On 2023-06-23 01:19, Adam Thompson wrote:

RHEL's own *customers* still have access to the source code for the as-built system, so I think they're in the clear there, but... IANAL.

Except that they can't redistribute the sources, else Red Hat will drop them as customers.

"You're totally free to do as you please, but if you don't do as *I* please, there be consequences."

That's a... very... elastic definition of freedom.

From: Roundtable roundtable-bounces@muug.ca On Behalf Of Trevor Cordes Sent: Friday, June 23, 2023 1:16 AM To: roundtable@muug.ca Subject: Re: [RndTbl] RHEL pulls source code

Is this legal, per the GPL? They make modifications, they release binaries (though not for free). Therefore they must release the sources? Releasing a different version (I guess what they'll call their "upstream" may not satisfy the GPL?

By the time you're calling the lawyers, the relationship is already soured.

Ramifications? I guess this instantly kills Rocky et al and forces everyone on "free RHEL" to buy RHEL? I don't think Rocky et al have the resources to path & update their distro on their own, and in any event, it would no longer be "fully RHEL compatible"

Or am I reading this completely wrong?

That's the whole point. It doesn't need to be impossible, it just needs to be hard enough.

You know what pisses me off? When they first started down this path, I - and many others - decided to go and look at their terms and prices.

Red Hat does *not* want to deal with any organization that lacks deep pockets. We got out of this exercise thinking about paying Canonical for Ubuntu, instead. Talk about shooting your own foot.

And here's another one that just has to go off the deep end, but for different reasons: we decided to not go with them, because of the little hills they choose to die on. Snaps, for example. Heck, Canonical could just do "Debian, with Enterprise Support" and it'd be a winner!

I am always amazed by how far we've come, and yet we often manage to screw it up because we're unable to see the bigger picture.

Oh well.. it was a good run. Hope Debian sticks around. That's where I'll be most likely going for the long-term. I am more of an RPM guy, but between RH's shenanigans and having to battle snaps on every release of a **server** distribution, that's where it's at.

Kind regards,

Not wrong, but there are a LOT of users who can't even tolerate modest occasional "you're on the bleeding edge" pain. In fact I'd say nearly 100% of corporate Linux instances can't tolerate that - all the SMBs who can are merely a rounding error... for better or worse.

Most of my clients (EDU) cannot tolerate one second more of downtime than absolutely necessary... during the school day, anyway. And those pain points don't come at predictable dates :-). If I started using a distro (no, not a dildo, WTF autocorrect?!?!?) that I *knew* would cause even one hour more per year of service outage or degradation, I'd get lynched. (At my previous employers, I'd simply get fired.)

IMHO, corporate Fedora users are unicorns, or, "it's nice work, if you can get it".

We're now waiting to see if we get the exciting joy of migrating ~100 CentOS/Alma VMs to another distro, which would easily be a year-long project or more. Oh, or we could just buy RH's Enterprise license that provides blanket licensing for<Infinity> VMs for only US$2500 per CPU socket... that's a really big ouch on a VMware cluster our size!

Bah, humbug. Post CentOS "acquisition", we all suspected this day would come, but hoped it wouldn't.

Unhappily, -Adam

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________________________________ From: Trevor Cordes trevor@tecnopolis.ca Sent: Friday, June 23, 2023 10:03:37 PM To: Alberto Abrao alberto@abrao.net Cc: Continuation of Round Table discussion roundtable@muug.ca; Adam Thompson athompso@athompso.net Subject: Re: [RndTbl] RHEL pulls source code

On 2023-06-23 Alberto Abrao wrote:

I am always amazed by how far we've come, and yet we often manage to screw it up because we're unable to see the bigger picture.

Oh well.. it was a good run. Hope Debian sticks around. That's where I'll be most likely going for the long-term. I am more of an RPM guy, but between RH's shenanigans and having to battle snaps on every release of a **server** distribution, that's where it's at.

Well, RH making dumb mistakes (ever since creating RHEL and making RH non-free) always causes a big upheaval in the Linux world. (Well, blame IBM this time.) This usually turns out for the better. Often it forces RH to backtrack.

It took about a year after RH's dumb RH->RHEL mistake to force them to create Fedora. Then the clones were created. CentOS being screwed up created Rocky, etc.

So I don't see this as all that bad at the moment. (Well, partly because it doesn't affect me, my boxes or my clients in the slightest.) I know something good will come out of it. Maybe a consolidated RHEL-replacement (RPM-based of course) created by the mega-corps might that Adam listed that are about to be hosed.

They can out-RHEL RHEL, one-upping them and getting all the users. Think Maria vs MySQL (who's that?). Of course, such a thing would take months and that means major pain or short-term RHEL subscriptions for all the RHEL-clone users.

(Heck, it gets me itching to do my big PHP fork idea again, as PHP goes down the path of insanity, too.)

As always it makes me reiterate my support for Fedora (until they screw that up...) which is still 100% free, has great easy upgrade paths, and if you play your cards right has only modest occasional "you're the bleeding edge now" pain.

On 2023-06-23 22:03, Trevor Cordes wrote:

Well, RH making dumb mistakes (ever since creating RHEL and making RH non-free) always causes a big upheaval in the Linux world. (Well, blame IBM this time.) This usually turns out for the better. Often it forces RH to backtrack.

This time, it's a a lot more than that IMHO. If they succeed, the GPL becomes kind of a joke, really.

They can out-RHEL RHEL, one-upping them and getting all the users. Think Maria vs MySQL (who's that?). Of course, such a thing would take months and that means major pain or short-term RHEL subscriptions for all the RHEL-clone users.

(Heck, it gets me itching to do my big PHP fork idea again, as PHP goes down the path of insanity, too.)

As always it makes me reiterate my support for Fedora (until they screw that up...) which is still 100% free, has great easy upgrade paths, and if you play your cards right has only modest occasional "you're the bleeding edge now" pain.

Fedora is great.

After the first round of IBM-RH mishaps - the CentOS debacle - I did run Fedora Server on everything for a while.

I did not have many - if any - breakages, that's true. But it does require updates fairly often - that's the whole point of it! - and many of these require a reboot. I am diligent in doing updates and rebooting as needed, so I obliged.

Even my home stuff started to be a little bit of a pain in the bottom to keep current and fresh. I can't imagine anything that requires a solid uptime being subject to that. You can, of course, not do that as promptly, but I just can't bring myself to not do those things on a timely manner.

On 2023-06-23 22:23, Adam Thompson wrote:

Not wrong, but there are a LOT of users who can't even tolerate modest occasional "you're on the bleeding edge" pain.  In fact I'd say nearly 100% of corporate Linux instances can't tolerate that - all the SMBs who can are merely a rounding error... for better or worse.

I am with Trevor that the "bleeding edge pain" claims are wildly exaggerated more often than not. Regular updates proceed without issues. Even between versions it goes fine more often than no.

But that's only a part of it  Even if you accept this, a Fedora Server installation still requires significantly more attention to keep current.

Most of my clients (EDU) cannot tolerate one second more of downtime than absolutely necessary... during the school day, anyway.  And those pain points don't come at predictable dates :-).  If I started using a distro (no, not a dildo, WTF autocorrect?!?!?) that I *knew* would cause even one hour more per year of service outage or degradation, I'd get lynched.  (At my previous employers, I'd simply get fired.)

(I lauighed out loud, thanks for that one!)

I can relate to that, 100%. Again, even if you consider all updates will be flawless, there's still the work between applying them, and making sure system hygiene is done properly so it comes back online and running the latest bits. Updates between major versions can take a little bit of (down)time, even considering they tend to work surprisingly well.

Hand wave the potential pitfalls, and you still have the increased frequency of the updating process itself. It does add up.

IMHO, corporate Fedora users are unicorns, or, "it's nice work, if you can get it".

We're now waiting to see if we get the exciting joy of migrating ~100 CentOS/Alma VMs to another distro, which would easily be a year-long project or more.  Oh, or we could just buy RH's Enterprise license that provides blanket licensing for<Infinity> VMs for only US$2500 per CPU socket... that's a really big ouch on a VMware cluster our size!

Back when they first pulled a fast one, we looked.

No support RHEL was 4 times what Ubuntu would cost at the time, and Ubuntu has the "live update" feature included, which seemed like a decent value-add. We didn't investigate how well it really works, but still....

Bah, humbug.  Post CentOS "acquisition", we all suspected this day would come, but hoped it wouldn't.

Not that far out, back in 2020, the fears were there for us. We started moving to Ubuntu, then decided not to, because it's so damn annoying. They get so much right, and yet, decide to die on the most stupid hills ever. Snaps on a server distro? Get out of here.

Alma and Rocky show up, disaster averted, it seemed.

Until now. I really, really like the "flow" of RPM-based distros. But that's it. It is time to face the music.

When I moved to Winnipeg three years ago, I set up my mail server and other things using Debian 10. At the time, it was a cheap old desktop PC. It was later virtualized, moved between hypervisors a million times, wrecked by fat fingering when messing with its qcow2 file, recovered, you name it. But it was never reinstalled. The Debian 10 installation was brought forward to 11, flawlessly, and is running right now, ready to be upgraded to the newest Debian 12.

It gives me very little headache, other than when I actively poke in it, or have it sitting on flaky hard drives. Can't blame the distro for it, of course.

It almost dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, I should just use Debian. No trickery, no Snaps, just old school reliable, predictable, current*, and SysAdmin friendly.

The only remaining question concerns to my desktop/laptop installations. I've been running Fedora, and I really enjoy it, so I am in no rush to change. But, as it stands, it would not be wise to ignore the warnings for the second time. We'll see.

Kind regards, Alberto Abrao

* Yes, current. For Desktop users it may not seen like it, but Server distros move on a different pace. Debian has new releases every 3 or so years, so you can get your PHP -or whatever -  ducks in a row. If you're not ready, you have time, because older versions hang around for at least two more years. For a community distribution with no strings attached, what more can you ask for, really?