A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system
Also check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
Red Hat probably contributes to Open Source and Linux more than any other company around. Are they perfect? Of course not, and it's fair and good to discuss and criticise them when warranted. But overall they seem to contribute positively much more than negatively.
How are they "doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem." exactly ?
Remember that in 2023 RedHat restricted access to the source code of RHEL packages, which had a big impact to lots of server distros. This article explains really well why that's problematic:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
Not really
It isn't a black and white thing. Redhat simply exists like anything else. I don't like everything they do but they also fund a ton of research and development. If Fedora ever becomes problematic people will just move. Ubuntu desktop used to be good but after it turned to shit many people moved.
IBM sucks. They have bought up a bunch of small data centers and made them worse.
I'm still pissed about CentOS as well. Long live Rocky.
Alma is actually a real community distro. They deserve so much more support than Rocky does.
TIL; though I moved my servers to Debian ... having the ability to sanely upgrade without a reinstall is a major plus.
@Dark_Arc @LeFantome I've had mixed luck with debian in this regard. Bullseye to Bookworm was a smooth upgrade but some of the others have not gone so well.
I'm pretty sure Alma had a way to upgrade major releases. I know RHEL has Leapp, but it is always recommended to do a greenfield reinstall. Although with image mode and ostree that is changing.
Interesting ... yeah it looks like Leapp can do some upgrades for Alma and possibly others as well (TIL). I'm not sure how well that upgrade process would compare / be supported vs Debian though.
What's the image mode and ostree stuff? Is that required for RHEL and/or Alma going forward?
No image mode is not required. It is the immutable mode for RHEL. Using image builder and bootc to create and upgrade your images. Ostree is sort of like putting your entire OS in git. For an upgrade it checks out a new branch, updates that branch, then you have to reboot into that branch. That makes the upgrade atomic and gives you the ability to rollback. It's what Core OS uses and what the Fedora Atomic desktops use. It's a much bigger thing in RHEL 10 and I suspect will take over a lot of the duties of Satellite at some point.
Fuck Rocky. They are a leech on open source. They break user agreements to get at Red Hat source and don't contribute upstream. Use Alma, they actually work with the community and contribute upstream.
Ok, but why is there even an agreement required to access to source to something, uh, open source?
The GPL says you can get the source to software that people distribute to you. Red Hat does not distribute to Rocky.
Seems like they use that to circumvent other parts of the gpl, in spirit and possibly in the letter of the law. Others have more and better things to say about it than I:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
Because CIQ, the company that bankrolls Rocky, was poaching Red Hat customers. They were hiring Red Hat sales people, then using their contacts to swoop in and drastically undercut Red Hat because they don't do any engineering. It is an effort to stop leeches like CIQ/Rocky.
They were hiring Red Hat sales people, then using their contacts to swoop in and drastically undercut Red Hat because they don't do any engineering.
There's an easy solution to that. RedHat could just pay their salespeople what they are worth and keep them at RedHat.
Yeah but its pretty easy to avoid them. They survive on government contracts not community support. There's lots of better alternatives than Fedora.
They make you sign into their support portal to view most of their documentation and download most of their software. That right there is a deal breaker for me because it violates the spirit of open source.
I'm wary of them and I refuse to use Fedora (because it's basically their testing bed) due to their support of the US military, in addition to the reasons you've mentioned. Also, I'm trying my damnedest to #BoycottUSA
I prefer LMDE. It doesn't check all my wants, but it finds a great balance and I don't feel like an unpaid tester.
due to their support of the US military
What?
I'm all for Linux distributions run and owned by the community. With those we don't have to be afreaid of weird business decisions. Debian is a good example, and very democratic. But I believe several other distros are maintained by a community as well, including Arch, NixOS...
Fedora is also community operated. Although there's a bit of an informal understanding between RedHat and Fedora to work together.
I didn't know that. Wikipedia says it's only 35% of contributors who are employed by RedHat. But isn't governance split equally between the community and RedHat? So it's not entirely independent, but more a mix?!
It definitely makes me suspicious, considering they're a standard 'money above all else' company (though they're better at playing the long game than some other companies) operating in a fascist state. They don't seem to abuse their power much, yet, but that can change rather quickly.
I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority. Suspicion of Red Hat was a major reason why systemd was so controversial.