[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[Douglas Eadline]

I'll have more to say later and to me the irony of this situation is
Red Hat has become what they were created to prevent*.


--
Doug

* per conversations with Bob Young back in the day


> 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 "CentOSÂ  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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-- 
Doug