Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? | Jeff Geerling
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Linux@kbin.social – 32 points – jeffgeerling.com
related article from RHEL: Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream
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It will force a panic registration from people who are using RHEL compatible tools without subscriptions. But in the long term it will prevent the semi-admins from entering the world of redhat. I believe that they exchanged long term goals against immediate profit.
A rhel subscription for a server is $800, you can't do anything with the $350 subscription since it's for physical machine only.
Dunno, there is probably an MBA with a big plan behind it, with "a focus on user experience and added value for our customers" yada yada. Anyway it doesn't feel like home anymore.
How is it on the debian side? Who is running debian servers here?
My immediate response to seeing the announcement was to contact all the IT at where I work and start pushing hard to move from RHEL and RHEL-alikes to Debian where we can and they agreed, so...
It's like a big shake up of all our habits. First banning twitter, then the move from reddit to fediverse, then picking better news sources, then move from rhel to debian. Honestly I'm thinking more and more about how to integrate the tools from the fediverse to the IT and the work environment.
Ok hold up… so, Red Hat is locking sources behind a subscription? Is this not a GPL violation?
As I understand it, no. I could be all wet, but RedHat isn't under any obligation, I don't think, to provide their sources to anybody that wants them, and is perfectly within their rights to only provide them to "customers" under the GPL. They just aren't allowed to withhold them from those same "customers".
But I'm not any sort of expert on opensource licensing.
You still get access to the sources if you get a binary at all, every subscription (even the free dev one) includes them, but if you redistribute the sources and Red Hat finds out, you're not allowed to be a customer anymore according to their agreement.
Scummy as hell but apparently OK, since you have all the GPL rights. This feels like something a newer copyleft license should probably address.... either way, scummy as hell, especially because one of the arguments used by Red Hat people to defend the CentOS Stream change was that you could still build from the source RPMs.
That’s incredibly disheartening to hear. Oracle and IBM really do just destroy everything that’s good in this world, don’t they…
Oof that's a sort of big deal. Geerling's (geerling.guy) well-known in the Ansible world for the Roles he publishes to Ansible Galaxy. This could end up being a lot of work for people in enterprise scenarios if his roles for RHEL stopped receiving support and engineers have to start rolling their own solutions.
I understand and agree with his pov though. I don't see the benefit to walling off access to the RHEL source behind their subscription. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can share some insight
RHEL is going through enshittification.
That's super fair, I was thinking of this as a downstream user, but yeah as a contributor to upstream RHEL it's an annoying barrier, that no other distro has. Heck, with this much good will lost, control of centos should be spun off, otherwise trust that centos will remain available may be too low for people to contribute to it.