this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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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.
I've become a lot more sympathetic to RH after learning about Oracle Linux. I still disagree with it, but another mega-corp selling support for a RHEL clone is egregious.
Oracle Linux is 100% the cause of this change.
Imagine supporting 2 other distros to make your own enterprise linux that is your only source of money through optional subscriptions to it.
Then some other big unethical corporation (much like your own parent company) comes in, use the GPL license to clone it and slap an "Oracle db certified" sticker on it. Finally, they decide to use the same subscription model as you except they get insane margins since you did 99% of the work for them.
But looking at what Rocky Linux is saying publicly. It's not impossible that Red Hat won't levy their right to remove access to the sources to non-commercial forks of RHEL.
Ok, but lets say IBMHat wins here. If the selling point of OEL is Oracle db certified (which is almost HAS to be, no one else wants to touch Oracle), they are also the people who could just certify for Amazon Linux or Debian Stable based OEL. This doesn't achieve anything good for IBMHat.
I think this is a good theory. I would be surprised if Red Hat hadn't realized the value of clones and the community (and contributions) they bring.
I hope, but also honestly believe, that this is targeted at Oracle and that publicly saying "Don't worry we're only gonna use this against this company" would be make Red Hat liable to a lawsuit.