Red Hat has made RHEL closed source. This sparked much controversy and Oracle did a write up to accuse Red Hat’s actions.
Do we consider Red Hat to be on some anti-open-source scheme? Should we boycott Fedora and other Red Hat-sponsored distros that are used to create this closed source distro? (And I’m not sure if RH’s actions has violated the GPL.)
Maybe community-made distros like NixOS or Debian secured with Kicksecure will be better recommendations?
This is confusing, why post this now even though this is nearly 3 week old news. And why not at least add a summary of all that has happened since in terms of reactions from Rocky, Alma, Oracle, SuSE and the various opinions on how the RHEL license clause restricts GPL freedoms and why use the misleading term ‘closed source’ that has been widely criticized in the comments to the original article?
This has been one of the most overly milked and sensationalised stories I’ve seen.
The article you linked even explains that this move is in compliance with the GPL.
If people think the GPL’s loophole of allowing source to only be distributed to those receiving the binaries and agreeing to non-distribution terms is a problem, then the problem lies with the GPL.
As for if Red Hat is a bad guy here…
OSS needs alternate monetization in the future if things like this would be avoided.
Personally, I’m a big fan of interested parties paying for the production of software (or media, etc) upfront and then the produced thing being available freely.
Should we ever see models move to something like that, then in that ecosystem suddenly closing source is clearly more of a bad guy move.
Here, the article you link straight up has a line about the current model allowing downstream repackaging to deliver effectively the same product without paying Red Hat. It was likely only a matter of time for them to make a move like this.
All that said, I personally would never build a product on top of Red Hat’s source for anything moving forward given the potential for further decisions along these lines blowing it up later on. But as someone who was never doing that to begin with, it costs little to commit to.
This is misinformation. RHEL is still open source
RH Closing source code and adding telemetry to Fedora made me go back to Arch. Can’t trust these people
RH Closing source code and adding telemetry to Fedora
Neither of those statements are true, it’s a shame when people make decisions on bad information.
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Well, it is still open source, and even with new restrictions the majority of Red Hat’s developer contributions are upstream, they are very much an open source company.
Fedora asked its community for feedback about a proposal to add opt-out privacy-conscious telemetry.
In both cases when all nuance is removed it becomes disingenuous and misleading, it’s harmful because it’s easier to spread such a black and white view compared to the truth and people end up making decisions based on it.
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While it makes things less convenient I would still argue that’s splitting hairs, everything in RHEL was in CentOS Stream and can be assembled from the source code there.
As for Fedora, the fact that it’s opt out instead of opt in concerns me. At least with Ubuntu it’s opt in.
Actually (it’s buried in the discussion so I can’t find it at the moment), Matthew Miller (I think it was him) gave Ubuntu as an example of how it might work in Fedora, i.e. you’ll be presented with the option after initial install, it’s not going to be something that’s buried in settings.
and what is the community’s response to SuSE’s decision to hard-fork?
Generally, I approve of it. RHEL customers should be able to migrate to SEL fairly easily if they want but there would be some caveats in tooling changes based on kernel version.
Having a hard RHEL fork would make that transition easier for customers that want to leave Red Hat.
The open source drama isn’t going to be something most Red Hat contract signers care about, though. So SUSE will have make the transition more appealing in other ways.