Rocky Responds to RedHat and The Open Source Community..

After the switch from old redhat to fedora, and then them shutting down centos and now this next step of block people from downloading the souce, i pretty much will now stick only with debian and slackware. It seems canonical, and suse are not too far behind with their distros as well. From now on i am sricking to community based distros.

All that tried to exploit and suffocate open source in the big way filled for Chapter 11. Lets wait and see if RHBM conglomerate are smart enough to see that

- Red Hat - bought by an evil company which produced punch cards for Nazis in WW2, so they could more efficiently enumerate Concentration Camp victims.

-Implementing Microsoft BORG-like Globalist telemetry in Fedora 40.

- Close sourcing RHEL

I see the writing on the wall!

"RHEL" is not pronounced R - H - E - L. It's pronounced "rel" as in "relative". It's like spelling out NASA, nobody does that! It was hard to watch a video of someone doing this.

I would really like to know more about the details about the two workarounds that Rocky found.
E.g. I found redhat/ubi9 and can start it ("docker run -t -i bash -il") but how to continue? Where to retrieve the SRPMs now?
Where can I find a pay-per-use cloud instances based on RHEL9.2 ?

I keep hearing it's about the relationship between RedHat and Oracle. I don't know anything about that stuff but even if they very vaguely imply that was their motivation, they were doing this because it's an issue between giants and they have no intention of screwing over little guys; community reception might be more understanding or less heated in my opinion, instead of you calling people who contribute to your environment "'freeloaders'" by some.

people can't pay for their necessities with good karma. they need to be paid. this is why linux is destined to just be a niche for geeks. if you want support, you need to PAY for it. linux is a nice idea, but it fails as a mainstream corporate OS. you have to pay for stability. all you freeloading idiots are the ones stopping linux from becoming a real competitor to M$. but continue whining. O.o

RHEL is no longer open source, since a open source software allows their user to view, modify, and distribute. Telling their user that their licence will be revoked if they redistribut the software will make it 'source available', not 'open source', which means the user will be able to view the source code, but nothing else.

Ps i am not a lawyer, dont quote me on this

Imagine if SUSE & Nix started to fill in

BTW, how do you upgrade from one version of a distro to the next (e.g: fedora 38 to fedora 39)
?????????

I think RH is more afraid of downstream releases such as Rocky, Alma and CentOS (earlier releases) cause the downstream releases are more being worked on instead of the next or upcoming releases. For an example, there are number of community engineers who works on derivatives or downstream, 1:1 distros of RHEL. And in RH there are a bunch of engineers who work on RHEL releases, the number or RH engineers is very less as compared to the community or the contributiors from open sources distributions which makes it more engaged more productive and more stable. Instead of restricting the access to the source code, RH should be more open to the others, it would benefit alot to RHEL. Just restricting the access and the stuff, RH would never be so reliable without these downstream distributions. Just the fact they afraid that one day they don't take over RHEL ! RH you can directly admit Yes we are afraid and no harm in accepting the reality.

Good response from Rocky.

The solution to this problem is obvious. Sign up for RHEL and share the source code with Rocky Linux. This is perfectly legal under the GPL terms. The only recourse that RHEL has is to discontinue support, but how do they know who did it? Are they going to harass their entire customer base? And if they do figure out where the leak came from (which seems to me to be almost impossible) then their only recourse is to discontinue support services as anything more than that would be an actual violation of the GPL license terms (in which case RHEL discovers that it can no longer distribute RHEL!) Ok, they discontinue services, then all it takes is for one more RHEL client to share the source code, rinse and repeat. I have no idea how Red Hat can actually follow through with this in practice. This letter seems to be saying indirectly that Rocky Linux will be happy to use this technique.

IBM IBM'ing

RHEL's pricing reflects the quality and reliability it offers. By choosing RHEL, you are opting for a thoroughly tested and enterprise-ready operating system that has been fine-tuned to meet the demanding needs of businesses. The higher price is a testament to the value it brings to your organization."

RHEL totally professional not humanity

I like Rocky and CentOS ❤

Why don't they file a case in court and see the effectiveness of the GPL?

Well, this drama kinda forced me to stop using Fedora workstation. I am using an arch based distro endeavouros instead with LTS kernel. What could go wrong?! I'm actually enjoying this lol

Redhat is no Oliver Twist, their revenue has been increasing in the past years and at the same time they just fired 5% of the workforce. This is IBM milking the cow , and at this point, they not a FOSS friendly company anymore, profits over morals.

If you want to close off your codebase and throw leftover scraps at community there's the MIT license already for that.

I’m glad I’ve spent more time working on Debian and very little time on anything related to Red Hat. Anything related to Red Hat is going is going to lose a lot of developers. I also should learn Arch Linux too. I’m glad Raspberry Pi was always based on Debian. I think most embedded were all based on Debian or used it directly.

In my opinion, it's time for someone else to start selling support contracts and start stealing Red Hat's customers by promising to never have a contract like Red Hat's with their customers that attempt to get around the spirit of the GPL if not the letter.

Please excuse my ignorance but why don't the companies stop using Redhat and move to other free and open source alternatives like Debian or Ubuntu? What is so special about RHEL?

I have been running Debian on production servers for over 10 years, and I have never had any issues.

Money rules the world, remember Elasticsearch vs. Amazon?

Debian 12 could not have come at a better moment, giving the community a DUMB stable, totally free community-driven answer when we most needed it, and now with so much usability even for desktops.
That's the lesson, we trusted Red Hat, and thought they were "different" and now we learned our lesson, if we want free software we must use free software, and not fall for a wolf in sheep's clothing again.

(looking at you Canonical.)

I'm sensing a repeat of SCO Linux days. Except this time, Red Hat is set to start behaving like SCO.

Redhat's point is very much genuine. Let's be honest here, without RH will you be using Linux at the scale we use now? Most of desktop Linux a.k.a GNOME was RH Money. CentOS back then, and now Rocky, Alma, whatever are just freeloaders, wanna be copycats "enterprise" distros without any investments on their own. Without money nothing runs, I beg these distro founders to invent a Time Machine, and preach communism/socialism in the 90s in the "spirit of open source", heck even the word "open source" was invented because businesses confuse "Free Software" with "no cost". These distros will kill FOSS, not RH's decisions. They should burn in hell. Full support to RH.

The name Rocky so apropo. Essentially, Rocky telling Red Hat, aka Ivan Drago, I am Knocking you The F@#! Out (KTFO). Luv it!

I want a hardfork and everybody tries to work with them and become the new standard.

This is so ridiculous, they "don't find value in a rebuild", yea, tell that to the hundreds of businesses that can manage their own servers and do not want or care to have a RH subscription. At least they revealed their true face, the "we're open source" charade is finally over.

I see and get both sides on this one. So many legal hairs to split here. In a way RHEL main offering is the professional support and additional tools like cockpit. However RHEL is correct here too that Rocky Linux and Alama linux pull customers off them since bug for bug compatible. In the end investigations into if this violates GPL3 license or not will determine if it sticks. I never went with using these distros at home for this reason, figured this would happen someday.

I've already started the move to Debian, not sure I'm going to change that plan. That said, I do use XCP-NG which has a lot of CentOS inside, which kind of scares me.

What IBM(redhat) is doing is completely legal with most "Open Source Software" licensing, most if not all are not copyleft. Most of the software in RHEL is not GPL licensed. This is a fundamental difference between "Open Source Software" and "Free Software". The GNU Public licenses of "Free Software" are to protect "user freedoms" and are copyleft. IBM(redhat) would be violating the GPL if they removed a RHEL subscription from someone exercising the GPL granted rights, which they won't do for GPL'ed software. IBM(redhat) really is attacking the GPL licenses.

RHEL is right, rocky and Alma Linux needs to be more independent and not just a copy of RedHat, RHEL needs money to pay its employees.

In other words, a group of developers that closely copies a paid product (even if it is open source) and celebrates it by promoting itself as 1:1 with RHEL without contributing anything to it, and that only works for greedy companies that do not want to pay the price. license complains that they are cutting the source of "his project" XDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD. The only bad thing about Red Hat is not allowing diffusion of the project after the rest is fine, people in general think that being open source is being free, for things like this, companies do not take Linux and opensource as seriously as they should

Debian 12 > RHEL

Community should actually respond to RedHat and do things in a way that RH can't get any of community's work anymore. Also, let everyone stop using anything related to RedHat and let them enjoy their life and decisions. No more Fedora, Centos, RedHat etc.

Thanks for this info. I was unawre of this statement by Rocky.

Do not contribute to Rocky. Move away from any RH related stuff.

People keep asking if Red Hat has infringed upon the GNU GPL by limiting their source code to those whom they give binaries. It's a trap. It's a trap because the much bigger problem is the threat of revoking your license to RHEL if you distribute source code.

The GNU GPL expressly prohibits you from changing the license terms or placing additional restrictions on people. Red Hat has done this. The GNU GPL requires that anyone who receives the software be free to redistribute it as they see fit. You're only obligated to give source to those whom you have given binaries, but you MAY NOT impose restrictions on what they do with the source, period.

If your license to RHEL is contingent on surrendering your rights to the GNU GPL, that is an additional restriction.

Question should be simple, RHEL profits from open source community & if they are not giving back a clear percetage of their income to Open Source directly proportionate to code they used, what moral stand they have to pretend that Distros like Rocky are impacting them negatively?

The big hat to drop is Oracles reply to RedHat.

So you are begging the company that you take work from, repackage it and brand it as your own? Nah... money has to be made. Rocky and Alma have no options, sadly. Just sounds like Rocky is actually the copy machine and is sad it's out of toner...aka, code.

In a normal healthy community, rocky would have said "I dont like this, let's fork" why didn't they do that?

I think IBM is the problem here, Redhat is just another example of how they are trying to extract as much money as possible from their base, and forcefully exclude those who won't give in. They are bullies. At least Dick Turpin wore a mask.

Arch ftw

So...
Rocky enjoys working for free and relying on donations... 😏

Not gonna lie, RedHat drama is quite interesting