Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?

Owl@mander.xyz to Linux@lemmy.ml – 135 points –

I’m curious about what you think on how it will affect the Linux community and distros (especially RHEL based distros like Fedora or Rocky).

137

More detials found here: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream?sc_cid=701f2000000tyBjAAI

Seem more accurate that their public repos will be closed, so now only centos-stream will be public. You will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a paying customer.

Thanks, by reading "RHEL going closed source" first thing I thought is that would violate the GPL license, but the article you linked seems to indicate that's not the case.

CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?

CentOS is basically RHEL without Red Hat commercial stuff, so sources will still be freely available, just not directly from Red Had, am I understanding it correctly?

No, CentOS is no longer a RHEL clone, but a beta version of stuff that goes into RHEL.

undefined> u will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a pa

Their developer plan is free

I can't be the only one who has no real interest in dealing with their developer program just to support their outdated distro.

RHEL hasn't gone closed source, it still complies with the GPL. If they provide you a binary, they must and will continue to provide you with the source code. I feel like this is like when they announced Centos Stream as a "rolling distro", their messaging is awful, and the optics are bad. I feel this is more to stick it to Oracle and unfortunately, Alma and Rocky are just getting caught in the crossfire.

It has me conflicted. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, we need projects like Alma and Rocky.

Yeah, I'm conflicted too. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, fuck IBM.

I'm going to continue running Debian as I did since 2003 or so.

I'm happy for you. Some of us have commercial software that needs a RHEL like distro to run.

supposedly you pay for this software. might as well pay for RHEL too then.

With all the new updates happening around all the Linux peripherals, I wouldnt like to stay behind for the next 2/3 years on Debian

Anything that is old on Debian is even older on RHEL so I don't understand your comment.

Except not everything, as RHEL has selection of software updated to newer versions. Debian just keeps everything old.

Debian has great backports support. And if you need fresher software use nix, flatpak, etc, or run testing or unstable.

You don't have to use stable for the entire duration of debian 12, switch to testing after say about six months, I'm running testing right now (by accident, forgot I was tracking testing and not bookworm/bullseye) only found a tiny bug with libvirtd.

Debian is lovely os.

My immediate thoughts as a fedora user: Fedora is looked at as a bleeding edge testing distro for what eventually goes into red hat. By using fedora, I am sort of a beta tester for ibm, and am in some ways contributing to the improvement of a distribution (red hat) that goes against what I believe a Linux distribution should do. Given that, should I distro hop?

Or is my brain just trying to make me distro hop again?

Edit: spelling

I would never consider Fedora bleeding edge, but that being said, after the Red Hat lawyers forced the removal of H.264 I did end up hopping after 5 very great years with Fedora. If you're up for learning something new NixOS is a lot of fun.

NixOS is actually what I was considering! I like the immutable aspects of it but the setup will require me to find some downtime in order to get started.

That's great to hear! It took me a few evenings wrap my head around it, but now I'm really enjoying it. There's a great community as well!

You have to make up your own mind. Personally the association with IBM or Oracle would put me right off a distro. But you can find evil in all these big companies, so pick your poison.

You aren't the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I'm not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.

Not to revive any lame memes, but have a look at Arch Linux! I've been daily driving it for 10 years. It's way more "updated" than fedora is.

does it have same interface? Fedoras gnome is unmatched (...to me, as far I tested around distros).

Or is there any other equivalent, similar to fedora and its gnome?

Arch doesn't come with an interface, the idea is you build it up from the bare minimum yourself

Wouldn't recommend if you just want a usable desktop os

As for gnome, gnome is gnome you can get it on any distro

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...

You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.

It's nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy...but usually some compromise is required.

Yes, you should. Try something debian based like Mint. Hell, try Arch, which I use btw.

I think it’s time to distro hop again

Go NixOS man it's the one that finally convinced me to ditch windows entirely and stop hopping

Opensuse. If you're used to fedora the learning curve is minimal to make that switch. I used SuSE for years until their Gnome 3 implementation had some issues. I switched to fedora for a couple of years, then switched back to tumbleweed a couple years ago and have been on that happily since.

1 more...

I wouldn't expect it to impact Fedora, but this will probably be significant for Rocky/Alma.

Great, I've got an alma ec2 instance with like 5 different services at work, I wanted to avoid changing it for at least a while =/

Well, users and contributors of Fedora might stop doing said things...

Yup. Transitioning off of fedora for multiple machines next few weeks.

This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There's been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.

IMO that's the main driver behind this change: don't feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.

So then Oracle just gets 1 dev account and pulls the source.

This was my initial thought as well, but I imagine that would violate the terms of their subscription and Red Hat could just revoke their access going forward.

I doubt it would legal to make that against the terms. It GPL code, Oracle is allowed to access it as they please.

Very true for the GPL code, but Red Hat adds code that isn’t GPL to the distro. So your downstream distros would have to cherry pick that code out.

They could still revoke access. The subscription probably says something like "we can revoke access for any reason". Most subscriptions do

True, but what's stopping someone from uploading it anonymously? They have to share the code with customers, but that doesn't mean GPL doesn't apply to non-customers. Anyone working at these companies can download the source code and upload it online.

They didn't even go that far lol. There's still Red Hat branding all over the place in Oracle Linux.

Wait wait, Oracle took someone's stuff and did a lazy half-assed job of slapping Larry's name on it and then shipped it as a product they then sell seven-figure support contracts on?

Well, I do declare.

Absolute L move from them. Atleast it makes the choice easier if future distrohopping urges will haunt my zoom zoom brain.

Some additional information from Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, since many people (including me) are confused about the implications of this:

https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/ https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/

Interestingly, Rocky Linux claims to be largely unaffected by this, while Alma Linux is desperately looking for alternative solutions.

It seems like no one really knows what the implications are, and we will just have to wait and see.

Rocky's reaction seems the same as Alma, current long-term solution is they don't know. A more businessly optimism in the post doesn't really make up for a clear technical plan going forward.

They still give all the code to their customers and as it is still GPLed code, noone can stop redistribution. So I'm wondering who will be the first RHEL customer which runs some "open mirror" of the RHEL codebase.

From what I've read redistributing it is against the EULA. So you could share it once.

How does that restriction not violate the GPL?

It doesn't. The GPL is satisfied as long as they provide you with the source code for the version of RHEL that they distributed to you. But they're not obligated to continue distributing later versions to you.

I'm referring to their further restrictions on redistribution. I.e., why can't the subscriber then redistribute GPL code they received?

They absolutely can, but RHEL Red Hat will likely stop doing business with them if they find out (and thus stop giving them new versions), hence why they would only be able to do this once.

It doesn't seem likely that would be allowed, as it would arguably constitute a restriction on distribution, which the GPL explicitly forbids.

There's no restriction on distribution. You're free to distribute the GPL software you got from Red Hat.

They're under no obligation to ship you other, different software in the future. You're only entitled to get the source for the binaries they distributed to you. If they never give you the next version, you have no right to its source.

This is something for the courts to resolve, but it seems to me that there's a good argument to say that threats of future punishment (explicit or implied) would constitute a "further restriction" under the GPL.

Honestly? I think Ubuntu's userbase is about to get a lot bigger. The larger hosting companies (AWS and Digital Ocean are the two that come to mind immediately) support Ubuntu as a first-class citizen, so once the not-true blue RHEL distros take the hit migrations are going to happen.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Rocky & Alma were easy targets. Next up thumbscrews on systemd!

Could you elaborate, I didn't get the reference.

A term used by M$ in the past to drive competing open standards out of the market.

People use rocky/centos because they don't want to deal with the hassles of licensing while also keeping the door open to an upgrade to RHEL if needed. I think this will be a net positive for Debian and Debian-based distros thanks to enterprise infra switching to Ubuntu which offers this (free use and an upgrade path to full compliance/commercial support.

Them closing up completely undermines their UVP.

Doesn't Canonical hold the updates (also security ones) for days if you don't have the "pro" license?

Someone enlighten me. What are we talking about? The whole distro? Isn't almost all of it GNU stuff under GPL or similar licenses?

Or is it just about some in-house made RH applications and patches done without any collaboration from outside people?

I don't get it how a Linux-based project can go closed-source after ~30 years.

To comply with GPL, RedHat simply has to provide source code to anyone they provide binaries to.

Yea, so why is everyone misrepresenting these news so damn hard? I'd think people who report on Linux would understand the core basics of GPL.

RedHat could just not do business with the RHEL rebuilds and there'd be no obligation to share the source with them.

The source can be open, just not easy to access...send an email and in 30 days they provide it, they are not obligated to have everything available instantly as they do now or provide an infrastructure to make life easy for community projects.

They could also mix in proprietary code to make things more awkward afaik.

I'd bear in mind in-house made applications RH provide include systemd, wayland, pipewire & gnome....as long as your distro and use case don't depend on any of these, there's no need to worry.

I knew it would happened the moment IBM bought them. Those corporate idiots can't comprehend OSS.

Well, I just hope they ARE thinking. Gotta be a good reason -I have no read anything about this- for doing this.

I guess a few people might be looking at other distros now.

They won't say it, but the reason for this is 100% to kill downstream distros based on RHEL. They already effectively killed CentOS, the downstream distro they controlled, by moving it from downstream to upstream. With this change they're now coming for other downstream distros that they don't control, like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Upstream repos like Fedora (and CentOS once it changed to CentOS Stream) will not be affected... for now at least.

I think downstream repos are important to the ecosystem because they give the FOSS community contributors an easy way to test against RHEL-compatible binaries without being encumbered by an RHEL license. IBM seems pretty hellbent on ensuring that people won't be able to do this without agreeing with their license, and as soon as they achieve that I think they'll tighten the screws on their own licensing in ways that aren't to the benefit of anyone but IBM. It seems pretty obvious to me that IBM is making this change because they see some advantage in having absolute control of the licensing terms, and my guess is that their benefit will come at the community's expense. Yes, you can get a free (as in beer) developer account and test using that but now you have to register VMs, keep track of your number of registered systems, and you have to worry about possibly violating the not free (as in freedom) license that you have to agree to in order to access the Red Hat developer program. I think this change will be bad for RHEL in the long term, but time will tell.

I guess we're in a bit of a waiting game then. Too much stuff is tied to RHEL to easily switch for us, but TBH we're starting to see more people wanting Ubuntu (ugg) / debian because ML seems to be there. Also most commercial software I've seen tends to offer .deb and .rpm or just .deb actually so more and more it's RHEL that isn't packaged for - and that's been for years now.

I need to understand... Given its GPL because of the kernel, how could they change the terms of the license suddenly? Doesnt GPL forbid you from replacing it with a different license? How are they managing to get this through?

They're not changing the license that governs the open source code, they're changing who receives the source code directly from them. The GPL requires that if you distribute binaries based on GPL open source code, you also have to distribute the source code as well. If you modify GPL'd source code and produce and distribute binaries using that modified code then you also have to distribute the modified source code as well. However, the important point is to who the GPL requires them to distribute the source code. The actual requirement in the GPL is that you have to distribute source code to the same people that you distribute binaries. You're not required to distribute source code to anyone and everyone.

For Red Hat's enterprise customers, they'll still have access to the source code that makes up the distro. Source code packages will still be a thing and licensed RHEL customers (including the free-as-in-beer developer license) will still be able to install source packages. Red Hat cannot do otherwise as it would put them in contravention of the GPL license. What is changing is that Red Hat is no longer publishing the same source code publicly. They used to do that on git.centos.org but have now stopped. The general flow of code changes used to work something like this:

Fedora (and now CentOS Stream) -> RHEL -> git.centos.org -> downstream distros (Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, formerly CentOS before it become CentOS Stream)

By breaking the link at git.centos.org, Red Hat makes it harder for downstream distros to create versions that are one-for-one binary-compatible with corresponding RHEL versions. Doesn't mean it's impossible, and certainly both AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux have put out statements saying that they will work around the problem and continue as per usual.

Hopefully this simply becomes the new status quo. Downstream RHEL-compatible distros have a harder time of it because they have to reverse-engineer each RHEL build to some extent rather than receiving the exact updates directly from Red Hat themselves. However I do wonder whether this is IBM / Red Hat's first step toward an attempt to kill downstream distros, and if there are changes coming to the Red Hat license that make it less free-as-in-freedom. I hope that's not the case because at that point things become very contentious and there will likely be litigation as to whether Red Hat can legally lock down what mostly amounts to a curation of open source software.

Thanks. So theyre not closing it completely just "hiding it" kind of, and making it harder to access it. I wonder what Linus has to say about this... Or Stallman

I'm newish to Fedora and admit I don't understand the whole developer/governance structure of it vs RHEL, but the news did make me wonder about continuing to use Fedora.

Reading some comments here, maybe it's a non-issue. Guess I'll have to dig more.

It's a complete non-issue. Sensationalist headlines are so easy to make about this.

Anybody who has a FREE developer account can access the source code.

Fellow Fedora user here. I find this is a little concerning, but overall, I'm not too worried. Fedora is their test bed for stuff, although it is a very stable, well maintained test bed.

RHEL technically isn't going "closed source", the source code will just be paywalled now. Despite being a dick move from RedHat, it is perfectly legal to do under GPLv2, as far as I understand anyways...

They've been essentially read-only for years, in my experience. It's stupid to go closed source, but they weren't easy to work with to get things fixed before now either.

Aren’t there poison pill clauses in a lot of OSS licenses that prevent moves like this? Could they face legal repercussions?

Technically none of the open source licenses require you to publish the source to everyone. They just require you to publish the source to the same people who get binaries from you.

But they are free to redistribute it again if I understand it correctly

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.

anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be.

Used to be?

This has been coming for a long time.

Great response to the discussion, as this 2012 article lays our their path many years ago. Lots of very economically valid reasons for changing, and it seems to have worked even if it is a shame to see. It makes me wonder if the changing economy is going to put more pressure on other favorites to monitize or fail. I say this given that volunteers are showing a decline so without people spending free time, then open-source software will face further challenges.

I don't want to digress too much, but I can't help but juxtapose the slow change and monetization RH has done very well as compared to the idiocy that Reddit is doing.

Big Blue asserting their dominance. Unfortunately at the cost of some very fantastic community projects.

Ehh, well it's something interesting. I've never really ever used RHEL myself on any of my servers. I do know some people that might be impacted.

As a strictly desktop/personal Linux user, could someone enlighten me: What advantage (if any) does RHEL have over Ubuntu Pro at this point?

4 more...

Have they given a reason? The blog post doesn't list one.

Reduce effort. They say there’s duplication between hosting RHEL and Centos, so they’ll just do Centos. Since Redhat becomes Centos anyway it seems neither here nor there.

They aren't going closed source though? Just not providing source to everyone. But everyone who gets binaries from them still gets access to the source code. Unless I'm missing something?

I am worried about the impact it will have on clone distros like Alma linux.
The code can still be accessed from a free developer account, but I'm not sure about the implications it will have on the legalities and licences.

I was there at nearly the beginning with Redhat 1 and kernel series 1.1.x and 1.2.x series. Redhat died when IBM bought them. My company has finally completely moved away - I pushed very strongly to dump RHAT - all Debian and FreeBSD now.

I'm not necessarily about to start distro hopping again, I don't want my machine out for to long, but I'll definitely have my eye on how this goes

(I use fedora BTW)

They can't go closed source. They aren't going closed source. It's not allowed under the GPL, so not sure what you mean by this.

Interestingly, I've been trying to push my HPC customers towards SLES and Ubuntu LTS. SLES has better extended support for minor releases (that doesn't cost an arm and a leg), and Ubuntu's LTS... for obvious reasons.

How has Cannonical support been recently? I used Ubuntu Server for a while, but never really needed to use my support contract, but my recollection is that it was fairly light.

Wtf?! It's going closed source?

I hate how profit hungry corps will do anything in their power to attack the open source movement. Because it's completely out of their control.

I guess "torrenting a Linux distro" will have a completely new meaning 😁

The discussion on the LWN post gives some insight into why this is probably happening. Most likely due to Rocky/Alma not contributing upstream while benefiting from Red Hat's work.

@BuboScandiacus Hm. As far as I know it's not Fedora which is based on RHEL but rather RHEL which is based on Fedora?

Fedora is upstream. CentOS Stream is fed from that. RHEL is fed from that.

RHEL (Stable) <- CentOS Stream (Dev Test Bed, basically RHEL Next) <- Fedora (Cutting Edge)

It seems like what I've read from GPLv2 and GPLv3 as well as RH's EULAs, contrary to some people here, Red Hat technically didn't violate the GPL, but they are already not following the spirits of GPL and free software/open source (People expect free/open source software as in they can easily find the source publicly accessible in GitHub, GitLab, CodeBerg, or whatever Git, Subversion,... repos of your company or organization). And I think they don't believe in free marketing either, many other companies are aware that people are pirating their softwares, or compiling the software themselves (if it's open source) and give them as if it's from them for free; especially when you're dominating a market segment, it can make people exposed and relying on your softwares, so that anyone will mandate to use your softwares because it's "industry standards".