[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

Tue Jun 27 01:36:18 UTC 2023

There is a good discussion on this topic over on the Slack channel at
hpc.social
I would urge anyone on this list to join up there - you will find a home.
hpcsocial.slack.com

On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 at 19:27, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> 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
>
> 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/
>
> 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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