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.
This argument that open source somehow needs to exploit users and blatantly skirt the intent of the GPL because profit must be taken from it is absurd.
Why is it assumed that they weren’t perfectly sustainable before and why is it the end users responsibility to bear the burden of making their business model viable if they weren’t? Being unprofitable doesn’t excuse you from following the terms of your software license.
No, RHEL “exploits” large companies and the public sector that require a lot of compliance certificates and long term service guarantees for the software they procure. If Red Hat doesn’t collect this money, it goes into the pockets of people with much lower upstream contributions than Red Hat.
The regular user doesn’t need RHEL. Fedora or any other non-enterprise Linux distribution is perfectily fine and they will directly benefit from the contribution that Red Hat finances through their enterprise sales.
Red Hat weren’t ever unprofitable under the old model. This is just the classic killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. They’ll get a short term boost in profit until customers start moving to competitors.
I agree that they should be allowed a profit. However calling it open source when redistributing rhel code causes them to hold the right of canceling you access to the code and binary, eventhough gpl states that redistributing is a right under gpl rubs me the wrong way.
In the video, and in the blogpost that is effectively the transcript of the video, he clearly states that though locking away the source code is within IBM’s or RedHat’s rights.
What seems to have done it for him is, the subscription terms and conditions that prevent redistribution of source code by subscribers or else have the subscription revoked. This is what he argues as being borderline illegal and that RedHat could be banking on the army of lawyers on IBM’s retainer.
And, knowing Oracle, what is to stop them from becoming a subscriber? That way, RedHat has a poster child of a subscriber, Oracle gets access to the code which they can and most likely will, with their own army of lawyers, repackage and publish as Oracle Linux. Admittedly this is my cynical take on Jeff’s.
Time to start debating moving more projects under GPLv3 or AGPLv3 which demand more innovative ways to run a business than what IBM is doing.
I’m so annoyed with this. We were using CentOS, which was effectively killed, then I did a lot of research and spent time moving everything over the AlmaLinux.
Having to now do it all again another time is so frustrating; the only pragmatic long-term option is to bite the bullet and get things working on Debian.
Look in to Rocky Linux. It was started by the original developer of CentOS the day Red Hat announced that CentOS would be moving upstream of RHEL. They’ve already put out an announcement saying that it’s essentially going to be business as usual for them.
From what I understand, Rocky and Alma are essentially the same and so I found it difficult to decide between the two when moving from CentOS. Whatever happens now, will apply to both.
The writing is on the wall and it’s similar to Twitter and Reddit: they wanted to kill CentOS as it was, weren’t expecting the community to come back with Rocky and Alma, so now they’re trying to kill those too. The above video posits a scenario where Oracle’s legal team help the little guys by going to battle with IBM, but I don’t see it.
At this point, I don’t think it’s smart to go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over, but then again I’d be very happy to see the little guys succeed.
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. Manjaro can be good too but there are legitimate problems with how the project is run.
I was having graphics driver problems in Ubuntu-based distros until I tried Linux Mint.
If you get crashes right before or after login, it’s often a (Nvidia) graphics issue. To get around this, you could use nomodeset in the Grub menu to get a successful first boot where you can then install the proprietary drivers.
Also, you may want to set the Desktop Environment to Xorg or X11 (same thing) if Wayland is causing you problems. It’s older, but in some cases more efficient and less experimental. Check out the section: Switching desktop environments using a graphical user interface. It should look similar to the pictures. And notice that the “gear” icon may not appear until you select a user or start typing your password.
If your problem is different than this, open a support ticket in the discord or forums of the distro you’re using. Linux Mint has a great system for this on Discord.
I dont understand how redhat is going to police this policy of “we’ll keep source code open to paying customers, but reserve the right to cancel a customer that shares said source”.
Toss in GUID’s or randomly place identity files to anyone that downloads the RHEL source hoping they get accidentally published as an identifying attribute if someone does decide to publish it elsewhere.
And make sure that identifier scheme still works if different people on different subscriptions download the source and compare to filter identifiers like that out…
They could try that but I suspect it would be rather easy to find anomalies like that. These are ultimately patches to an upstream and already open-source project, so one can just diff the RHEL version with the release it’s based on and quickly notice that random GUID in the sources or random spaces/indentation. Or have multiple sources leak the code independently, and then you can diff them all between eachother to verify if you got exactly the same code or if they injected something sneaky to track it, and remove it.
Lots of companies in enterprise also want to host their own mirror because the servers are airgapped, so they can’t even track who downloaded all the sources because many companies will in fact do that. And serving slightly modified but still signed packages sounds like it would be rather computationally expensive to do on the fly, so they can’t exactly add tracking built into the packages of the repos either. And again easy to detect with basic checksumming of the files.
I don’t think that many companies have their shit together well enough to mirror the source code, besides the RHEL repos aren’t small, so that’ll cost.
The companies I’ve helped either had a minimalist mirror to reduce the surface area of what was installable or to save on cost.
It’s possible that a few enterprises do a full mirror of all RHEL sources, but i doubt it’s many
I don’t know, I’ve worked in Debian/Ubuntu companies mostly. Last two had thousands of servers and both had an apt-mirror custom repo including the deb-src ones. Otherwise we just get ourselves banned from the official mirrors when thousands of VMs pull updates from the same NAT IP.
Not sure how that works exactly on the RHEL side, maybe it’s not nearly as easy or common to do that.
This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.
I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don’t see why he can’t just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.
Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)
|
|
v
CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
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v
RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
You can absolutely run important services on Fedora server edition. Most of the stuff in containerized anyways, so having a more up to date version of the base system is actually an advantage.
It is really only those large corps with massive closed source lagacy applications and loads of compliance regulation that need a stale but long term supported distribution like RHEL.
If you like raspberry pis, SBCs, or Linux you’re in for a decent time. Although he did get a bit of flack for his Eben Upton interview. Though I felta lot of that was overblown.
I kinda like Helix, I just don’t really know what’s the point of it. Some of the Kakoune bindings are marginally better than the vim default but any efficency I might get with it I instantly lose when trying to re-learn things or getting confused when I hop on a vim terminal on an other machine.
Kind of the same with the editor, it’s like a ‘batteries included vim’ but I can just get that with a really light vim config and not mess up my workflow.
I guess it’s might be cool if you are getting into it as your first modal editor but even then, if you want to use other stuff or need to use some different tools getting a vim extension will probably be easier than getting a Kakoune one.
In my opinion, users who already use vim are not the primary target audience of Helix. I see the target group more among users who want to switch from a “normal” editor to a modal editor. The selection → action model and the easier shortcuts probably make the switch easier for many. I personally don’t like vim at all because of the handling (purely subjective view). Helix will definitely not be my default editor but I get along much better with it than with vim or neovim.
When I first tried Helix, my main concern (that prevented me from getting too far into it) was not going from Vim to Helix, but the other way around. Vim (or sometimes vi) is a standard editor on almost any Linux machine, so if I am ever working on a server if a VM, I would need to know/use Vim keybinds. That made Vim a more useful tool for me to learn at the time, as I could use the skills both on my machine and anywhere else.
My usual suggestion: Get a generation-old business or workstation class machine from one of the major manufacturers, as a refurb. Mostly meaning keep an eye on Dell Refurbished or Lenovo Outlet - sometimes you can also get a deal on a refurb via woot - for something that appeals to you. The stock is always changing at those, and there are almost always sales/coupons for around 40% off at the first-party refurb stores, so +/- a week of patience can save you a bunch of money.
Business or workstation class machines (think Dell Latitude or Precision, especially the ones with models that start with a 7, or Thinkpad) are typically mechanically much better built than their consumer counterparts, and usually full of reputable components that are connected in standard ways - low end consumer stuff sometimes has issues where they got weird less-common components or connected things in stupid ways to save a few cents per unit that will cause driver issues.
Waiting a generation gives time for mainline kernel driver support to fully mature to minimize driver problems, and drastically cuts the price.
I’ve had several machines following that advice, and I think the only driver trouble I’ve had with them has been with unsupported fingerprint/smartcard readers, which I …don’t care about anyway.
Or, if you want a way cheap beater and don’t mind some hackin’, grab a used/refurbished AUE Chromebook that is on the Mr. Chromebox Supported List. AUE means they no longer receive ChromeOS updates, so their price craters to like $50, and you can flash a normal UEFI payload and use them as a (feeble, storage starved, low resolution) computer. Not a good main machine, but they make fun beaters for experimenting. There are often batches of them being dumped via woot.
…also, don’t buy anything with an Nvidia GPU unless you have a specific compelling reason, it’ll be a pain in your ass for the life of the machine.
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