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.
I haven’t seen this in person so I can only speculate, but I bet they’ll only provide the sources as a tarball or something instead of a git repo, which will make it a PITA for anyone do actually do anything useful with it. I mean, you could potentially still build a full distro from it, but you wouldn’t be able to feasibly maintain it without the ability to do a sync and merge from upstream. So this way, Red Hat achieves their goal of being able to kill any spinoff distro, whilst still remaining compliant with the GPL.
It’s not a “they will.” Red Hat customers are able to download source rpms from the repository or the site, this has been the case for a very long time. It is possible to clone / sync the repository, this is how airgapped networks can still host their own.
The concern is that Red Hat terminates your account if you redistribute the source to another party. This feels like an additional restriction placed on the source code, which if it is, would indeed violate the GPL.
Serious concern and asshole move? Yes. Gpl violation? Not sure. You could argue you are not restricted to do whatever you want with the code you receive with a subscription. But if you share the code, they don’t want you as a customer anymore and won’t give you new code. I don’t know if the GPL allows that.
Terminating a support contract, in itself, is not a GPL violation. The restrictions only affects the ability to receive future updates.
Edit: Red Hat indeed claims that no GPL violation is happening, yet they inform their customers that sharing updates leads to contract termination, which clearly breaches the GPL at least in spirit: sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/…/rhel-gpl-analysis/
Context is important. It’s possible that the software is distributed without any warning like that and that the termination of the support contract is done without citing the redistribution of previous versions as a reason. OTOH if the customers could prove that there’s widespread knowledge of the retaliatory termination that could be equivalent to a (non-written) restriction that is indeed incompatible with the GPL
“the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.”
The warning is in the agreement every customer (and free developer account) signs to obtain access. They also mention they could sue you, although I think it is unrealistic they would do so just for redistribution.
As someone who admins around 200 Rocky 8/9 and Centos 7 servers, this is a little concerning.
But I have a lot of faith in Rocky and Alma, who are reportedly working together, in coming up with a solution to ensure they continue getting security fixes and updates.
Redhat are steadily turning into every bit as anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be. It's a shame as they used to do a lot for the FOSS world. Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.
Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.
This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.
To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn’t undo everything else Red Hat does.
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.
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.
The battery life is awful. But I bought the official clamshell keyboard for it that replaces the back cover and expands the battery capacity. With this accessory the battery life is good.
Quoted from my other post: Well in order to access the CentOS stream repo you need to have a subscription. So really not closed source but rather "harder-to-view-the-source".
Well in order to access the CentOS stream repo you need to have a subscription.
That’s false. The sources are right here, open to the world and open for contribution. What was shut down was the automation to export RHEL source RPMs to the legacy location. The source RPM exports were pretty much useless for contributors and maintainers of RHEL and CentOS. However, they were critical for RHEL rebuilds, which is why people are upset.
For the last two, it will more than enough. Gaming tho, it depends. If you wants emulator, Linux is THE emulator OS. For Windows game tho, if you are planning to play older game, Linux is better than Windows. Period. For newer games, like ‘just-release-game’, it is not ideal. Free to play multiplayer games, especially outside of Steam/Valve, forget it.
To piggy-back off this, take stock of your current favorite games and do some searching to find out how those have worked out for others. ProtonDB is a great resource for games on Steam. Outside Steam it can often be done, but can be a headache.
I will typically try a game on Linux first, but keep Windows around and will just boot into that if I cant get up and running pretty quick. Don’t have time to deal with the tinkering all day haha
I used to have various Linux setups on my Android phones. I experimented with different chroot setups and applications, settled on just generating my own chroot using debootstrap and mounting it with a script in the Terminal app. XServer XSDL for GUI. It worked, but it wasn’t amazing.
These days I switched to proper Linux phone. Typing this on my PinePhonePro keyboard using postmarketOS. If you really want the best pocketable Linux experience you can get, this is by far the best. Might not be the best if you depend on Android apps, but my Android use case was mostly just browser and a few unimportant apps that have Linux alternatives.
I’ve been on KDE for a while now. Doesn’t feel as heavy as I guess it is. That said, if you want Wayland you’re kinda stuck with GNOME or KDE (if you want something traditional). I’ve been enjoying KDE since the switch, though. I’m hoping it’ll get more resources from Valve.
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