I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It's only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that's what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it's time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn't go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal... is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about "hey we are considering this, what do y'all think?". Well, they're certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it's a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like "does anyone even use this" or "how reliable is this feature" can help them prioritize their efforts.
I'll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there's problems. I'm sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points... or you think I'm on Red Hat's payroll (I'm not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I'm a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I'm not planning to change that anytime soon.
Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I'm honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I've used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
I think it will be fine, but I'd personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.
This is the way
I use Arch btw
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
You might not be worried for the code, but the project is a different thing. Red Hat has done some serious damage to its image (centos stream, lay off with record profits, lay off of fedora program manager, nasty circumvention of common open source practices). This will affect fedora. I am a long time debian user, but I often suggest fedora as distro for newcomers. I am not doing it again, and I believe many won't do as well.
At this point it is difficult to trust red hat on their long term commitments. At work we still use rhel, because all our sys admins are used to it, we have licenses, have been using it for ages. So there will not be a big impact for rhel on existing contracts. But on the future, I will actively try to persuade my whole department at least to move out. It is not easy for us, it will require work, but on long term I do not trust red hat/ibm.
Open source market is a difficult market for IBM's MBAs. Because trust is more important than money. This ibm problem to understand open source world has always existed. And the recent actions proves they haven't learned yet. It is a pity that rhel and fedora are the only victims here
just
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free,
...for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Many people gave up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It's always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
It's amazing how a 130-odd year-old company watched how apple put its ][ in front of school kids to great success, and then intentionally stops making it easy to run EL when faced with the same opportunity. But, if you've read cringely, you'll get the impression that IBM has been sucking for decades, grabbing anything that floats and standing on its head to remain afloat until that thing suffocates.
As a long-time RH customer, it's hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it's been hobbled and impaired so much. Really, the only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I'm not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn't being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Non free firmware specifically, since it's a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don't have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server.
Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don't bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk!
I don't run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I've switched from elogind to seatd. I'd like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven't.
I'll stop now. So /rant
Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs.
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open.
So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I'm lazy. Fedora was the only 'just works' option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn't actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn't get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, 'just worked' in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don't plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Raspberry Pi OS has the same advantage as macOS - both OSes are meant to be run on specific hardware, so everything should just work. ;)
Since you've been playing with RPi, have you tried Alpine Linux?
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I've stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall 'testing' it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn't seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven't kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
I suffer with systemd
What's the problem?
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don't know much about KDE at all.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn't popular enough to be forked.
I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don't consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it's not.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan...but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
LGPL, less user freedom, more room to entangle with proprietary crapware.
Firmware is software.
Firmware is software.
Debatable.
Example 1: The microcode hardwired on your CPU (the one before you upload an updated one into it on every boot). Is it software if it's physically on the chip?
Example 2: Let's say you have some PCIe card which has a small FPGA chip on the board to handle say some signaling. Is the FPGA circuity software?
I don't have answers to these. I'm saying the lines are blurred when you look closely what's software, what's firmware and what's hardware.
Fair point...but it seems the Debian stuff being included in their images is all software.
Hey Zucca, I've not been around fgo much since around the time otw vanished but remember you from there and I'm still a happy portage user.
I sometimes miss OTW too. But at least there's Other Things Open Source -subforum where general hardware talk is also fine. There have been few people now trying to create the very minimal RH -free Gentoo installation. I have hopes those people will eventually publish their works as profiles on their overlays.
OTW died because world politic topics, imo. I hate when it ruins things.
If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.
Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.
I don't doubt that relying on Red Hat's code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Nobody's "relying" on Red Hat. You guys are being insanely dramatic. It's FOSS software. If Red Hat loses their minds, systemd will just be forked, or there will be a discussion on where to move to next.
Good god.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn't give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat's recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn't help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn't be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I've even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat's future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it's foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
Yes, and? If those things went closed source tomorrow, the previously open source would not disappear. People could continue to build on it.
Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
There was a strong community discussion because a lot of people didn't like systemd. After a public democratic decision making process, a decision was made. If something significant happens, another discussion will happen. I don't understand why you're talking about disagreements as if they're the end of the world. "Publically painful"? What does that mean? Debian isn't a politican. Lennart issuing 'wake-up calls' to people is just him being a dipshit. It means nothing for Linux and it's usability.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
Cool, the system is working as intended. Debian can swap Red Hat's technologies for the other ones. Do you think that it's not possible to run systemd free Debian, or use KDE instead of GNOME?
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Yes. The decades of work on the kernel will not magically disappear, and people can continue that work. A new one wouldn't be necessary. Linus barely writes the majority of the kernel code any more. The kernel has shit loads of developers working on it regularly.
This is just FUD bullshit written by someone who doesn't understand how Linux has been working for the past decade.
I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It's well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted:
*
IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I'm not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you're a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you're making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.
stable is not the only debian release.
Yes, and?
I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don't see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
Not remotely.
Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.
Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little "cloned distro + support" business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what's basically (not entirely) a loophole.
The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I've seen this perspective. It's the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?
Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).
Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.
If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).
There's no way this change stops Oracle, though. Oracle will continue doing whatever they want and the consumers can abandon hope, all ye who enter into contracts with Oracle. (The fact that this is all Rocky and Alma and nobody was talking about going to Oracle after Red Hat killed CentOS should be a sign.)
Anyway point is, Red Hat can cry about Rocky and Alma all they like but if those two had the same institutional backing as Oracle they'd shut up quick. They just think they can get away with preventing small fries from exercising their rights under the GPL.
Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux for example.
I think we haven't seen this perspective is because it's not a good take on things. After IBM bought RH they killed CentOS which was bug compatible with RHEL. A lot of devs used CentOS to be able to easily ensure compatability with RHEL. RH replaced CentOS with CentOS stream which is not bug compatible with RHEL. The community was able to move past this blunder thanks to Rocky and ALMA "rebuilding" RHEL in the spirit of the old CentOS.
Now RH has killed off the ability for the community to build a free bug compatible distro and instead want devs to register for 16 (free) RHEL testing licenses. No other major distro that I know of does this.
I'm not a dev but it seems like a good way to lose support for your platform. If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
That model just does not work. For the engineering that goes into RedHat (and all the contributions back to the community they send), they just don't make enough for that to happen. Everyone just wants to shrug this off as "Oh IBM has lots of money so that's not a problem". This "make it free and charge for support" model almost never works for FOSS yet so many people want to believe it does. On an enterprise level, it just doesn't. People who want to use an enterprise distro of Linux for free also likely don't want to pay for support either, instead wanting to support it themselves. Which is all well and good but that doesn't account for the fact RHEL does all the engineering, all the building, all the testing, everything, and then puts that release up for use. All of that has to be covered somehow.
There was never any promise that you'd always be able to create a "bug compatible distro". Ever. The GPL does not cover future releases or updates and never has, and even implying that it should sets a dangerous precedent of people being entitled to what you haven't even created yet.
Rather than hearing the emotional takes from people that want to turn this into "RedHat vs the Linux Community", I strongly suggest you listen to LinuxUnplugged: https://linuxunplugged.com/517?t=506.
RedHat is still contributing everything upstream, and CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. You have full access to the source of whatever you buy.
The only thing that has changed here is that the loophole that Alma and Rocky were using to create a RHEL clone and then offer support for it (Which is literally RedHat's own business model) is gone. Those two are throwing a tantrum because they got to set up a nice easy business model where they literally did nothing more than clone RHEL and then offer support for it and that free lunch is over. That's it. They don't contribute back to RHEL, they don't do anything to help development. They sold themselves as the "free" or "cheaper" alternative and now they're getting burned for building their entire business of the work done by RHEL.
Everything else in this story is noise, drama, and unnecessary emotion.
One of the best comments on it that I've seen. Kudos to you.
Redhat develops a ton and probably wouldn't care about a free downstream done by the community but taking their hard work and doing nothing except "support" is just cannibalizing RHEL. Don't blame them honestly.
Listening to the podcast at the moment, it's grim. They have a Red Hat employee as the special guest and just agree 100% with the company line. I think I'm meant to feel sorry for poor little Red Hat & IBM being taken advantage of but it just all feels very silly. I'm gonna have to turn it off shortly but so far it feels like a paid advert for Red Hat. Nothing but positivity for Red Hat and being pretty nasty about anyone who doesn't 100% agree with Red Hat.
Wow, that's a weird take. The host brings up several points on the other side too, and the Red Hat employee even acknowledges some shortcomings, but all you really heard was "RedHat good everyone else bad" when you listened to that?
I mean, you want multiple perspectives, you need to include someone who has a stake in both. The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side, does it not make sense to bring in someone from RedHat? Why are they automatically just "company yes men"?
How can you ever have any kind of nuance or understanding of the other side if you just view it black and white like that? I've read and understood the claims from people that are upset with Red Hat, and I kind of get it, but I also think these people don't really understand the value of what it is they're using. Under-appreciating what you get for "free" is a very, very common sentiment among FOSS users (and I'm no exception, I'm sure I'm guilty of it too). But the facts here are simple; no one is really "losing" anything here except Rocky and Alma, and they should not have built their business model on basically taking de-branded RHEL and selling support for it directly.
Like I said, Fedora is not going anywhere, CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. If you are a Red Hat customer, the source code of whatever you run is always fully available.
There is literally nothing being lost by anyone except those who wanted to use Rocky/Alma as a perfect 1:1 clone of RHEL without contributing a single penny back to RedHat. Yet somehow, the narrative has been changed into "Redhat is being evil and violating the spirit of open source and blah blah blah" and somehow, conveniently, no one has noticed that all of the narrative seems to only benefit/support Rocky and Alma? No one finds that the least bit suspicious?
Whether or not RedHat is going to suddenly claw back a bunch of business from all these people that were using "free" RHEL, that I highly doubt. As far as a move to try to regain perceived losses, I doubt RedHat is going to have any success with that, if that's their intention. But see, I can have the opinion that they're removing loopholes for competitors who add absolutely nothing (whether monetary or code contributions) but take and "resell", and I can also have the opinion that it's probably not going to change the bottom line much because people who were used to getting "RHEL" for "free" aren't going to start paying for RHEL, they're just going to go elsewhere.
TBF someone did say stream 'wasn't a great name' which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.
If: "The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side" as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat's payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don't want employees debating this stuff.
If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn't seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating "freeloaders".
I've been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I'm happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past....but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn't want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.
Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn't often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.
Hm, then respectfully, if it's not possible for a RedHat employee to be anything more than an advertisement and we're judging the number of people on either side to be the indicator of truth, then I guess there's nothing productive for you and I to discuss. I didn't hear anything that sounded like rationalization or excuses from the RedHat guy.
Something people were getting for free is no longer free. Those people will always outnumber anyone who has a different perspective on the situation. Which is why I said that FOSS enthusiasts have a tendency not to understand or appreciate what they're getting for "free" and everyone wants to treat open source like it's entirely powered by community and spirit and "money" or "compensation" or "economics" don't really mean anything because we shrug it aside.
Everyone wants to demonize the big bad corporate IBM but somehow we're totally happy looking the other way while Rocky Linux happily clones the product and sells support contracts to NASA that should rightfully go to RedHat, no matter how much money RedHat makes.
I think RedHat has provided tons of alternatives and compromises that don't involve buying RHEL. Again, I don't think this decision is going to convert anyone to a paid customer.
It's entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn't agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what 'the entire linux community' thinks about this.
For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don't know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the 'entire linux community' are not happy it's not great journalism.
"Now we've heard Red Hat's version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on"
I've not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing....but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I'm confortable dismissing them.
If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I'd want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.
I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.
If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.
Red Hat controls Fedora, anyone saying Fedora is independent is just spouting nonsense.
I've been on Fedora all this time because I loved Red Hat. Oh, how wrong I was.
Fedora is community owned, it's just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don't really think there's a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
Single users really don't need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it's not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?
If you're a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.
I've broken my install so much that I can have everything set up in 15 min on a new machine. I just wish I didn't have to bother or know that.
Same here, of course. But now it is comforting to know that even if it breaks, we won't be down for long. :-)
Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole "Opt-out" telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and "open" nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.
super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.
Making and arguing for "Opt-out only" telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.
But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I've done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.
To be honest, very worried. I used Fedora as my main for about a decade but these days, I just don't care for it anymore, and every piece of news that comes out about IBM and Red Hat makes me even more worried about the future. Sure, it's ostensibly community-driven, but Red Hat has historically been very involved with it.
Hopefully I'm wrong, and I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong, but Arch and Debian seem to have the best chances at a good future these days.
I don't give a shit about fedora but I'm very worried about the future of Linux as a whole, red hat has an undisputable importance in the Linux ecossistem and these movements maybe are a signal that IBM don't give a fuck about that
It inspired me to move on. I'm running OpenSUSE now. I don't really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I'm out.
I switched after getting into a boot stuck after an update. Don't regret it until now.
By default you can always roll back to the last working version from boot menu.
Only a little. The only thing I'm really worried about is IBM (maybe secretly) forcing Red Hat to reduce or cut its involvement with Fedora to save money. Without Red Hat's help, Fedora might struggle, but I don't think it will die or be corrupted as a result of whatever's going on.
Also, while I don't have the full picture, I heard that the whole "closed source" thing was an exaggeration in the first place. So maybe there isn't really much to worry about. We'll just have to see of course. I like Fedora a lot, but I can just switch if I need to, so I'm not really letting this worry me.
When kernel-0.96 came public, i checked it out on my Amiga as it was released for Motorola chips as m68k .. and still is :)
Then RedHat came with their first distro, so i had it running on a Motorola 68060 for some time.
It was the swap from i386 to i686 and later, with Vesa local bus, my Amiga lost the performance race.
Then, a good friend gifted me an i686 PC. WindowsXP was on it and boah, what a crazy shit that was.
Filenames and libraries had stupid names and in a file hirarchy, everything was just dumb there, so installed RedHat on that and since then it was all good.
Fedora came, RedHat closed their enterprise buisness sector and then we had Fedora.
Up until doday im using it and enjoy the community, wich has a very scientific and innovative spirit.
Fedora was always one of those distros, going new ways on a stable and solid base, thanks to RedHat.
Even if RedHat would drop out completely with their Fedora support - wich will never happen - Fedora would be mature enuff to survive.
Should Fedora nontheless go for another path wich im not happy with, ill change, but it does not look like that
So nope, im not worried a single bit^^
IDK, I don't use Fedora anymore and all the redhat problems lol using RPM sounds meh
I'm choosing to divest and look for more opportunities to help community ran distros to better fill that niche. Maybe NixOS or Guix as system os and rke2 and flatpak for the rest of services and apps.
If the time comes, that Fedora doesn't fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.
I don't care about it at all. If you want freedom from corporations, use community owned distros.
i use arch btw
Red Hat going full IBM mode, Fedora implementing telemetry.
As someone who hasn’t really been following, what anti-user decisions are those?
I don’t really see them as anti-user, in the sense that if you are a subscriber your position has never changed and they are happy to provide support in exchange for money. They do restrict your ability to redistribute (they threaten to cancel your subscription) which I am not a fan of.
Fedora is also looking at adding telemetry. They are calling it opt-in but also defaulting the checkbox to “on”, at least in discussions.
You know what's funny? Most of the time, when something asks me to opt in for telemetry, I strongly consider doing so, then look into what's collected and end up deciding I'm okay with it.
But when I have to opt out, or the default is selected to opt in, I just lose trust entirely.
And I'll jump through hoops to block anything I can't replace that doesn't even ask.
Like, I totally understand why some telemetry is necessary for continued development. I'm down with that. But the shadier it is, the less willing I am to allow it.
@shapis
I'm gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don't want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I'm at least paying enough attention to what's going on that if they do something I see as to far I'll switch
Still not sure what too though
I don't see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That's on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn't I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it's not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn't I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I've almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it's just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that's just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say "opt out" it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
Not worried at all, I've moved on many years ago.
I consider it dead and am thankful that I don't use it.
I think it's too big to fail, but it killed personally interest for me for some time.
Not at all. There are many many projects out there which should be killed anyway. Just stop using them.
Personally, at this point I don't fully understand why someone would choose to use Fedora over something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's such a fantastic, rolling-release distro, that's super stable, easy to work with, has some amazing tools to work with it for more experienced users (YaST), and now it also means you aren't involving yourself in the chain-of-FUD that is arising due to RHEL's incompetence.
I was using Fedora because I needed Appgate for work, and a Mullvad rpm was a bonus. Neither of those are compatible with openSUSE, so I'm back on Arch (btw). Tumbleweed was my first distro, and I'm always looking for an excuse to go back.
I need to use fedora because it's the near OS with bleeding edge, aside from RHEL that I work daily. Just matter of convenient. I don't know, SUSE/OpenSUSE seems not for me.
Very
I am more worried about them dropping packages to push users to use flatpaks.
I'm conflicted on this. I 100% think CLI applications should remain as packages but Flatpak IMO is superior for GUI. It just has a lot of "step in the right direction" sorts of things that address some of Linux's faults.
The big two positives for me are:
Makes it easier for developers to publish their own software and reach many distros at once. This has really helped with software availability and updates.
Sandboxing (although not perfect and Flatseal is kind of essential here, I hope this gets rolled into software centers or something).
I am on Fedora Silverblue and the concept of a base OS + Flatpaks just feels right for workstations. OCI containers (podman/docker/distrobox) as a bonus for development environments without borking your host.
But with this recent Fedora news (I know nothing has changed YET but I am just sussed out tbh), I am considering switching to OpenSUSE Aeon/Kalpa.
Your 2 big positives are stuff I agree with wholeheartedly. But I'm still holding out on using flatpak because it feels like an incomplete solution still. There's many things with it I could work around, definitely, but it feels annoying and with NixOS I don't have to worry about those issues because stuff just works for me.
As for FS, I wanted to love it, but doing some stuff with it is annoying. I wish it let you install stuff with dnf to /usr/local (like how it is on bsds or also macs with brew iirc).
Organizing my thoughs: I would love a future where flatpak just works, the sandboxing is nice and all you need is to click "yes" or "no" when an app wants/needs something, where you don't even need to use your distro's package manager (or you can't even use it because the distro is immutable and it updates on its own), but we're not yet there. Installing fonts on FS was a nightmare, and I had to layer stuff like powertop and other stuff I don't remember right now. Also flatpak isn't yet a good solution for development with VScode or similar stuff.
Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.
I am not conceded but keeping an eye in things.
My needs for a work station and my needs for a server are different. For a work station it needs to work without getting in my way, and my metric to compare it to is Windows.
Does it crash?
Does it force me to use a (Microsoft) account?
Can I use it and install it offline?
Does my software work?
So far their decisions do not impact these questions for me, nor change the answers to them.
Their decisions have impacted my servers though, and I am waiting on Alma to see how they move forward. Sticking with them so long as its binary compatible with another distro. But if they can't do that I'll migrate over to Debain for the stability.
Desktop, I feel I would need to go into the weeds more than want to, to get arch configure like Fedora, or to move back to a Debain base OS and get my usability back.
Not really
Fedora is Red Hat's upstream, and about 30% of contribution comes from Red Hat. It is a community project after all.
I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It's only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that's what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it's time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn't go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal... is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about "hey we are considering this, what do y'all think?". Well, they're certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it's a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like "does anyone even use this" or "how reliable is this feature" can help them prioritize their efforts.
I'll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there's problems. I'm sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points... or you think I'm on Red Hat's payroll (I'm not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I'm a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I'm not planning to change that anytime soon.
Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I'm honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I've used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
I think it will be fine, but I'd personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.
This is the way
I use Arch btw
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
You might not be worried for the code, but the project is a different thing. Red Hat has done some serious damage to its image (centos stream, lay off with record profits, lay off of fedora program manager, nasty circumvention of common open source practices). This will affect fedora. I am a long time debian user, but I often suggest fedora as distro for newcomers. I am not doing it again, and I believe many won't do as well.
At this point it is difficult to trust red hat on their long term commitments. At work we still use rhel, because all our sys admins are used to it, we have licenses, have been using it for ages. So there will not be a big impact for rhel on existing contracts. But on the future, I will actively try to persuade my whole department at least to move out. It is not easy for us, it will require work, but on long term I do not trust red hat/ibm.
Open source market is a difficult market for IBM's MBAs. Because trust is more important than money. This ibm problem to understand open source world has always existed. And the recent actions proves they haven't learned yet. It is a pity that rhel and fedora are the only victims here
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
...for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Many people gave up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It's always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
It's amazing how a 130-odd year-old company watched how apple put its ][ in front of school kids to great success, and then intentionally stops making it easy to run EL when faced with the same opportunity. But, if you've read cringely, you'll get the impression that IBM has been sucking for decades, grabbing anything that floats and standing on its head to remain afloat until that thing suffocates.
As a long-time RH customer, it's hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it's been hobbled and impaired so much. Really, the only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I'm not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn't being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Non free firmware specifically, since it's a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don't have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don't bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don't run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I've switched from elogind to seatd. I'd like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven't.
I'll stop now. So /rant
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open. So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I'm lazy. Fedora was the only 'just works' option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn't actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn't get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, 'just worked' in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don't plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Raspberry Pi OS has the same advantage as macOS - both OSes are meant to be run on specific hardware, so everything should just work. ;)
Since you've been playing with RPi, have you tried Alpine Linux?
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I've stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall 'testing' it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn't seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven't kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
What's the problem?
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don't know much about KDE at all.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn't popular enough to be forked.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don't consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it's not.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan...but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
LGPL, less user freedom, more room to entangle with proprietary crapware.
Firmware is software.
Debatable.
Example 1: The microcode hardwired on your CPU (the one before you upload an updated one into it on every boot). Is it software if it's physically on the chip?
Example 2: Let's say you have some PCIe card which has a small FPGA chip on the board to handle say some signaling. Is the FPGA circuity software?
I don't have answers to these. I'm saying the lines are blurred when you look closely what's software, what's firmware and what's hardware.
Fair point...but it seems the Debian stuff being included in their images is all software.
Hey Zucca, I've not been around fgo much since around the time otw vanished but remember you from there and I'm still a happy portage user.
I sometimes miss OTW too. But at least there's Other Things Open Source -subforum where general hardware talk is also fine. There have been few people now trying to create the very minimal RH -free Gentoo installation. I have hopes those people will eventually publish their works as profiles on their overlays.
OTW died because world politic topics, imo. I hate when it ruins things.
If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.
Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.
I don't doubt that relying on Red Hat's code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Nobody's "relying" on Red Hat. You guys are being insanely dramatic. It's FOSS software. If Red Hat loses their minds, systemd will just be forked, or there will be a discussion on where to move to next.
Good god.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn't give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat's recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn't help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn't be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I've even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat's future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it's foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Yes, and? If those things went closed source tomorrow, the previously open source would not disappear. People could continue to build on it.
There was a strong community discussion because a lot of people didn't like systemd. After a public democratic decision making process, a decision was made. If something significant happens, another discussion will happen. I don't understand why you're talking about disagreements as if they're the end of the world. "Publically painful"? What does that mean? Debian isn't a politican. Lennart issuing 'wake-up calls' to people is just him being a dipshit. It means nothing for Linux and it's usability.
Cool, the system is working as intended. Debian can swap Red Hat's technologies for the other ones. Do you think that it's not possible to run systemd free Debian, or use KDE instead of GNOME?
Yes. The decades of work on the kernel will not magically disappear, and people can continue that work. A new one wouldn't be necessary. Linus barely writes the majority of the kernel code any more. The kernel has shit loads of developers working on it regularly.
This is just FUD bullshit written by someone who doesn't understand how Linux has been working for the past decade.
I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It's well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I'm not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you're a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you're making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.
stableis not the only debian release.Yes, and?
I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don't see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
Not remotely.
Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.
Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little "cloned distro + support" business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what's basically (not entirely) a loophole.
The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I've seen this perspective. It's the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?
Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).
Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.
If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).
There's no way this change stops Oracle, though. Oracle will continue doing whatever they want and the consumers can abandon hope, all ye who enter into contracts with Oracle. (The fact that this is all Rocky and Alma and nobody was talking about going to Oracle after Red Hat killed CentOS should be a sign.)
Anyway point is, Red Hat can cry about Rocky and Alma all they like but if those two had the same institutional backing as Oracle they'd shut up quick. They just think they can get away with preventing small fries from exercising their rights under the GPL.
Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux for example.
I think we haven't seen this perspective is because it's not a good take on things. After IBM bought RH they killed CentOS which was bug compatible with RHEL. A lot of devs used CentOS to be able to easily ensure compatability with RHEL. RH replaced CentOS with CentOS stream which is not bug compatible with RHEL. The community was able to move past this blunder thanks to Rocky and ALMA "rebuilding" RHEL in the spirit of the old CentOS.
Now RH has killed off the ability for the community to build a free bug compatible distro and instead want devs to register for 16 (free) RHEL testing licenses. No other major distro that I know of does this.
I'm not a dev but it seems like a good way to lose support for your platform. If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
That model just does not work. For the engineering that goes into RedHat (and all the contributions back to the community they send), they just don't make enough for that to happen. Everyone just wants to shrug this off as "Oh IBM has lots of money so that's not a problem". This "make it free and charge for support" model almost never works for FOSS yet so many people want to believe it does. On an enterprise level, it just doesn't. People who want to use an enterprise distro of Linux for free also likely don't want to pay for support either, instead wanting to support it themselves. Which is all well and good but that doesn't account for the fact RHEL does all the engineering, all the building, all the testing, everything, and then puts that release up for use. All of that has to be covered somehow.
There was never any promise that you'd always be able to create a "bug compatible distro". Ever. The GPL does not cover future releases or updates and never has, and even implying that it should sets a dangerous precedent of people being entitled to what you haven't even created yet.
Rather than hearing the emotional takes from people that want to turn this into "RedHat vs the Linux Community", I strongly suggest you listen to LinuxUnplugged: https://linuxunplugged.com/517?t=506.
RedHat is still contributing everything upstream, and CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. You have full access to the source of whatever you buy.
The only thing that has changed here is that the loophole that Alma and Rocky were using to create a RHEL clone and then offer support for it (Which is literally RedHat's own business model) is gone. Those two are throwing a tantrum because they got to set up a nice easy business model where they literally did nothing more than clone RHEL and then offer support for it and that free lunch is over. That's it. They don't contribute back to RHEL, they don't do anything to help development. They sold themselves as the "free" or "cheaper" alternative and now they're getting burned for building their entire business of the work done by RHEL.
Everything else in this story is noise, drama, and unnecessary emotion.
One of the best comments on it that I've seen. Kudos to you.
Redhat develops a ton and probably wouldn't care about a free downstream done by the community but taking their hard work and doing nothing except "support" is just cannibalizing RHEL. Don't blame them honestly.
Listening to the podcast at the moment, it's grim. They have a Red Hat employee as the special guest and just agree 100% with the company line. I think I'm meant to feel sorry for poor little Red Hat & IBM being taken advantage of but it just all feels very silly. I'm gonna have to turn it off shortly but so far it feels like a paid advert for Red Hat. Nothing but positivity for Red Hat and being pretty nasty about anyone who doesn't 100% agree with Red Hat.
Wow, that's a weird take. The host brings up several points on the other side too, and the Red Hat employee even acknowledges some shortcomings, but all you really heard was "RedHat good everyone else bad" when you listened to that?
I mean, you want multiple perspectives, you need to include someone who has a stake in both. The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side, does it not make sense to bring in someone from RedHat? Why are they automatically just "company yes men"?
How can you ever have any kind of nuance or understanding of the other side if you just view it black and white like that? I've read and understood the claims from people that are upset with Red Hat, and I kind of get it, but I also think these people don't really understand the value of what it is they're using. Under-appreciating what you get for "free" is a very, very common sentiment among FOSS users (and I'm no exception, I'm sure I'm guilty of it too). But the facts here are simple; no one is really "losing" anything here except Rocky and Alma, and they should not have built their business model on basically taking de-branded RHEL and selling support for it directly.
Like I said, Fedora is not going anywhere, CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. If you are a Red Hat customer, the source code of whatever you run is always fully available. There is literally nothing being lost by anyone except those who wanted to use Rocky/Alma as a perfect 1:1 clone of RHEL without contributing a single penny back to RedHat. Yet somehow, the narrative has been changed into "Redhat is being evil and violating the spirit of open source and blah blah blah" and somehow, conveniently, no one has noticed that all of the narrative seems to only benefit/support Rocky and Alma? No one finds that the least bit suspicious?
Whether or not RedHat is going to suddenly claw back a bunch of business from all these people that were using "free" RHEL, that I highly doubt. As far as a move to try to regain perceived losses, I doubt RedHat is going to have any success with that, if that's their intention. But see, I can have the opinion that they're removing loopholes for competitors who add absolutely nothing (whether monetary or code contributions) but take and "resell", and I can also have the opinion that it's probably not going to change the bottom line much because people who were used to getting "RHEL" for "free" aren't going to start paying for RHEL, they're just going to go elsewhere.
TBF someone did say stream 'wasn't a great name' which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.
If: "The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side" as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat's payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don't want employees debating this stuff.
If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn't seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating "freeloaders".
I've been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I'm happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past....but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn't want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.
Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn't often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8
In light of the community response to the Red Hat situation that podcast really did feel like a marketing piece from Red Hat.
Things are getting entertaining though as Oracle have indeed, as hoped, stepped up to question Red Hat's moral ethics 😂 https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/
Hm, then respectfully, if it's not possible for a RedHat employee to be anything more than an advertisement and we're judging the number of people on either side to be the indicator of truth, then I guess there's nothing productive for you and I to discuss. I didn't hear anything that sounded like rationalization or excuses from the RedHat guy.
Something people were getting for free is no longer free. Those people will always outnumber anyone who has a different perspective on the situation. Which is why I said that FOSS enthusiasts have a tendency not to understand or appreciate what they're getting for "free" and everyone wants to treat open source like it's entirely powered by community and spirit and "money" or "compensation" or "economics" don't really mean anything because we shrug it aside.
Everyone wants to demonize the big bad corporate IBM but somehow we're totally happy looking the other way while Rocky Linux happily clones the product and sells support contracts to NASA that should rightfully go to RedHat, no matter how much money RedHat makes.
I think RedHat has provided tons of alternatives and compromises that don't involve buying RHEL. Again, I don't think this decision is going to convert anyone to a paid customer.
It's entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn't agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what 'the entire linux community' thinks about this.
For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don't know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the 'entire linux community' are not happy it's not great journalism.
"Now we've heard Red Hat's version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on"
I've not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing....but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I'm confortable dismissing them.
If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I'd want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.
I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.
If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
Red Hat controls Fedora, anyone saying Fedora is independent is just spouting nonsense.
I've been on Fedora all this time because I loved Red Hat. Oh, how wrong I was.
Fedora is community owned, it's just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don't really think there's a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
Single users really don't need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it's not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?
If you're a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.
I've broken my install so much that I can have everything set up in 15 min on a new machine. I just wish I didn't have to bother or know that.
Same here, of course. But now it is comforting to know that even if it breaks, we won't be down for long. :-)
Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole "Opt-out" telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and "open" nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.
super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.
Making and arguing for "Opt-out only" telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.
But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I've done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.
To be honest, very worried. I used Fedora as my main for about a decade but these days, I just don't care for it anymore, and every piece of news that comes out about IBM and Red Hat makes me even more worried about the future. Sure, it's ostensibly community-driven, but Red Hat has historically been very involved with it.
Hopefully I'm wrong, and I'm sure someone will tell me I'm wrong, but Arch and Debian seem to have the best chances at a good future these days.
I don't give a shit about fedora but I'm very worried about the future of Linux as a whole, red hat has an undisputable importance in the Linux ecossistem and these movements maybe are a signal that IBM don't give a fuck about that
It inspired me to move on. I'm running OpenSUSE now. I don't really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I'm out.
I switched after getting into a boot stuck after an update. Don't regret it until now.
By default you can always roll back to the last working version from boot menu.
https://lemmy.world/post/1177173
Not even a little bit.
Only a little. The only thing I'm really worried about is IBM (maybe secretly) forcing Red Hat to reduce or cut its involvement with Fedora to save money. Without Red Hat's help, Fedora might struggle, but I don't think it will die or be corrupted as a result of whatever's going on.
Also, while I don't have the full picture, I heard that the whole "closed source" thing was an exaggeration in the first place. So maybe there isn't really much to worry about. We'll just have to see of course. I like Fedora a lot, but I can just switch if I need to, so I'm not really letting this worry me.
When kernel-0.96 came public, i checked it out on my Amiga as it was released for Motorola chips as m68k .. and still is :)
Then RedHat came with their first distro, so i had it running on a Motorola 68060 for some time. It was the swap from i386 to i686 and later, with Vesa local bus, my Amiga lost the performance race. Then, a good friend gifted me an i686 PC. WindowsXP was on it and boah, what a crazy shit that was. Filenames and libraries had stupid names and in a file hirarchy, everything was just dumb there, so installed RedHat on that and since then it was all good.
Fedora came, RedHat closed their enterprise buisness sector and then we had Fedora. Up until doday im using it and enjoy the community, wich has a very scientific and innovative spirit. Fedora was always one of those distros, going new ways on a stable and solid base, thanks to RedHat.
Even if RedHat would drop out completely with their Fedora support - wich will never happen - Fedora would be mature enuff to survive. Should Fedora nontheless go for another path wich im not happy with, ill change, but it does not look like that
So nope, im not worried a single bit^^
IDK, I don't use Fedora anymore and all the redhat problems lol using RPM sounds meh
I'm choosing to divest and look for more opportunities to help community ran distros to better fill that niche. Maybe NixOS or Guix as system os and rke2 and flatpak for the rest of services and apps.
If the time comes, that Fedora doesn't fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.
I don't care about it at all. If you want freedom from corporations, use community owned distros.
i use arch btw
Red Hat going full IBM mode, Fedora implementing telemetry.
As someone who hasn’t really been following, what anti-user decisions are those?
Source code distribution change is the big one now, on top of getting rid of traditional centos: https://news.itsfoss.com/red-hat-restricts-source-code/
I don’t really see them as anti-user, in the sense that if you are a subscriber your position has never changed and they are happy to provide support in exchange for money. They do restrict your ability to redistribute (they threaten to cancel your subscription) which I am not a fan of.
Fedora is also looking at adding telemetry. They are calling it opt-in but also defaulting the checkbox to “on”, at least in discussions.
You know what's funny? Most of the time, when something asks me to opt in for telemetry, I strongly consider doing so, then look into what's collected and end up deciding I'm okay with it.
But when I have to opt out, or the default is selected to opt in, I just lose trust entirely.
And I'll jump through hoops to block anything I can't replace that doesn't even ask.
Like, I totally understand why some telemetry is necessary for continued development. I'm down with that. But the shadier it is, the less willing I am to allow it.
@shapis
I'm gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don't want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I'm at least paying enough attention to what's going on that if they do something I see as to far I'll switch
Still not sure what too though
I don't see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That's on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn't I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it's not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn't I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I've almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it's just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that's just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say "opt out" it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
Not worried at all, I've moved on many years ago.
I consider it dead and am thankful that I don't use it.
I think it's too big to fail, but it killed personally interest for me for some time.
Not at all. There are many many projects out there which should be killed anyway. Just stop using them.
Personally, at this point I don't fully understand why someone would choose to use Fedora over something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's such a fantastic, rolling-release distro, that's super stable, easy to work with, has some amazing tools to work with it for more experienced users (YaST), and now it also means you aren't involving yourself in the chain-of-FUD that is arising due to RHEL's incompetence.
I was using Fedora because I needed Appgate for work, and a Mullvad rpm was a bonus. Neither of those are compatible with openSUSE, so I'm back on Arch (btw). Tumbleweed was my first distro, and I'm always looking for an excuse to go back.
I need to use fedora because it's the near OS with bleeding edge, aside from RHEL that I work daily. Just matter of convenient. I don't know, SUSE/OpenSUSE seems not for me.
Very
I am more worried about them dropping packages to push users to use flatpaks.
I'm conflicted on this. I 100% think CLI applications should remain as packages but Flatpak IMO is superior for GUI. It just has a lot of "step in the right direction" sorts of things that address some of Linux's faults.
The big two positives for me are:
I am on Fedora Silverblue and the concept of a base OS + Flatpaks just feels right for workstations. OCI containers (podman/docker/distrobox) as a bonus for development environments without borking your host.
But with this recent Fedora news (I know nothing has changed YET but I am just sussed out tbh), I am considering switching to OpenSUSE Aeon/Kalpa.
Your 2 big positives are stuff I agree with wholeheartedly. But I'm still holding out on using flatpak because it feels like an incomplete solution still. There's many things with it I could work around, definitely, but it feels annoying and with NixOS I don't have to worry about those issues because stuff just works for me.
As for FS, I wanted to love it, but doing some stuff with it is annoying. I wish it let you install stuff with dnf to /usr/local (like how it is on bsds or also macs with brew iirc).
Organizing my thoughs: I would love a future where flatpak just works, the sandboxing is nice and all you need is to click "yes" or "no" when an app wants/needs something, where you don't even need to use your distro's package manager (or you can't even use it because the distro is immutable and it updates on its own), but we're not yet there. Installing fonts on FS was a nightmare, and I had to layer stuff like powertop and other stuff I don't remember right now. Also flatpak isn't yet a good solution for development with VScode or similar stuff.
Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I'm not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.
I am not conceded but keeping an eye in things.
My needs for a work station and my needs for a server are different. For a work station it needs to work without getting in my way, and my metric to compare it to is Windows.
Does it crash?
Does it force me to use a (Microsoft) account?
Can I use it and install it offline?
Does my software work?
So far their decisions do not impact these questions for me, nor change the answers to them.
Their decisions have impacted my servers though, and I am waiting on Alma to see how they move forward. Sticking with them so long as its binary compatible with another distro. But if they can't do that I'll migrate over to Debain for the stability.
Desktop, I feel I would need to go into the weeds more than want to, to get arch configure like Fedora, or to move back to a Debain base OS and get my usability back.
Not really Fedora is Red Hat's upstream, and about 30% of contribution comes from Red Hat. It is a community project after all.
Not at all.
I don't care about fedora.