[bonzini]

My guess is that they will be content with:

1) having something to show their customers who has the actual expertise

2) making it clear that the Red Hat of today is significantly more open than the Red Hat of 2014 when neither CentOS Stream nor UBI existed and CentOS releases were months late despite the SRPMs being on ftp.redhat.com

3) making it obvious that they are respecting the GPL, and that no one gives a flying f**k about "free as in freedom" because all the uprising was always about either the free beer or the clicks/likes.

[musicale]

> making it obvious ...that no one gives a flying f*k about "free as in freedom" because all the uprising was always about either the free beer

Indeed - Red Hat is making it obvious that IBM (like most large companies) views open source as free beer - or rather free labor.

It's great when they get other people's labor for free, as long as they don't have to give away any of their own.

[solarengineer]

Per this link: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c...

"Communities we contribute to

Red Hat is a proud contributor to all aspects of the software stack, from the operating system and developer toolchain to middleware, desktop, and cloud. We financially support a number of open source organizations who help us create and maintain better open source software. We also contribute to a wide range of standardization efforts that help define future, interoperable technologies."

If RedHat were exaggerating, then those named communities would have called RedHat out by now.

[geerlingguy]

I've seen plenty of posts on Twitter, Medium, on the Fedora mailing list, and elsewhere by individual contributors and industry veterans (some of whom had storied careers at Red Hat) who are not happy with Red Hat's decision.

[pjmlp]

Lots of free beer in Linux exist because Red-Hat and IBM made it happen in first place.

As did some of the other beloved giants over here.

[dreamcompiler]

If "they" was Red Hat then I might agree with you. But "they" is now IBM, which has lawyers like a gas station bathroom has bacteria.

[bonzini]

Interesting how you seem to know more about the relationship between Red Hat and IBM than the people who actually work at Red Hat and IBM.

[geerlingguy]

It's cute how many people think the uproar is about whiny freeloaders or clickbait influencers.

[totallywrong]

No it's mostly from people with a commercial interest. I can't take Rocky seriously when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle.

[coldtea]

>when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle

So just like RedHat and IBM?

[happymellon]

What are you talking about?

What is Redhat demanding for free? They spend more than anyone else on developers for all of the Linux stack.

[coldtea]

>What is Redhat demanding for free

Their whole business started and grew on FOSS stuff people wrote for free...

[gbraad]

Just like Canonical asks for Ubuntu, and SUSE for SLE/Leap they make. Rocky/CIQ are not 'making' RHEL, ...

[coldtea]

IBM/RHEL doesn't make most of RHEL either. It's repackaged FOSS projects. Some they contribute to themselves as well, but most not.

[gbraad]

You paint a very weird picture of the engineers they pay to work on Gnome, the kernel, or the hundreds of other libraries used.

What more should they do?

Also note, Red Hat pays engineers for the extended support, the compliance https://access.redhat.com/articles/2918071, etc that customers expect from RH. Engineers contribute both upstream (first) and backport those changes to older releases.

[pritambarhate]

There was time today's big distros were small and they mostly took from community, packaged it and sold support for it. Rocky is small now so needs to take more from community. If it becomes big later it can also contribute back.

That's one of the benefits of open source. It helps small guys to get started and make it big. Once they become big, they can contribute back.

[totallywrong]

But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.

[gbraad]

> If it becomes big later it can also contribute back.

Contributing starts from day one https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/red_hats_co...

You can't all of a sudden expect you to have gained respect and trust, just because you are part of something 'big'.

I'd appreciate a small community more when they reach out, to grow them, than for a big one to lend them a hand with the basics.

[geerlingguy]

According to Rocky Linux devs they aren't: https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/vague-accusations-about-shad...

[gbraad]

Developers? What do they develop? If they have upstream contributions great, but if they are just adjustments to their build pipeline they are not developing... That is tweaking.

Read this post from Carl who works on CentOS and Streams: https://old.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/14jq5i7/red_hats_co...

[austhrow743]

Does it matter if Rocky and CIQ are separate organisations? Would your or anyone elses opinion be different if the flow went client -> paid support -> Rocky rather than client -> paid support -> CIQ -> donation -> Rocky?

[totallywrong]

That's one guy saying he doesn't know what's up. I have no doubt he doesn't get paid. What counts though, is this:

https://rockylinux.org/support

[tgmux]

I'm one of the board members who replied on the forum thread. Rocky has never sold support or any other product. We make an OS for the community, that's it. The link to the support providers page simply is that, a list of other third party providers who offer paid support services.

[gbraad]

So why is Rocky Linux as the 'project?' trying to indicate they still go to space: https://mastodon.social/@[e-mail]/1106244765..., referring to the 3 person seat, 2 year premium support 'they' sold to NASA?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 https://sam.gov/opp/2e0365ce1e3c4c179b50fb15573d68e4/view

[totallywrong]

So a "founding partner" is now a third party provider? Frame it as you may, but there is in fact commercial interest here. Even if Rocky were a separate entity, it depends on the sponsors selling support.

[liamnal]

I think you misread the post. He's clearly saying that he doesn't understand how the conclusion was drawn that there was anything shady going on. Willing to bet that the RESF builds rocky linux and CIQ does all the "shady" business dealings, which is out of their control.

[Brian_K_White]

They demand that Redhat pay for what they take in the only coin that the original producer ever asked for.

Redhat are the parasites, not Centos.

If Redhat don't agree to the deal that the gpl makes, they are free not to use any gpl code.

Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft, and it's an incredible expression of the art, when something is free, and yet you still manage to steal it.

[davisr]

> Trying to paywall gpl software is simply theft

No, it's not, and I've seen your comments elsewhere. I don't think you even know what the "free" in "free software" means.

You are COMPLETELY allowed to SELL free software. "Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." See: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

Red Hat is still distributing full corresponding source code to anyone they distribute a binary to. That is what the GPL class of licenses require, and that is what they are doing.

You are free to get the software elsewhere. You don't have to get it from Red Hat. And if Red Hat wants to charge you for it, you can take it or leave it.

[snovv_crash]

Yes, and anybody who buys RedHat product, even for a few minutes on a shared cloud provider, is entitled to the source code, and is also entitled to redistribute the source code as they see fit. Which is what Rocky is doing.

[theolivenbaum]

Which is both brilliant and surprising that RH didn't see it coming

[Brian_K_White]

I never said you can't sell free software. You have picked the wrong argument to try to make thinking I conflate the frees.

It's always been a fact that RH can't actually prevent a Centos-alike from reproducing the binaries from the same source, since RH are obligated to make the source available to anyone they hand a binary to. So you are right, they are still doing that. Congratulations on something that was never contested.

The problem is simply that they are trying, and HAVE at least issued statements asserting policies that they don't actually have the right to make. For instance they said that users can not legally redistribute the source they have access to, because it has RH trademarks in it. Well, fortunately that doesn't actually fly. The GPL isn't nullified by just including your cooyrighted or trademarked logo into the package. If anything, it just creates a derivative work and you just gave away all rights to your logo. Presumably they were'nt that stupid and carefully only do that to software they wholly wrote themselves, or things that are MIT and not GPL.

[bonzini]

You recognize a clickbait influencer when you see it.

[Brian_K_White]

What's the term for those paid actors placed in audiences to cheer for patently terrible things? Found one.

[bonzini]

"Free software contributor of 25 years"?

[Brian_K_White]

RedHat themselves are a free software contributor of 25 years. So the point still stands.

[bonzini]

I was a hobbyist contributor for 10 years before joining Red Hat and still do occasional contributions to random projects I use.

[coldtea]

What's the term from name-calling when facing some argument one doesn't like?