[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.

[pipo234]

Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre, while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer?

I for one am perfectly happy paying some. Appreciating that RedHat is not a charity, while also doing great work for the community I bought the distro and merchandise for years. Even when they changed course to target enterprises and I became less their target audience I kept supporting them for being a major contributor.

I feel bad that other distros try to profit from the free beer (and its implied enterprise quality), but restricting access to what is essentially a commons in order to force other through your front door takes away all of the goodwill.

[bonzini]

> Call me a hippie, but wouldn't it be great if Rocky got its way with free as in libre, while RedHat got its way with NOT free as in beer?

Now we're talking. :D

To me, the optimal outcome would have been a foundation overseeing the creation of a CentOS Stream derivative. Something that, in a unicorn-and-rainbows world, even Red Hat could join as mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Sharing the work and then competing on the services. However, based on this very blog post I have doubt that this is the idea of the money-making arm of the rebuilders.

[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."

[luma]

Post-IBM RH always falls back on this: we took a free operating system and made billions from selling it to others, and now we're extra-mad that somebody else is doing the same.

[bonzini]

Why the fixation with "post-IBM"? Ever heard of PNAELV?

https://lwn.net/Articles/578768/ for the history (up until 9 years ago).

[pipo234]

Curious to learn who the bad faith actor was. Oracle? Rocky Linux? Alma? VMware? All of the above?

And what avenues of negotiating a better outcome did they try before opting for the nuclear tactics?

[bonzini]

I don't have a view in which rebuild they saw bad-faith action from; but I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.

[pipo234]

Disclaimer: I'm an ex-oracle employee.

Making millions on DB software only withhold RedHat the pocket change they absolutely deserve is absolutely pathetic. Even with the helpful support and hand holding of then co-workers, I found that Oracle's unbreakable linux is a close to useless rip off, littered with subtle gotchas, pitfalls and please-insert-yet-another-license-key-here.

Installing, tuning and maintaining an OS professionally on enterprise hardware to run enterprise software is the bread and butter of RedHat. I never understood why they insisted pushing their own mediocre engineers instead, and did not want to pony up the (relatively) modest cost of reselling the license.

> I have doubts something has changed at Oracle.

I guess so. It still mystifies me why they haven't gone out of business wearing the emperors cloths.

[account42]

That quote is someone complaining that others are making money of "their" work, not that Red Had isn't making enough money to fund development.