[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

Mon Jun 26 18:38:55 UTC 2023

Debian doesn't suck, and is fairly painless/consistent to admin. Been 
running clusters on it for more than a decade.

RH/IBM's business is not to be an open source warrior, rather to make 
money for their shareholders.  Seen in this way, they are trying to 
define a moat around RHEL so that they are the only RHEL(alike) that is 
standing.

This was likely aimed at the other folks like Oracle who are making 
money off of rebuilds and not so much at Alma/Rocky.  Those are 
collateral damage.

I've seen now a number of people just give up on them in the last week.  
Doug Eadline put a message on twitter this morning from Jeff Geerling 
(ansible guy).  Gromacs looks like they are done with specific support 
of RHEL(alike).

This was a dumb move on IBMs part, but entirely predictable.  The 
correct move would have been to make CentOS the on ramp to RHEL, and 
encourage everyone to use it for non-enterprise (read as: something you 
aren't making money with, where you need audit trails).  They chose 
instead to try to restrict a license that says you can't restrict it.  
IBM is banking on having many lawyers, to enforce this action.

It sucks, but maybe its time to move off RHEL.  Ubuntu could be ok, but 
it has some idiocy (snap/flatpak) in it as well. Debian has no 
controlling corporation, no requirement to make returns for 
shareholders, and its automation system is second to none.  The 
transition for me was easy.

On 6/26/23 14:27, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
>
> Beowulfers,
>
> By now, most of you should have heard about Red Hat's latest to 
> eliminate any competition to RHEL. If not, here's some links:
>
> Red Hat's announcement:
> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream 
> <https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream>
>
> Alma Linux's response:
> https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
>
> Rocky Linux's response:
> https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/
>
> Software Freedom Conservancy's anaylsis of the situation:
> https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ 
> <https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/>
>
> I'm writing to get your thoughts on this situation, as well as see 
> what plans of action you are considering moving forward.
>
> Here are my thoughts:
>
> This is Red Hat biting the hands that feed them. Red Hat went from a 
> small company operating out of a basement to a large global company 
> thanks to open-source software. My first exposure to Linux was Red Hat 
> Linux 4 in December 1996. I bought a physical, shrink-wrapped version 
> with the commercial Metro-X X server to start learning Linux at home 
> in my spare time shortly after graduation from college. I chose RHL 
> because everything I read said RPM made it super easy to install and 
> manage software (perfect for noobs like me), and the Metro-X X-server 
> was far superior to any open-source X-server available at the time 
> (which was just Xfree86, really). I felt good about giving RH my $40 
> for this not just because it would make it easier for me to learn 
> Linux, but because it seemed like Red Hat were really the company that 
> was going to take this underdog operating system and make it famous.
>
> They certainly achieved that goal, but along the way, I've seen them 
> do a lot of anti-open-source things that I didn't like, leading me to 
> change my image of them from champion of the underdog to the 
> "Microsoft of Linux" to whatever my low opinion of them is now 
> (Backstabber? Ingrate? Hypocrite?):
>
> 1. When they weren't making any money off a product they were giving 
> away for free (Red Hat Linux, and "duh!"), they came out with an 
> "Enterprise" version, that would still GPL-compliant, but you'd have 
> to pay for subscriptions to get access to their update mechanism. To 
> get people to buy into this model, they started spreading fear, 
> uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), about "non-enterprise" Linux 
> distributions, saying that any Linux distribution other than Red Hat 
> Enterprise Linux (RHEL) wasn't reliable for use in any kind of 
> enterprise that needed reliability.
>
> 2. When spreading FUD didn't work, RH killed of RHL entirely. If you 
> wanted a free version of Red Hat, your only option was Rawhide, which 
> was their development version for the next generation of RHEL, which 
> was too unstable and unpredictable for enterprise needs (of course).
>
> 3. After RH starting contributing funding to GNOME development, the 
> next major version of RHEL didn't install other desktops during the 
> install. I remember RHEL saying this was a bug, but I've always 
> suspected it was a deliberate act to reduce KDE market share and and 
> give RH another area of the Linux ecosystem it could control. This, to 
> me, was identical to Microsoft including IE with the OS to kill off 
> Netscape. Now if you excuse, me, I need to go fashion a hat out of tin 
> foil...
>
> 4. RH takes over control of CentOS, which at the time was the only 
> competitor to RHEL. There used to be Scientific Linux (SL), which was 
> maintained by the DOE at FermiLab, but FermiLab decided that the world 
> didn't need both SL and CentOS, since they were essentially the same 
> thing. Not long after, RHEL eliminates CentOS as a competitor by 
> changing it to "CentOS Stream" so it's no longer a competitor to RHEL. 
> CentOS Stream is now a development version of sorts for RHEL, but I 
> thought that was exactly what Fedora was for.
>
> 5. When Alma and Rocky pop-up to fill the void created by the killing 
> of CentOS, RH does what it can to eliminate their access from RHEL 
> source code so they can't be competitiors to RHEL, which brings us to 
> today.
>
> Somewhere around event #3 is when I started viewing RHEL from as the 
> MS of the Linux world for obvious reasons. It seems that RH is 
> determined to make RHEL a monopoly of the "Enterprise Linux" market. 
> Yes, I know there's Ubuntu and SLES, but Ubuntu is viewed as a desktop 
> more than a server OS (IMO), and SLES hasn't really caught on, at 
> least not in the US.
>
> I feel that every time the open-source community ratchets up efforts 
> to preserve free alternatives to RHEL, RH ratchets up their efforts to 
> eliminate any competition, so trying to stick with a free alternative 
> to RHEL is ultimately going to be futile, so know is a good time to 
> consider changing to a different line of Linux distro.
>
> The price of paying for RHEL subscriptions isn't the only concern. 
> Besides cost, one of the reasons Linux has become the de facto OS for 
> HPC was how quickly/easily/cheaply it could be ported to new hardware. 
> Don Becker wrote or modified many of the Linux Ethernet drivers that 
> existed in the mid/late 90s so they could be used for Beowulf 
> clusters, for example. When the Itanium processor came out, I remember 
> reading that a Linux developer was able to port Linux to the Itanium 
> and got Linux running on it in only a matter of hours.
>
> With RH (and IBM?) so focused on market dominance/profits, it's not a 
> stretch to think they they'll eventually "say no" to supporting 
> anything other than x86 and POWER processors, since the other 
> processors don't have enough market share to make it profitable, or 
> compete with IBM's offerings.  I mean, right now it's extremely rare 
> to find any commercial application that supports anything other than 
> x86_64 (other than Mac applications that now support Apple's M 
> processors, which is a relatively new development).
>
> My colleagues here agree with my conclusions about the future of RHEL 
> and, we are certainly giving the thought of moving away from RHEL some 
> serious consideration, but it's certainly not going to be cheap or 
> easy. What are you thinking/doing about this?
>
> -- 
> Prentice
>
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Joe Landman
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