[Shakahs]

The public cloud route is pretty elegant. Red Hat is restricting source code to subscribers only, so Rocky contributors will just subscribe for an hour at a time when they need to download source code. There’s no way for Red Hat to stop this without terminating all public cloud licensing everywhere.

[dlor]

I'm not a lawyer, but that's definitely not their only recourse here.

Lawyers are not going to look at this coordinated attempt to subvert a EULA and say "oh well, nothing we can do here".

[musicale]

> I'm not a lawyer, but that's definitely not their only recourse here.

Agreed - Rocky Linux probably has other options, but these seem like decent ones.

> Lawyers are not going to look at this coordinated attempt to subvert a EULA and say "oh well, nothing we can do here".

It does seem like Red Hat wants to subvert the GPL, but I'm not sure who would be suing them for doing so.

[bubblethink]

>Lawyers are not going to look at this coordinated attempt to subvert a EULA and say "oh well, nothing we can do here".

Once you get lawyers involved, you lose a lot of goodwill. At that point, who can tell RH apart from Oracle?

[pipo234]

Indeed, who can?

RH is still leading and sponsoring a lot of Linux development — that's the goodwill part. But maaaann, for quite a while RHEL has not been a very welcoming and inviting distro (unless you're the one checking the boxes on the corporate procurement form).

[bonzini]

What could be done to improve it (while keeping in mind that Red Hat needs $$$ to continue development)?

[pipo234]

Okay, let's start with the software itself being free. That is, no-one pays for distribution or use, creation is sponsored voluntarily (contributions, donations) but this is not sustainable.

Customers may want to pay for training and consultancy, managed hosting, hardware, feature development, hand holding, insurance, productizing, etc. This is the business that RedHat is in, but so are MontaVista, AWS, vmware, Google, to name a few sponsors of Rocky. If everyone agrees to upstream a fair amount of their revenue, there should be plenty for RedHat to contribute into various projects.

Sure will be a bit of hassle to negotiate a fair price. But so far, these companies appear happy with the quote they pay Rocky, whereas the RedHat deal (per seat/per core/per instance/whatever) clearly is not. If RedHat had been more open to that kind of a deal with CentOS (8), there would probably never have been a Rocky Linux.

So yes, there is always the free loaders issue, but mostly people and businesses are open to sponsoring organizations that have a lot of goodwill.

[bonzini]

So two free distros are not enough, got it.

[account42]

They seem to have been able to fund development before. So what changed? Just the new corporate overlord that wants a return on their investment?

[bonzini]

Quoting Reddit: "The problem of rebuilders has been around forever. Things heated up a couple of months ago when we detected what we think was a continued bad-faith action from one of the rebuilders, not on the code/engineering side but on the commercial/money making side of their house. That's as far as I'll go publicly. After that it was just a matter of discussion on what to do about it, so we landed on the announcements I made last week."