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AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Whole situation is ridiculous. People can't expect enterprise features and support infrastructure for free. But enterprises need to offer more price tiers.
I always thought the Red Hat business model was based around service and support with the OS being a secondary product which is why the free forks existed. When did the OS become the product?
When other companies made a business out of building a clone distro from the source RPMs with trademarks removed.and selling support contracts for it. Oracle being the absolute worst about it. Fuck Oracle.
The ability to do that is literally one of the core purposes of the license.
You don't and can't own derivative works of GPL projects. Oracle has the exact same right to resell an exact copy as red hat does of the original project.
I agree. That's why I said I don't support RedHat's choice to close off access to their source to non-customers. RedHat is still complying with their end of the license though, by keeping source access open to the recipients of their binary distribution. This is how Rocky is aiming to maintain 1:1 binary. RedHat is still publishing their Universal Base Image Docker image, so they need to keep source for that open, and Rocky will be using that method to get sources.
My stance is that we as users should be moving on from RedHat and RedHat derivatives, or just pay for RedHat if that's what we want. Continuing to use derivatives will just convince RedHat we'll all pay up if they can just get rid of those other options.
Having a prerequisite contract that allows them to punish customers who exercise their rights to the software is not complying with the license. Selling the code is allowed (though if it were written in the modern era where distribution costs are negligible I'm not sure it would be. Predicating distribution on other contracts that limit your rights is not.
You don't have a right to their sources until they distribute to you. And they have the right to choose to whom they do business (as long as they're not violatong discrimination laws). If they've distributed their product to you they have to give you the source, and they will. And if you distribute that source, they won't distribute the next release to you, so you won't have license to those subsequent sources. Compliant with the letter, not the spirit. It's shitty. And I think we should accordingly not do business with RedHat. That's what Alma is chosing here, by pivoting to no longer being 1:1 source rebuild distribution. Rocky is trying to hold onto the model that RedHat is trying to kill, by finding ways to still be a non-paying recipient of an RH distribution, requiring they be given access to source. I think we can expect RedHat to try and find a way to cut that off. Then Rocky will either pivot or die. But I wouldn't want to wait and see and then be screwed. I would want to break all dependence on an entity intent on breaking me. And I'd be wary of recommending Rocky as a migration from CentOS because of RedHat's actions.
It's not compliant with the letter. The GPL doesn't allow you to place other limitations on someone to receive the source. "You have the rights the GPL grants you, but we can punish you for exercising it" is a blatant and egregious breach of the GPL.
They're not betting that there's a 1 in a billion chance that they're right. They know with absolute certainty that they aren't even in the neighborhood of complying with the license. They're betting that no one is willing to spend the massive amount of money it would take to punish them for their stolen code.
Just to reiterate, I don't think RH is in the right here.
They're "punishing" you by not taking any more of your money for future versions. Maybe we'll see a court case out of it to settle the question but I doubt it. But consider you are a customer, and you have to ship RH binaries with your application. In order to comply with the license you must also make the source available. RedHat can't stop you from doing so, they just won't give you access to any more updates (and stop taking your money). So now you can't ship security updates to your customer. So now you have a legal liability by being a RedHat customer. Either you fail to comply with GPL yourself for the sake of updates, or you expose your customer to known security risks because you compiled with the GPL. So .. why do business with RedHat anymore? Explain this problem to your customers why you can't certify on RedHat anymore.
"If you distribute the code you're entitled to distribute we can terminate your contract" is identical to "if you distribute the code you're entitled to distribute we can charge you money". They're additional restrictions that are unconditionally not under any circumstances allowed by the GPL. You cannot restrict redistribution in any way for any reason outside of the GPL terms.
The second you do so, you are no longer covered under the GPL and everything you're distributing is copyright infringement.
I'm not a lawyer, but I categorically disagree that those two statements are the same. If someone takes RedHat to court and wins, fantastic. But as I've said, I wouldn't make business plans that rely on winning that case.
This has a name.... someone help... tip of my tongue... aaaaah... FREE SOFTWARE?
Did Red Hat invent linux? Did Red Hat write bash?
No, but Red Hat created the following major projects:
They're also major contributors of the following projects:
If you use Linux, you directly use or benefit from Red Hat contributions. As simple as that.
This is an ethical problem. You can rebrand RHEL as Oracle Linux, copy Red Hat's business model, and dump the work on Red Hat, but should you do that? Nobody at Oracle stopped to think about that question. According to the software license, sure. But is it ethical to exploit the good will of foss to these extremes? I would personally say no, especially considering Red Hat reinvests money into foss. Money now in the pockets of Oracle.
Imagine you develop a foss and license the software under MIT like everybody else does. Now a company roams around and makes your foss a core part of their business after a massive success. Perhaps they're the next FAANG company, who knows. You generated billions of dollars in revenue for that company, and never saw any of that. You regret your careless licensing decision, yeah. But at the end of the day, you will feel exploited.
What even is the point you think you're arguing against with me? Someone asked when RedHat decided to change aspects of their business model and I provided an answer. I didn't say I agree with it. Even in the face of me saying literally "I don't support RedHat" and "I haven't used RH in like 20 years" you seem really dedicated to convincing yourself that I just love RedHat and think they can do no wrong. Geerling is right. RedHat is stupid, and IBM is killing whatever was left of the brand. There are many, many alternatives to RedHat. Both free and commercial. Lets use them instead of clinging to RedHat-but-not-RedHat-because-we-don't-want-to-pay-RedHat.
Hmm? Does Red Hat have *anything* you couldn't install in *any* linux distro?
Alma sells support IIRC don't they? Or are you saying we need to fire all Windows IT specialists that are not Microsoft employees?
Can you install Satellite servers on your fleet of Ubuntu machines? OpenShift isn't free. I don't think there's anything that RHEL does that any other enterprise vendor can't do. And I don't support Red Hat (IBM) closing access to the source RPMs. But it costs money for vendors to develop their enterprise management platforms, the storage and bandwidth for geo-cached mirrors of updates, and all that. And if you're in an organization with a fleet of thousands of installations you need enterprise management platform.
Exactly. It costs Alma money to have the resources to do that. So customers will need to pay the support costs to keep Alma viable. Just like with RedHat. But enterprises a freaking out about needing a new free enterprise distro, because RH is too expensive to license on thousands of machines. So RH should be finding more flexible price models, instead of trying to squeeze out competition.
OKD is free and same as Openshift without support..
Not sure what direction you're leaning with this one. From here:
So it's the CentOS Stream of OpenShift. And just like CentOS Stream is openly available while Red Hat Enterprise is not, OKD is openly available while OpenShift is not. So revenue from OpenShift is used to support the development of OKD, just like with RHEL and CentOS Stream.
I just saying there OKD can be a replacement of OpenShift, even it's upstream, I just saying that it's possible to have somekind of openshift... in OKD.
The person you're talking to is strictly anti-opensource, he does not believe anything can be done with community projects.
ugh... I hope this doesn't end up flame war. Thank you for sharing and reminds me about it.
Raphael is blindly ignoring that I've literally said I don't support RedHat closing access to their sources and that I'm in here applauding Alma for moving away from their dependence on a greedy corporation. Somehow my acknowledging that enterprise support costs money to provide, and that the resources to develop and distribute FOSS aren't free, means to him that I'm just blindly opposed to FOSS and that I'm pro-corporation.
Your argument boils down to "It can't be helped".
In this thread I've said don't use RedHat because they're being dickbags, also maybe don't use clones of RHEL because they then see you as a customer who isn't paying them, and also if you need enterprise support it costs money so pay for it (because it also pays for the FOSS projects that these companies foster and contribute to).
So what is it that I'm saying can't be helped?
You say this and then you go on a large rant in the next post effectively defending Red Hat. You may be afflicted by Multiple Personality Disorder.
Please link/quote to me defending what RedHat is doing with access to their source repos. I've said repeatedly in this thread (and in your other satire s/RedHat/Linux/) post that we should all stop using RedHat and stop creating a market for Red Hat as the de facto standard, because I do not support what they're doing with access to their source repos.
Use Rauncher from SUSE instead, they may be a corp but they're committed to Free Software at the moment.
Care to check for how many BILLIONS Red Hat was sold for? It is more than profitable enough, capitalism propaganda won't fly this time around.
The free stuff is subsidized by enterprise subscriptions (and YaST sucks). That's all I'm saying. Alma has a free option and paid subscription. So does Rocky. So does Ubuntu. So does Suse. RedHat has free stuff too. (CentOS Stream, Fedora, and free RHEL developer license, and ubi). If you want the enterprise features of RedHat, pay the enterprise price. And if you don't want to (I sure don't), then use something else, because like you said we have choices.
You're way off the mark here. I haven't used RH in like 20 years, since they first introduced RHEL and killed its predecessor because screw that greedy shit. But I also haven't been trying to use 1:1 rebuilds of RHEL. Employers have made us use CentOS to because customers use RedHat but no we won't pay for RedHat but also no we can't use CentOS because no enterprise management to push security updates without the application updates but also no we won't pay for RedHat. It's stupid. Either pay for RedHat because you need it, or shut up and move onto something that isn't RedHat.
Maybe you should read the rest of my comments in this post.
Enterprise features like the update management server to keep a fleet of thousands of machines patched with only security updates. Infrastructure like geo-located mirrors of the update repositories (not volunteer mirrors like universities around the world mirroring kernel.org and centos.org and eclipse.org etc). Support service like on-call staff to pick up the phone whenever you call. Those things cost money to provide. If you know of a distribution which provides all that for free, please let me know. If you need that level of support, pay for it instead of trying to find a freebie around it.
I assume you like to be paid for your work. You might be surprised to learn that revenues from that commercial support pay for the free stuff.
I agree with you, and everyone else who thinks I need to be told this. Which is why I've been advocating in this thread for users to drop RedHat like I did 20ish years ago when they first replaced their free desktop with RedHat Enterprise. And further to move away from source-rebuild distributions because RedHat has clearly stated that they see these users as lost revenue and are taking these actions as a way to "claim" those customers by removing the options. And I certainly wouldn't pay RedHat after shitting on at least the spirit of the GPL (and I'll be happy if someone sues them successfully to set a precedent about the letter of the GPL).
I'm so apologetic to these corporations that I'm literally commenting in here to stop buying from them! Such an apologist! When RedHat killed CentOS, I recommended at my office that we switch all CentOS usage to Ubuntu. When they announced this last move of closing the RHEL source to non-customers and the user agreements that they'll terminate your contract if you distribute the sources, I recommended we don't even consider a source rebuild distribution either, because I don't want us to be caught with having to transition to another distribution if RedHat finds a way to kill off the source for UBI to non-customers (how Rocky is planning to stay compatible as a source-rebuild distribution). And it seems Canonical is killing their free distribution too, for organizations of more than 5, so I have to reconsider Ubuntu now (which sucks because WSL was really helping my case to use Ubuntu) Maybe now that Alma is moving away from the RHEL source rebuild model I can recommend Alma, maybe can get a WSL package of Alma. If the other distributions stop caring about RHEL compatibility, then RHEL will cease to be the de facto standard. And we can all rejoice. Seriously why would anyone want to sell a product they built on RHEL now. If they have to redistribute a library they got from RHEL, then they are faced with either being in violation of GPL or losing access to security updates from RHEL (meaning they'll be exposing their own customers to security risks). It's a legal lose-lose to be a RHEL customer now.
Fucking duh. I never implied that. I said if you're trying to make use of enterprise features that cost money to provide, you should pay for them. I personally get by just fine with support from GitHub issues/discussions, Gitter/Slack channels, IRC, and Usenet.
First, thank you for not resorting to name calling this time.
Here are RedHat's own words on users of source-rebuild distributions.
This is the perspective that is informing RedHat's decision making on the matter. It doesn't matter that you and I know the people using Alma and Rocky, and previously CentOS, won't switch to paid RHEL users if those options are gone.
I can see how you would see my comments as conflating the two. It was not my intention to do so.
I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, RedHat is saying that. I'm saying given RedHat's actions, I wouldn't want to be in the business of trying to fight with them to maintain a source-rebuild distribution or base my own business continuity on them being able to out-maneuver RedHat and continue to exist.
It is a fact that big corporations like Canonical, RedHat, and Suse have historically paid full time developers to contribute to and maintain FOSS code. They have to have money to pay those developers. They can't make a reliable and predictable revenue stream on just the existence of the software itself, so they sell support contracts to pay for it.
No, and I never claimed anything close to that. But RedHat is among many Linux distributors who employ developers full time to contribute to and maintain FOSS projects.
Indeed, hence why I think RedHat is ethically in the wrong here.
I gave examples of what I perceive as enterprise support, you're free to think those things don't matter, but maybe tell me who does those things for free. Alma Foundation isn't some group of benevolent billionaires paying for everything out of their own pockets. If they weren't receiving donations (be they monetary or services) or revenue, they wouldn't be able to do what they're doing.
Again, I agree. All the source-rebuild distributions have the right to exist. And if they feel it's worthwhile to pursue still , good for them and good luck.
I mean .. we all agree that RedHat is in the wrong here because the actions of the source-rebuild distributions are protected under the FOSS licenses. We have different reactions and hopes, but we all agree that RedHat is doing wrong. So I don't understand why you and Raphael are out here calling me an apologist who doesn't understand OSS.
fair
edit: I do support Linux distribution vendors having the option to do freemium if that's how they feel they can best deliver, just not the way that RedHat is now trying to do it. And I support people trying to do it in a way that is completely gratis to the users.