@Migueldeicaza in what way is it akin to Reddit? Centos Stream is the upstream where RHEL comes from. Most packages in RHEL are verbatim Centos content and a RHEL release can be traced to a tag or a commit in Centos.
Also RH continues paying developers that contribute directly to upstream projects like Gnome, GTK, the kernel... In what way is any of that akin to Reddit?
@itorres@Migueldeicaza There are more people contributing to the FOSS tools that RHEL uses than RHEL employees and contractors. A huge chunk of FOSS tools used in modern GNU/Linux OSes comes from unpaid volunteer developers (I wouldn't be surprised if it was more than 50%). Reddit's content came from its userbase, which is what brought in more users, which is monetizeable. With no user-generated content, Reddit might as well not exist. Without volunteer devs, Redhat might as well not exist.
and all that code is in #Centos Stream, a project by #RedHat.
In Centos Stream RedHat opened their internal builds that went to priority RHEL support and started to do them in the open so people could get access to them earlier and contribute. That allows external projects to not only track RHEL but even release earlier and participate in the solutions.
@Migueldeicaza@itorres@animist it's amazing how people keep making that claim [that it's not the same], when they can easily verify it by looking at CentOS Stream and git.centos.org, or even RHEL itself ...
@Migueldeicaza I compel you to talk to them, I did and they had a lot of interesting information about it. Some redhatters have replied here and they are not managers.
@Migueldeicaza@mattdm@itorres It's pretty clear that the freedoms and collective advantages FLOSS grants are at some odds to profit generation: this is, indeed, a threat to RH's business model.
Once it becomes "good enough" that support is no longer deemed universally necessary, the funding model flounders since everyone else also wants to maximize their (short-term) profits.
@larsmb@mattdm@itorres agreee, this has always been a problem, I think it remains an unsolved problem. An asymmetry between those that build the code and those enabled to monetize it
I agree about different funding models. But, I want to stress — Red Hat has not made (and I do not expect it to make) any changes relevant to that. All changes are made available to everyone, and upstreamed directly if possible.
@mattdm@Migueldeicaza@itorres A big part of the GPL is the right to redistribute (and use, for any purpose, the modified or unmodified source code).
So you're saying RH is not adding any restrictions or negative consequences to that?
(I get the part about "you're not allowed to redistribute the signed binaries". I think that part is fair enough.)
I found the distinction in economics between Public Goods and other types of goods helpful in understanding all this. It seems like FOSS is fundamentally at odds with normal market approaches, and RedHat is trying to get around that. (https://youtu.be/hA2z-X31IvI?list=PL-uRhZ_p-BM4XnKSe3BJa23-XKJs_k4KY)
@Migueldeicaza we're gonna keep seeing this for the next few years - companies that aren't doing well always start to just throw wild punches in the air like this as they're spiraling the drain
If you had the misfortune of reading the replies to my post, enjoy an explanation without corporate speak.
While the authors of this post need to walk a fine line to attempt to salvage their efforts, I have no stakes on this, and can tell you in black and white the answer to the last question is: yes, IBM and Red Hat are doing this to eliminate their competitors and extract more money from the market.
@Migueldeicaza Bit lost in the lingo here, but does this mean Red Hat is trying to benefit from all commits made to RHEL-based distro’s while gating all its own contributions behind a subscription paywall?
That article is not a lie. It says Red Hat is no longer publishes the sources the way Alma consumed them.
The phrase "gating all its own contributions behind a subscription paywall" is a very different statement.
All RH contributions are public.
Even those RHEL patches, which go to minor-stream branches first and not land in the CentOS Stream directly, must be brought into CentOS Stream before the next minor release of RHEL by the development policy.
I am not talking about republishing sources acquired through the customer portal.
I say: Red Hat publishes all RHEL content via CentOS Stream Gitlab repositories. It doesn't just publish them, it also develops that RHEL content via open MRs on GitLab.com
That might not match precisely the form of the patch in an specific RHEL release, but those are available alongside the binaries. Most differences are due — ironically contrary to the narrative Miguel is pushing — to getting those changes upstream, benefiting everyone and making patches obsolete.
@mattdm@maxsteenbergen people don’t want that, people want the exact replica, the one that is certified by assorted third parties for functionality and device drivers.
The bullshit you spew can work on some naive people, but sadly for you, i am not one of those.
I agree that many people want those things. That work has value, separate from the code.
So, I get why people are so upset even though the licenses are followed (and beyond — again, it's not all GPL) and even though the actual fixes and improvements are shared freely to all.
But I wish you wouldn't keep claiming that Red Hat isn't doing the latter.
@Migueldeicaza I am curious what Amazon Linux will do. In the past they tried to remain close to RHEL. With AL2023 they have some dependencies on CentOS Stream it seems (haven't kept fully up-to-date).
At least at work we turned off the last RH boxes the other day. Debian and its ilk are the way forward.
@itorres in physics we multiply mass by velocity to get the momentum. In those terms, given the little velocity and mass of opensolaris it certainly is.
@krzyzanowskim I still think we need to find a model that can fund this work. I think your license approach for your editor is a worthwhile exploration direction, and so is the gold linker approach.
But these approaches are too burdensome for people that just want to engineer. Perhaps an opportunity to set up a consortium to negotiate licensing
@Migueldeicaza@krzyzanowskim maybe the issue isn’t funding. Maybe it is profit and growth? Maybe red hat can find what it does but needs to grow yoy so it has to do this.
@krzyzanowskim well I’ll be cheering for you. But also, i am wondering if we had a consortium of libraries that companies could license could make this more appealing - some pro-rata or all you can eat.
As I have been both a Red Hat and a Sun employee during both transitions. I can't state how far from the truth your statement is.
Red Hat is still the same legal entity, with a very similar management chain with the exception of Jim W. not being in the picture and Paul taking a step aside as CEO.
@aruiz what Balmer’s Microsoft couldn’t do, IBM did: found a GPL loophole to enshitify Linux.
Doesn’t matter that they are separate entities, executives get their bonuses set by IBM chain of command.
Their job is to launder their shit strategy to be palatable to customer and employees. As we can clearly see in this illustration, they clearly succeeded with one group.
@aruiz nice deflection - you are taking this too personally, and you are defending shitheads that will fire you in an instant if they need to make their numbers.
This is both bad short term, and it is legitimizing a nasty attack on free software.
Unless you got your wealth tied to their stock, I don’t see how you would support this.
@Migueldeicaza I wouldn't support what you claim we're doing though, engineering teams are mandated to push every change upstream and each new RHEL change is here sooner or later:
@aruiz it doesn’t matter that the changes get there. It matters that this is not identical. I am sure you are not stupid and you know the difference fully - if not, read reddit or the replies.
And it matters that this is a nasty contractual land grab.
@Migueldeicaza I am afraid that you are moving the goalpost here, I am okay to going back to exact binaries, but you accused Red Hat of violating the GPL, how is making modifications (copyleft or otherwise) publicly available a violation of the GPL or the commons at large?
@Migueldeicaza@aruiz I assume that RedHat are still providing exact SRPMs via basically the same mechanism that they provide their customers the RPMs (i.e. the ones receiving the binaries).
At least as far as the GPL is concerned, is there something I'm missing that means they're not complying with that licence (i.e. v2: 3a, v3: 6d)?
Given that AFAIK, the rule in RH is that changes must be upstream first, how are they not actually going above and beyond what's actually required?
@MWelchUK@aruiz people don’t want the rolling release, the “snapshot in time at whatever time it is”. They want identical configurations, and this the contract is used to withhold.
You will never know unless you pay what exactly is fixed or improved. You have to take your chances.
@Migueldeicaza@aruiz No, unless you pay, you'll never get to run it. If you pay, you get access to identical source.
That's clearly a change from how it's been done in the past, however it's no different from a lot of OEMs from my experience (you don't get access to their Linux until you buy the product for which it's provided).
Unless I've miss-understood or RedHat have changed their operating procedures, then any fixes in RHEL are upstream already.
@Migueldeicaza@aruiz The only people that now seem to miss out are those wanting to run an enterprise grade Linux, but without financially helping support the effort of maintaining one.
It's not like RHEL is the only available Linux distribution. There are even "stable" community maintained distros if providing financial support is not your thing.
Given that AFAIK all fixes are already upstream, other than rebuilding and offering a free RHEL clone, what can't now be done?
@MWelchUK@aruiz those community distros are precisely the ones impacted.
Dude, just do me a favor and read the replies to the thread and the forums before I have to explain everything again. This drive-by-insight is just a waste of time. Sayonara bro.
@Migueldeicaza@aruiz If it wasn't clear, by community distros, I wasn't thinking of Alma or Rocky Linux. I was thinking of Debian. Unless I've missed something, I'm not sure that this is going to impact them greatly.
@Migueldeicaza@aruiz Thanks. However I currently no plans to work for Red Hat. I've not used one of their distributions in years.
However, I have and continue to use a lot of stuff they've been a big part in developing and/or support the developers that do, so would like to see them remain financially viable. I can do without a few free RHEL clones if that's the cost.
@Migueldeicaza I've quit Canonical, Sun and Amazon in large part because I am physically incapable of withstanding bullshit towards upstreams and/or because I don't like being treated like a fool or pushed to treat others like cattle
@aruiz so you do know then that this is both insufficient for the existing ecosystem of users, and you know that this is a nasty hack on the GPL.
I am surprised you are defending these moves that call those users free loaders. Someone already drew the parallel with Bill Gates’ letter to hobbyists. It is even in even worst taste than that.
@Migueldeicaza Since I apparently can't run software on anything newer than Java 8 without jumping through some obnoxious hoops or giving up a pile of PII I think I'll continue to hate Oracle harder than IBM.
@Migueldeicaza I knew all this was coming once that sale happened. Only thing I got wrong was I thought the actual RH name would be dead before now. I would have preferred that, honestly, because it would have felt like the thing I helped build died before they changed it so fundamentally.
@Migueldeicaza IBM doesn’t get into business to be good, neither oracle.
What makes me sad, is that our open source generation didn’t build any lasting software company that I see will survive the next 50 years. All of them got bought or are aiming to get a exit offer.
@Migueldeicaza When I hear the name ”IBM” I still envision suits and ties + dollar bills — and to reference Office Space: ”TPS reports”. For 23 years I’ve hoped that they convinced American companies that the Linux kernel and distributions are more than hobby projects. I was enthusiastic about the Muhammed Ali Super Bowl commercial, back in the day. I got chills from watching it (good chills). This debacle with changes to not get permission to downstream code … >>
@Migueldeicaza >> is a sign that IBM has taken control over the Red Hat culture, influencing the path forward. I believe the enormous amounts of money they paid to acquire the Red Hat company is very much the reason for their move. I assume they want a ROI. Letting Oracle and other commercial actors reshape it slightly is not in their interest. Do I think this is good for the Linux community? No, it’s not, but from an unbiased distance I see what they are thinking 🤔
@Migueldeicaza I am however biased: In my day job, I work as a full-time RHEL sysadmin (VMs in an on-premise VMWare ESXi cloud). I detest and loath the flaky, unstable subscription-manager and Satellite system. It can’t handle our massive deployments. The nr 1 thing IBM could have done before showing their ”evilness” towards open source communities, is: at least fix those issues. It’s so much more reliable using subscription-free CentOS, Alma and Rocky.
@Migueldeicaza I’ve done this job for a little less than 8 years — and counting. Another thing: the state of their (err, Netscape and Sun/Oracle) dogtag-ca, aka Certificate System. It’s a huge mess of legacy C++ code and old HTML + JavaScript, mixed in with Java and Python. I used to be the main guy responsible for a CA instance based on Dogtag (open source edition of Certificate System). I was always nervous about upgrades and it regularly broke for the most peculiar reasons 😅
@Migueldeicaza "IBM, Red Hat - Always two there are, no more, no less. A master and an apprentice."
More seriously I think Red Hat has been a lot better for open source than Oracle. At the end of the day they are all corporations, they exist to enrich their shareholders. That involves tricky balancing of co-operation and competition and I think Red Hat probably called this one slightly wrongly.
@etchedpixels I think your assessment is correct on short term impact, I place the “wrongness” a lot further away than you do.
But I think the roll out of this widespread contract to nuke the GPL is a tectonic shift. These new shitheads do not derserve the benefit of “our previous owners were not shit, so we can be shit now”
@Migueldeicaza I don't believe the contract side has changed much but the relationship has. It's one thing to try and stop service subscription fraud and another to use language and behaviour that ruins your relationship with others you actually need. Bob Young very well understood that the primary goal was bigger pies not fighting over the shares of the pie.
@Migueldeicaza I was somewhat favorable / neutral towards Red Hat at the start of this kerfuffle ( I agreed with this post contemporaneously https://alexgaynor.net/2015/mar/30/red-hat-open-source-community/ and therefore had lower expectations going into this most recent development ) but this is maddening to read. Why is he talking about "late nights" so much. Like, hey buddy, sounds like you've got a management problem and you need to stop crunching your team, not extort your customers and collaborators
@Migueldeicaza What value do they want to extract? The value that the ecosystem sees in the aggregation that they created. As I have said elsewhere, I think CentOS Stream is better for layered projects.
@Migueldeicaza Stack-ranking distros that an open source ISV should target for free adoption, I would put Ubuntu, CentOS Stream, OpenSuse. And successful adoption opens GTM with Canonical, Red Hat, and Suse. Ubuntu has been more important for adoption, Red Hat for revenue.
@Migueldeicaza That's one of the reasons I always argued for CentOS packages back in the day for things like oVirt, OpenStack, ManageIQ. The people we wanted to try our thing weren't using Fedora, for the most part. They were using Ubuntu and CentOS. And today, I think CentOS Stream offers a "best of both worlds" - stable for use, and close to the GTM target OS.
@krzyzanowskim@Migueldeicaza You're right, it's honestly not different (maybe in scale but not conceptually). Both industries should not be engaging in that type of action.
@Migueldeicaza I suppose this is yet another data point supporting the idea that Open Source Software in a world of capitalism can only exist as a pastime for the already-rich. Only companies extracting profit from something else can afford to maintain OSS. Only individuals paid for something else can contribute significant time to OSS projects in their spare time.
It’s a precarious thing to profit directly from maintaining OSS and selling it as a service, precisely because someone else can copy and repackage your work for less money—which is entirely within the spirit of OSS—and undercut your business model. A business truly in the spirit of GPL would celebrate such a copy; but a business that must profit from their work on OSS would see it as theft of their livelihood.
Some astute observations. I would also add that probably is the reason why don’t see many firms in the form of Redhat existing selling support on OSS. It is too precarious and they don’t have the first mover advantage that Redhat itself had.
@Saad@drahardja exactly. This isn’t a secret, we have known for now some 20 years that the red hat model couldn’t be generally be reproduced. A handful of attempts exists here and there, the exceptions to the rule.
@drahardja@Migueldeicaza Disagree. This isn’t about making money or not, this is about making MORE money. This is a squeeze.
What you guys are forgetting is RH is two main things: a brand, and a support company. IBM is killing the brand here with this and doesn’t care because they see more dollars in squeezing the support biz. And they think the IBM brand is infallible and will ultimately just be that anyway.
@ngaylinn@Migueldeicaza IMO public funding introduces its own unintended consequences, including stifling competition, as it would be impossible for anyone (who is not already wealthy) to fork a government-funded project, even if the fork produces superior results. The list of government-maintained projects essentially becomes a monopsony for OSS.
The more fundamental problem is, of course, capitalism, or more precisely: a capitalist system combined with the lack of a universal basic income and other social services that ensure that no one will suffer and die even if they didn’t spend most of their waking hours earning profit for a capitalist. Unless we change that system, I’m afraid profit-based systems will continue to fund OSS development.
@ngaylinn@Migueldeicaza I would even go so far to argue that the most important things we ought to support as a human species should not be profitable.
@drahardja@Migueldeicaza I agree. "The market" is good for some things, but it's crazy that we use it for everything. It's absolutely poisonous for some public needs.
@Migueldeicaza I literally just pulled that quote from the article into a private chat this morning. If companies have difficulty perpetuating their business models when freedom is preserved, why would I value preserving those companies over preserving software freedom?
@Migueldeicaza siempre pensé porque los software engineers de este mundo no tienen su lobby que defienda sus intereses. Sobretodo en el open source. USE, union of software engineers, es un buen acronimo.
@Migueldeicaza Several big IT companies have their own Linux distros. It doesn't seem like there's a problem with Linux being limited to hobbyists and hackers. I'm more worried about hobbyists and hackers getting edged out.
I think that's disingenuous. I don't think the funding model of Free Software is perfect, or even close to it. I want to acknowledge that, first.
But when you say "first with minimal changes," you're pretty strongly implying that Red Hat has never made any contributions to what they distribute, and that's pretty far off the mark.
@Migueldeicaza It's very selfish. Here is this body of work, put together by millions of developers over billions of man-hours. It's a heritage that we've built up over three generations now.
So here comes IBM. "This is ours now."
That attitude is very colonialist, and underscores the need for structural defenses, like the GNU GPL.
That said, if Red Hat is distributing source code to everyone that they're distributing binaries to, the GPL should be happy, even if money is involved.
@Migueldeicaza Feels more like Red Hat is bemoaning that this is happening/might happen, but it also kinda comical since it is clear they are powerless to stop it. No idea why that paragraph exists, makes them look pretty dumb. You could call it honesty, I guess?
@Migueldeicaza ok, I am not gonna dive into against RH or for RH, but this is factually wrong statement from them - distros simply rebuild code all the time. And Free Software thrives on being accessible from everywhere. Easy to access, use and modify has been huge practical corner stone of all our ecosystem. Yes, they have hard times, their shareholders watching closely. But it is not a problem of Free Software.
@Migueldeicaza Notice the subtle elision that a threat to "open source companies" is a threat to "open source"; it's equating the financial success of Red Hat with the viability and value of the free and open source software community.
People participating in that community - as users, developers, vendors, etc. - have no obligation to help Red Hat make money, nor do most predicate their participation on that goal.
@Migueldeicaza Every enterprise company once it becomes commercial business with shareholders to appease will always bait and switch. Remember #Google with Do No Evil? Apple with computing for the rest of us and the many others who have followed similar behavior.
@Migueldeicaza It sounds like that thing where I was able to download RHL, add my own packages to it, and have it sold at the NC State bookstore as “Red Hat plus the stuff you need to play nice on the NCSU network” would be…much much more difficult to do now, if not impossible. That’s a shame. I feel like a few good things came from that.
@Migueldeicaza I worked at a company that had a hundred or so CentOS VMs. After I left, the CentOS Stream announcement came out.
there's only maybe six nodes there that need full-RHEL-like behavior, and that's because of hardware drivers. I have no doubt that the rest have been (or are being) migrated to Debian Stable. Heck, they might even be getting migrated to Gentoo with locally-built binpkgs; I haven't asked--but the knowledge, skills and experience are there.
But we would have used RHEL, wanted to use RHEL, but the license fees were too high. We needed something like shared per-core licensing for a grand total of...72 cores, letting us run as many VMs as we wanted on those cores. What was offered either wasn't economical, either because the price was too high for the licenses themselves, or because figuring out how to actually do it legally, safely and reliably would be too much of an investment on its own. (I'm not saying it wasn't possible, just that we didn't have the time to look into it, with only 60-70 working hrs/week in aggregate among us.)
I get that we were small change to them, but I would have liked to have offered the coinage.
@Migueldeicaza seems like a really weird hill to die on, given that the sorts of people who pay you money in open source are usually the ones who do so more to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on support than specifically what code they have access to. Why piss off the people who don’t do that anyway, but whose primary value is in the goodwill they generate? Especially as the code is still available anyway, just with more effort than before, if I understand correctly
@sinbad I suspect the answer is crass: the bonus of the entire group that passed this decision is tied to revenue growth and they can’t do that with OSS so they are pulling this.
It is a denial of service on the community. Like paying a 1,000 bill with cents.
@cloudguy@Migueldeicaza lol! As if nobody talked about Oracle being crooks for the past 30 years. Why everyone is talking about RedHat is precisely because they weren’t.
There is a stat somewhere on contributions by employees of big tech, somewhere. Overall, I agree on contributing being more than just putting money up.
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