Thoughts on RHEL going closed source ?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since Fedora is upstream of RHEL I'd like to think it'll be unaffected from the move. But only time will tell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Them closing up completely undermines their UVP.

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

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

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

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

Ed: Oh ok so I guess they're just closing their own fork repos to outsiders? That's quite a different thing than "closed source", dammit

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

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

Blueification of Red Hat . . . sad times

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

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

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

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This has been coming for a long time.

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

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

As someone who admins around 200 Rocky 8/9 and Centos 7 servers, this is a little concerning.

But I have a lot of faith in Rocky and Alma, who are reportedly working together, in coming up with a solution to ensure they continue getting security fixes and updates.

Redhat are steadily turning into every bit as anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be. It's a shame as they used to do a lot for the FOSS world. Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

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

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

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

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

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

(I use fedora BTW)

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

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

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