by cancelling that subscription, I'd definitely tune into that court case.

But let me be clear: everything I've seen points to Red Hat trying to choke out downstream distros like Rocky, Alma, and Oracle Linux. I think their hope is users of those distros would get scared and sign up for a Red Hat subscription. They need this to happen to lock in some short-term profits to please their IBM overlords. That's my cynical take on it.

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

And please tell your employees to stop patronizing me, saying I should just use CentOS Stream. There's a reason Rocky and Alma linux have been downloaded millions of times. Stream is not a substitute for CentOS.

Who wants to build around an ecosystem where the open source users are called freeloaders and where massive disruptions are implemented in the middle of a release cycle, two times in a row, with no warning?

Solution could be as simple as drawing up a new GPL that would exclude RedHat practices and campaign to have package maintainers adopt it. Let RedHat fork everything they include and try and maintain it themselves

"UPDATE 2023.06.26: I can confirm via Red Hat employees the Developer Subscription has not experienced any changes. There is a display bug with the Customer Portal that is being tracked down. The DS4I is still limited to 16 entitlements."

I'm not a fan of systemd myself, it's just overly complicated for my needs. With that said, for the work Jeff does as well as anyone else doing "real work" with a Linux distro as a base, you can't get much better than Debian. It's stable, it's widely used and distributed, it's the base for several major distros, and it is run by a foundation rather than a corporation. I would love to say that my daily driver distro, Void, would be a great choice for Jeff to test on, but it's honestly just a niche distro despite how awesome it is, and there would be no point.

Regarding Ansible, I agree with the other person here who said NixOS is worth looking into if Jeff does have to drop Ansible down the road. Nix is available for other distros too, so there's plenty of opportunity to learn it without having to fully convert to the actual distro.

I'm curious what people are using for central package management on Debian. The main reason I've been loyal to RHEL-style distributions is losing the top-level visibility I get from Spacewalk Server is painful.

If you're looking for a distribution with long term support options your choices are probably either Ubuntu LTS or Suse Enterprise Linux. Particularly if you're looking for distributions that are supported by commercial packages you might need to run in a business.

Thanks to all, lots of good input. Our servers are to support our own businesses, and a few partners, and just use webmin/virtualmin, wp/php stuff, MySQL, python stuff, etc. I want to get this migration done now/soon and to a target that isn't going to change for awhile, and remain non-commercial OSS. Thanks again.

Well, nope. Unless RH changes their mind/policy, support for CentOS Stream X ends when final X.Y release of RHEL is released and that RHEL version goes from "Full" to "Maintenance Support" mode, which happens about 5 years after initial X.0 release. Look at centos.org, they already announced EOL for CentOS Stream 8 in May next year. That also means C9S will probably live only till mid-2027. Bummer.

Personally, I'm looking into SUSE's SLES. They've been around longer than RH, have the same business model and customer base, but they exist in an (arguably) better business environment for an open source company: Germany/EU.

OpenSUSE is free and maintained for 5 years, but to get the full 10+ years cycle you need to pay subscription. SUSE doesn't have other clones giving you the 10+ years maintenance for free as RHEL allowed before. So you are willing to pay the SUSE fee but not willing to pay the RHEL fee, even though, SUSE does the same thing?

Do you have another reason to choose SUSE?

What exactly is the problem with paying? Is it about Freedom here, or just about not paying? Because I have absolutely 0 sympathy for people who just don't want to pay others for their work, but I do care about freedom a ton.

From my POV, all RH has to do is point to the Github repo the source came from. The rest of the sauce of building the distro - that is the work they do, they are free to charge for that. And you can choose to pay, or not. The source is open at that point, I would say the GPL satisfied - the fact that you can't create a copy of the distro at near zero cost and effort and then turn around and sell that near-zero-work to others, well, my hard bleeds for you.

"Red Hat currently says they can cancel any user's account if they download the source code and redistribute it." - lets see a link please and where it says that. Would also love to see a link to previous versions of the same document to highlight what changed therein.

I am also not a lawyer, but there has been verbiage for a long time about subscription usage. This does not say that it cannot be redistributed. It does not say that you cannot make copies. It doesn't say that there can be multiple deployments.

IBM didn't have to pay for all the development. There's some things that require active development, sure, but the overwhelmingly majourity of the software they sell is just repackaged open source projects.

Therefore, software which is not Red Hat branded is fair game to take, which is the majority of RHEL. This can be observed by looking at old CentOS packages, which included package tags in the names of RPMs for those which had to have branding removed for legal reasons.

Maybe it time For IBM Hat to pay Fedora users, for the alpha testin of the packages, that will land in rhel'?

Would be awesome to see achange in Linux kernel license that excludes IBM/RH from using Linux kernel. xD

Not the first time IBM are short sighted. They are the same folks who once said OS market would never be profitable (or something along those lines), making room for one of the most profitable businesses ever.

Maybe I am reading too much in this but attempting to monetize on CentOS is basically saying they are desperate for cash, even small change. Maybe they are beyond healing

Any privately owned and autocratically governed GNU/Linux distribution will eventually behave in a manner similar to Red Hat. There is already a precedent on similar behaviors by Ubuntu (using snaps to create a monopoly package distribution mechanism, servers for which are not open source).

I know it's not the point, but folks are focusing on the traditional developer/paid account route to getting source rpms. There are other ways that don't require an account. Most notably, an AWS instance with official images - an extra hourly charge is added to the normal AWS rate which includes access to binary and source RPMS. When going that route, you don't have a persistent relationship with RH.

I heard about it even before IBM acquired Red Hat, that Red Hat is looking for a way to get rid of paid distributions, such as EuroLinux, which is based on RHEL, is cheaper and competitive, but doesn't add much to the OpenSource community. I do not know if such distributions did not exaggerate and finally the cup was overflowing, because as long as there was CentOS and other free ones, not rebranding Red Hat and selling much cheaper on big scale without paying other OpenSource projects, it was still moving forward somehow..

Please, take into account that the words about freeloaders could be towards freeloaders, not all of CentOS/Alma/Rocky users. I doubt that Red Hat would stick "freeloaders" on everyone. In particular, they made the RHEL system available to developers (16 instances) and Open Source projects free of charge. So this can't be true..

In my opinion, it is the effect of not thinking two steps ahead.. like EuroLinux. After all, as soon as they take RHEL, just rebrand and sell it cheaper, without such contribution as Red Hat do to the community, the Open Source will die. Many certainly thought about it, but also took into account the effect of such conduct. That's why it didn't - it's not logical.

Somewhere I heard that EuroLinux even got some certificates that they are 100% compatible with Red Hat from independent institutions to hook up to RHEL certifications and compliance with other things, as well as to match tender procedures.

3a8082e126