The two ways they have for getting source code are kind of funny and easy, and kind of makes fun of RHEL in pulling this maneuver, getting so much community backlash and ultimately having so little effect other than to negatively impact future business. But will they go further to violate the GPL? Or concede defeat? Say what you want, but to cut off paying customers if they share source code which is their right under the GPL is a really bad move that exposes the character of those running the company.
+1 it’s reasonable for RH to not devote resources to debranding stuff and to get paid for the effort of packaging and maintaining their distribution. However threatening to retaliate for exercising GPL rights just downright scummy and violates the spirit of GPL even if they might not violate the license technically…
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but… The folks at RHEL aren’t factually wrong. They’re not violating any GPL clauses by putting source code behind a paywall, or by not putting in all the work they have been these past years to basically spoon-feed their source to rebuilders.
RHEL has contributed and continues to contribute a lot to the FOSS community. Take the time to read this RHEL blog post that was linked to by Rocky. By metrics, the majority of people taking advantage of rebuilders aren’t hobbyists or students trying to become familiar with RHEL, it’s professionals who are trying to avoid the pricetag associated with all the work and support and value RHEL provides. As they say, they’ve got a lot of people working on that project, and those people need to be paid for their work. Sure, they could take donations… Or you could pay for their product.
As far as I can tell, all this uproar about RHEL is basically the community getting up in arms because RHEL has decided to stop devoting resources to such activities as… De-branding their sources to make the lives of rebuilders easier? Rebuilders can still do their jam, they just have to put in a little more elbow grease now.
I haven’t seen anything about RHEL cutting off paying customers who share source. It wasn’t in the link you shared, it wasn’t in any of the links provided by Rocky in said blog post you shared. I’d love to read about it if I’ve missed it, and reform my opinions.
EDIT to add: folks below have provided links and quoted segments from RHEL’s license. I encourage everyone passing through to look them over, as they’re pretty damning and unambiguous in their language, and was the piece I was missing as I formed the above opinion. Thanks everyone for the discussion!
The whole uproar is from them saying they will cancel accounts of users redistributing the code. Not them putting it behind a paywall.
Which is a perfectly valid reason to be upset, should that be the case. I was looking for sources on that, as I haven’t seen any. It looks like others may have linked them, so I’ll go have a look.
EDIT to clarify my meaning, and also to add: I am familiar with the GPL. And yeah, looks like that’s the case. Which really, really sucks lol. Someone quoted/linked their license and reading over it is uh… Pretty unambiguous about their intent. Sad days.
This document talks briefly about unauthorized redistribution of RHEL sources: https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20230309.pdf
Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units,
(c)providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such instance (collectively, “Unauthorized Subscription Services Uses”).Page for all agreements with Red Hat: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/agreements
These documents appear to be written in Microsoft Word, not that this is of any consequence.
Don’t forget Red Hat wouldn’t have problem with the “rebuilders” eating their lunch if they didn’t kill CentOS in the first place. People that don’t need support would just use CentOS, and people that do need support would still buy RHEL instead of paying Rocky, Alma and Rocky wouldn’t exists, and Oracle Linux would’ve still a niche product. But greed (or IBM?) got the better of them and they killed CentOS to increase their short term revenue. Now they’re getting bitten in the ass for that short-sighted decision (NASA contract with Rocky) and double down with an even stupider decision. They will surely get bitten in the ass again over this decision and probably will triple down with an even more stupider decision.
I haven’t seen anything about RHEL cutting off paying customers who share source. It wasn’t in the link you shared, it wasn’t in any of the links provided by Rocky in said blog post you shared. I’d love to read about it if I’ve missed it, and reform my opinions.
I think it’s mentioned in red hat portal ToC. There are screenshots around the internet if you look for it.
Edit: found it
g) Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units, © providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such instance (collectively, “Unauthorized Subscription Services Uses”).
https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix_1_Global_English_20230309.pdf
Nobody and nothing living forever is one of the reasons centralization is bad. But humans sadly like to flock.
RH is approaching the end of its life cycle. First they were hackers. Then they became a useful and aspiring business. Then RPM-based distributions were what made Linux not marginal anymore (though probably this also has something to do with Mandrake’s success). Then they became something in the center of things, connected to everything happening with Linux and other Unix-like systems (at least on desktop). Then they realized that and started milking that slowly. Then they became arrogant.
I’m not 100% on this as I don’t work for NASA so don’t shoot me if I’m wrong however I suspect/speculate the NASA contract is purely because someone needed X machines for a task and that their IT contracts would require support for the years the project runs for. There may or may not be a stipulatio/recommendation on the OS for the software stack. Meaning that because they want to run software Y they need to run Rocky and so corporate requires that to have support. Not that Rocky were simply undercutting RHEL.
I repeat, this is purely speculation.
I’ll see if I can’t dig it up.
Judging on their own blog post, a lot of this decision making wasn’t because of the people using rebuilders because they “don’t need support,” which was never really the goal IMO. CentOS seemed, to me at least, to fill the gap of “people who want to use RHEL but can’t or don’t need to afford the price tag; for hobbyists and learners.” And RHEL is reporting that their research shows the majority of people using rebuilders right now are not those groups of people, they’re professional enterprise environments who are trying to avoid RHEL’s fees.
To me, if you are a business who wants a Linux server but doesn’t want to pay RHEL’s price tag… Use something else. There’s Ubuntu Server, Fedora Server, Debian, and dozens more distros that cater to enterprise usage for absolutely free. RHEL does not. From what I can tell, the rebuilders are not adding any kind of value to the situation. And, again, RHEL’s own word on the situation seems to be “the sources are still there, we just won’t do your job for you anymore.”
EDIT to add: I am not against the rebuilders doing their thing. I am actually for it. But right now, everything I am seeing on the practical side of things is this: RHEL used to put in a lot of work making the rebuilders’ job easier. They don’t seem to want to artificially increase the difficulty of rebuilding RHEL sources, just to stop actively spending money making it easier when that work doesn’t return any money for the effort. Which is… Totally fair.
Yes, that’s totally fair, but a lot of people in the open source world, especially individual contributor, will only support an open-source product based on how many goodwill the backing company provides. Red Hat, before the IBM acquisition, is on the top of the list due to their enormous goodwill towards the open source community. Their willingness to support CentOS, which essentially making RHEL free and cutting into Red Hat’s revenue, created a lot of respect among Linux supporters, which in turns promoted usage of CentOS and RHEL and provides integration for CentOS/RHEL on their own open source projects. Red Hat became this big was partially due to the support and promotion from the Linux enthusiasts advocating their use in their companies.
The recent moves understandably made those people feel betrayed by Red Hat. Sure it’s within Red Hat’s right to do so, but in doing so, they burn a lot of goodwill and trust from their open source community.
I have since changed my overall view on this topic as others brought up their license’s verbiage that seems to be designed to threaten people into not rebuilding their source lest they lose access to their rightfully paid for license, but I’ll comment on this specific point.
Per RHEL, their metrics show that this:
Red Hat became this big was partially due to the support and promotion from the Linux enthusiasts advocating their use in their companies.
was a nice idea, but not a reality for them. They didn’t see that turn around the way hobbyist and enthusiasts claim they did. Again, I’m not in support of all the decisions RHEL is making in regards to this, and I’m not saying we should blindly take their word for it. But they have addressed this particular point in saying “Yeah, we kinda thought that would happen too, but it didn’t.”
But that’s all kind of a moot point now, since their ToS is kind of damning.
“Would” happen? That’s literally what initially happened. They just hoped for something impossible.
From what I can tell, the rebuilders are not adding any kind of value to the situation.
They are adding popularity. Enterprise is slow to change in some ways, but I can totally see the trend of moving to Debian. RH seems to have forgotten their own history and how they’ve started with one Red Hat Linux, with paid support for those who wanted it, and that’s what gave them the popularity to be profitable.
They don’t seem to want to artificially increase the difficulty of rebuilding RHEL sources, just to stop actively spending money making it easier when that work doesn’t return any money for the effort. Which is… Totally fair.
They are, in fact, going to reduce their revenue. Which is the main criterion for a business, no?
I mean, just like humans wither and die with time, so do companies.
The issue will have to be litigated, but… A lawyer once told me that there aren’t really “lawsuits” so much as “factsuits.” The actual judgment in a trial comes more down to the facts at issue than the laws at issue. This sure looks an awful lot like IBM strong arming people into not exercising their rights under the license agreement that IBM chose to distribute under. If it is ever litigated, it isn’t hard to imagine the judgment going against IBM.
No one truly familiar with open source are begrudging RedHat the opportunity to profit from their labors, but RedHat are not the sole source of the software used to make RHEL. RedHat would not exist if it were not for the fact that the FSF and the GNU project did most of the work to build the base userland in Linux, including the compiler toolchain that RedHat uses to create it’s products.
Thousands of others have founded and contributed to other critical components within RHEL. And in fairness, RH have contributed much to the community but they are not the majority contributor to the whole ecosystem.
I agree that the work of de-branding the RHEL sources should not fall on RH, this is something that should be done by the downstream distributions or “rebuilders” as RedHat like to call them.
I would suggest reading AlmaLinux: Our Value is our Values for what Alma have contributed to the RedHat ecosystem and Free Software Community in the short time they’ve been around.
And this is RedHat doing much more than just debranding their sources, they have cut off access to the repositories for RHEL and are only making sources available in the much faster moving CentOS stream, which will be very difficult for anything but a very large community or a large company (like Oracle) to manually track down each commit that was used for RHEL.
They also took pains to point out that subscribers trying to exercise their GPL granted rights to redistribution and installation were against the RedHat subscriber agreement:
Red Hat customers and partners can access RHEL sources via the customer and partner portals, in accordance with their subscription agreement. Section 1.2(g) of Product Appendix 1 governing Software and Support Subscriptions.
Also, please look at Software Freedom Conservancy Blog for their view and some historical context of actions RedHat has taken against customers. RedHat have violated the GPL in the past and I don’t expect this to change.
This also falls on the heels of their layoffs where they laid off a lot of paid Fedora positions, and even while RedHat were extremely profitable before these changes, they don’t need these changes to pay their employees, suppliers, contractors and shareholders.
They need these changes to drive more subscriptions to deliver more value (money) to their shareholders because – in this macro-economic environment – every company is desperate to shore up their year over year profits or the markets will punish them and leadership will get fired by the IBM board/shareholders.
This is just short sighted greed without consideration of repercussions to the larger Linux community that I’ve been a member of before RedHat existed.
This is why I’m upset with RedHat and why I removed Fedora from my laptop and workstation and my RHEL (free developer license, but still RHEL because that’s what I’m comfortable with) home servers over the past week.
They also took pains to point out that subscribers trying to exercise their GPL granted rights to redistribution and installation were against the RedHat subscriber agreement
This is the point that matters most to me. The rest of it… sucks, but I can live with. Putting sources behind a price tag is within the GPL and I don’t believe it is against the spirit of the GPL as others have said; removing sources from the RHEL repos and using CentOS Stream is an antagonistic change, but they’re protecting their business which… they’re a business. I don’t expect any company to be a bastion of free in the face of potential profits, though it’s always nice when they are. The one point that changes my view on the topic completely is that they are actively trying to prevent people from exercising their rights under the GPL by “cleverly” not VIOLATING the GPL, but doing some sneaky fuckery to threaten paying customers into NOT exercising those rights. They don’t say you can’t, they just say you shouldn’t (and here’s why). That’s straight up bad.
Previously, I hadn’t seen evidence of it despite looking around (admittedly not to heavily), all I found was hearsay. But multiple people have provided sources now, which is great!
I agreed with this take. Just rebuild (plus giving support at cheaper rate than redhat) is kinda disrespect to hardworking opensource programmer at redhat. Sure redhat is also disrespecting users for canceling contract on those who shares the code, but it is their right and disrespect level is lower than those rebuilders. If they really want to clone redhat, they should copy centos stream, do the job make them stabler then sell it. It is better for opensource community than just to leech redhat.
This is… Kinda where I’m at right now. Yeah, it’s absolutely shitty of RHEL to violate GPL distribution clauses on GPL licensed code. We have to see exactly how that licensing plays out, and to what parts of their service they’re applying it to.
I am not opposed to FOSS companies making money off their hard work, though, and it’s hard to do when other people steal your homework and sell it for cheaper. My question to those in support of the rebuilders, and I ask this not as a challenge but from a place of ignorance without the time to devote to really digging too deeply into this right now, what do Rocky and the like add to the situation? They rebuild RHEL source and distribute it free or cheaply. But what are they adding to the equation? Are they giving back to the FOSS community or are they just leeching off of RHEL’s success?
I was telling a friend of mine, sometimes I feel like people forget the F in FOSS isn’t “free as in free beer,” it’s “free as in free speech” with “free beer” frequently tacked on as an extra, lol.
It is mentioned in the AlmaLinux post.
Rocky is planning on using the pay as you go cloud platforms to get around the enterprise agreements, those also do actually have a license (cloud providers have some language somewhere in the TOS that you have to abide by it), part of it includes: “Distributing the Subscription Services (or any portion) to a third party outside the Portal or using the Subscription Services to support a third party without paying the respective fees is a material breach of this Agreement even though the open source license applicable to individual software packages may give you the right to distribute those packages”.
I have no problem with them locking down sources to customers, that’s all they need to do. Their enterprise agreements and others have people concerned about those customer’s redistribution rights, it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.
So the question becomes what is classified as a part of the “Subscription Services”? To what part of their products are they applying this part of the license? Because from what I can tell, and again I am not an expert by any means, RHEL’s message seems to be “the sources are still there, but we can’t keep doing your job for you.” The company put a lot of effort into making it exceptionally easy for rebuilders to do their rebuilds. It sounds to me like the goal is not to artificially increase the difficulty of rebuilding RHEL sources, but to just… Stop going out of their way to make it easier.
EDIT to add: someone else linked and quoted their license. And uh… Yikes. 😬
I appreciate all the discussion on the topic! Sounds like RHEL is getting a little high and mighty about this.
But they are artificially increasing the difficulty - cherry picking releases out of the CentOS Stream repo without the knowledge or context of what commit goes to which product version is a herculean undertaking.
