It seems like Red Hat want everyone to move over to Debian and OpenSuse
- I was actually about to do that (move to Debian).
  
  Not that i saw this exact thing coming but I do notice the recent changes many big companies make and i feel a lot more comfortable with staying on a community moderated platform even if it means making my life slightly more inconvenient.
  
  Using neovim, hosting on Codeberg and so on just makes me feel a lot more comfortable.
  
  I was actually about to do that (move to Debian).
  
  Maybe stay within the Enterprise Linux camp for a bit. Not to start a flame war, but when an OS company was deciding between EL and Debians, the RPM format was the deciding factor.
- Opensuse has really made some huge strides over the last few years too. Takes some time to get used to the differences, but overall I really like what they're doing. Tumbleweed has been great on my workstations as well.
  
  I went from Arch to Fedora, but moved to Tumbleweed because I really like the rolling release model. I recently moved my laptop from Tumbleweed to Aeon and have been really happy with that, too. I'm keeping my workstation on Tumbleweed since I game and code and generally just like fiddling with it, but I like the idea of an immutable stable base for my laptop since it just needs to work.
  
  Big fan of what openSuse is doing.
- After 20+ years of working primarily with Debian, I was giving Alma a shot recently and honestly, have really liked it. Guess I'll be going back to the ole' tried and true Debian.
- Red Hat has been bought by IBM, and IBM wants to bully people into using their licensed products by eliminating downstream distros
Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones?

We cannot speak to Red Hat’s intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.

The answer is "yes". IBM is being IBM. They bought CentOS and hoped that would be the end of it, but then Rocky and Alma appeared. I don't know why they didn't foresee this happening.
- But why would they want to kill their acquistion like that though? Not sure what they're trying to achieve with this move that isn't detrimental to their business.
  
  I think, in the short run, they are hoping some percentage of Rocky/Alma users will migrate to RHEL. I don't believe they are really thinking about the long term.
  
  Squeeze the existing users for cash.
  
  The enterprises will just pay it. It’ll be cheaper than a migration for critical servers.
  
  Corps pull the same gameplay each time:
  
  Buy product
  
  Jack prices to the roof
  
  Kill R&D and enshittify support to minimize cost
  
  Extract profit until other products make a higher profit margin
  
  Shutdown support and repeat with a new product
  
  But why would they want to kill their acquistion like that though?
  
  I can only recommend you look at the last decade of IBM's history in that respect.
This change means that we, as builders of a RHEL clone, will now be responsible for following the licensing and agreements that are in place around Red Hat’s interfaces, in addition to following the licenses included in the software sources. Unfortunately the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements.

I think this interpretation of Red Hat's agreements is not correct, or at least it doesn't apply to all off RHEL. I couldn't find any mention of not being allowed to share the source code within the EULAs either.
Since Red Hat doesn't own the copyright to the majority of the code in RHEL such an agreement would violate a lot of contributors' copyrights since Red Hat would effectively re-license the code without the consent of the copyright holders with such a clause.
I won’t pretend to have knowledge of the intricacies here but on the face of it this seems contrary to the both the spirit and letters of the GPL
- Not all RHEL packages are GPL though. That means that if you only have source packages distributed through the red hat license, you can only confidently redistribute GPL (or similar) packages, other packages needs another source.
It will be interesting to see what workaround Alma, Ricky and Euro Linux will come up with.
Here we go again.

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