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Should we be wary of Red Hat?
(lemmy.cafe)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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IBM sucks. They have bought up a bunch of small data centers and made them worse.
I'm still pissed about CentOS as well. Long live Rocky.
Alma is actually a real community distro. They deserve so much more support than Rocky does.
TIL; though I moved my servers to Debian ... having the ability to sanely upgrade without a reinstall is a major plus.
@Dark_Arc @LeFantome I've had mixed luck with debian in this regard. Bullseye to Bookworm was a smooth upgrade but some of the others have not gone so well.
I'm pretty sure Alma had a way to upgrade major releases. I know RHEL has Leapp, but it is always recommended to do a greenfield reinstall. Although with image mode and ostree that is changing.
Interesting ... yeah it looks like Leapp can do some upgrades for Alma and possibly others as well (TIL). I'm not sure how well that upgrade process would compare / be supported vs Debian though.
What's the image mode and ostree stuff? Is that required for RHEL and/or Alma going forward?
No image mode is not required. It is the immutable mode for RHEL. Using image builder and bootc to create and upgrade your images. Ostree is sort of like putting your entire OS in git. For an upgrade it checks out a new branch, updates that branch, then you have to reboot into that branch. That makes the upgrade atomic and gives you the ability to rollback. It's what Core OS uses and what the Fedora Atomic desktops use. It's a much bigger thing in RHEL 10 and I suspect will take over a lot of the duties of Satellite at some point.
Ahhh so leapp will simply become less relevant because a better upgrade mechanism will take over
Fuck Rocky. They are a leech on open source. They break user agreements to get at Red Hat source and don't contribute upstream. Use Alma, they actually work with the community and contribute upstream.
Ok, but why is there even an agreement required to access to source to something, uh, open source?
The GPL says you can get the source to software that people distribute to you. Red Hat does not distribute to Rocky.
Seems like they use that to circumvent other parts of the gpl, in spirit and possibly in the letter of the law. Others have more and better things to say about it than I:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
Because CIQ, the company that bankrolls Rocky, was poaching Red Hat customers. They were hiring Red Hat sales people, then using their contacts to swoop in and drastically undercut Red Hat because they don't do any engineering. It is an effort to stop leeches like CIQ/Rocky.
There's an easy solution to that. RedHat could just pay their salespeople what they are worth and keep them at RedHat.
I don't see the problem with that. Red Hat is bankrolled by IBM. I don't have any qualms about them facing competition, even underhanded competition which I don't think this is. Contributing to open source doesn't and shouldn't guarantee financial compensation, customers, whatever.
So, you're okay with one company taking another company's work, contributing nothing to it themselves, then hiring company A's employees, and finally taking company A's customers? Not even Oracle was slimy enough to do that.
IBM does not bank roll Red Hat. Red Hat acts and reports independently of IBM.
@FlexibleToast @zero_spelled_with_an_ecks If that company built upon open source and had then to release their work because of the original license, then I can't speak for others, but I'm ok with it. They can do original work or they can build on others, if they do the latter then they have to expect the same.
Right, I think you're basically saying what I think most of us would agree with. Don't just copy the homework and poach customers. You can copy the homework and add your own value to it and earn customers. Bonus points for adding that value add back into the community like Alma does with their HPC work.
I guess you consider the parts of open source that are contributed to be owned by the contributors? I don't think that's how open source works nor how it should work.
IBM doesn't bankroll Red Hat? Buddy, IBM owns Red Hat https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-landmark-acquisition-red-hat-34-billion-defines-open-hybrid-cloud-future
Buddy, I know IBM owns them. I also know that Red Hat is basically the only thing making IBM money. Look at the financials a little more closely.
What would that have to do with anything? That's not at all what I'm saying. I'm against companies that take an open source project to profit off of it without making any contributions to the community. CIQ and Canonical to a lesser extent. I have no issues with people like Red Hat, SUSE, Alma, etc...
I'm not. I don't think we're going to change each other's mind, so have a good one.
I wish Almalinux/Rocky would be recognized by Fedora.
What does that even mean? Alma already contributes and is down stream of CentOS Stream. Rocky doesn't contribute and steals Red Hat source.
Rock Linux isn't "stealing" anything. They make a exact RHEL clone for those who want absolute RHEL clone. Almalinux on the other hand is just trying to be comparable with RHEL software and tools. It is very similar to RHEL but they do things like fix issues faster. Some people are weary of Almalinux because it is tied to cloudlinux.
No, it is "stealing." Even worse is that they don't contribute back to the community. They're breaking the terms and agreement in order to get the source. Alma is based on CentOS Stream and is ABI compatible with RHEL.
Dude you're fighting a very uphill battle trying to make us feel bad for an IBM subsidiary.
Red Hat is more than just an IBM subsidiary. They're a major contributor to open source.
I agree, but they've also made deliberate moves to muddy the waters of open source and push the limits of what is acceptable under GPL, and I'm not going to shed any tears over their loss of potential corporate profit.
Fair enough. No corporation deserves a tear. But still, fuck Rocky for being a leech on the community.