[globalnode]

I was thinking of trying Fedora (currently using Debian) and this comment made me look up who owns red-hat. ibm now owns red-hat, and apparently vanguard owns a huge chunk of ibm. I wonder how much influence any of the sponsors have over what goes into the os and what direction it takes.

[rat87]

Vanguard "owns" a huge chunk of everything. Vanguard runs index funds, most peoples retirements are vanguard buying small shares of an index fund representing all the big companies on the stock exchange

[TZubiri]

Also they simultaneously hold the ownership rights as well as equivalent owenrship liabilities, so they own shit squat in net terms (excpet maybe their management fees).

[mattkrause]

It’s even weirder than that!

Vanguard has an odd corporate structure where it’s owned by the funds that it manages, so it’s effectively a co-op owned by its customers.

[_yb2s]

I don’t understand why customer owned co-ops aren’t ubiquitous. Vanguard is amazing- low fees, and great services- they beat all of the competition. I had to call their support line today and it was the most professional customer service I’ve ever experienced.

[TZubiri]

Interesting, that's inline with Bogle's mission for low (0%) mgmt fees.

I think it probably doesn't apply to other majority holders like BlackRock though.

[fny]

Vanguard is everyone’s retirement account. Everytime someone buys their S&P 500 ETF, they go buy stocks.

[TZubiri]

The vanguard thing is a common misconception, I've worked for S&P and we did tracking of ownership.

Think of these huge funds as proxies. It's like someone with little finance trading saying most of the internet is owned by cloudflare or RIPE or ARIN.

[lrvick]

Fedora is centrally built/signed and not part of the reproducible builds project. It should not be used for any systems you need to be able to trust.

You are much better off sticking with Debian anyway, or looking at Guix for a significant improvement.

[dismalaf]

> vanguard owns a huge chunk of ibm

Vanguard and other large institutions own a huge chunk of everything because most investors don't buy stocks directly, they buy them through mutual funds, ETFs, etc...

[hedora]

You probably missed the news that RedHat decided to systematically violate the GPL:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

tl;dr: They no longer publish source packages except to paying customers. If the paying customers republish the source, then RedHat closes the account.

I'm surprised none of the upstream developers have sued them for violating the license. There's no way I'd trust an organization that was behaving so unethically with control over my machine's package manager.

Anyway, I've been pretty happy with Devuan (Debian without SystemD). I find it much more stable than Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, etc., and all the userspace stuff I care about works great.

[dralley]

This is wrong. Everything in RHEL is downstream from CentOS Stream - all of the sources are published there. The only differences are a handful of trademarks.

>If the paying customers republish the source, then RedHat closes the account.

Even if you ignore the above and think only about the official sources provided direct from the customer portal, it's still not a violation IMO.

Because that's not a restriction on how you can use the software you've been provided, it's a restriction on which services you can expect Red Hat to continue providing you, i.e. providing new software in the form of updates. The software you have already been provided continues functioning, it's not like the system gets bricked if your account is closed. GPL only specifies "what are you allowed you do with this piece of software you have been provided with", it doesn't guarantee a future relationship between the provider and receiver.

At worst it's a murky area, not a "systematic violation" as you claimed.

Also, like, it's a hypothetical thing the user agreement claims could be done, not something that necessarily is done. I don't think there has ever been an actual demonstrated instance of an account being closed because of that.

[pabs3]

> Everything in RHEL is downstream from CentOS Stream - all of the sources are published there.

IIRC thats incorrect, RHEL gets some fixes before CentOS Stream.

[dralley]

They may get published to RHEL first in the case of embargo'd security fixes (and not by long), but the point is that the sources are still published to CentOS Stream.

[tbrownaw]

> I'm surprised none of the upstream developers have sued them for violating the license.

Sounds like that implies that they probably actually aren't.

[globalnode]

Cheers, will check it out.