I want to be clear on my bias here: I firmly believe that open source would not be a ‘thing’ if it weren’t for Red Hat. Linus Torvalds himself once said (albeit 10 years ago) that the shares he received from Red Hat before their IPO was ‘his only big Linux payout’. I don’t think anyone would disagree with the statement that Red Hat has had a major significant positive impact on Open Source across the world.
This morning I listened to an excellent podcast called “Ask Noah” where he interviewed Red Hat’s Mike McGrath who has been active on the linux subreddit and other social media. It seems that Mike has been involved in the decision to restrict Red Hat’s sources on git.centos.org:
https://podcast.asknoahshow.com/343 (listen at ~20 mins)
It’s really worth a listen. Mike clearly lays out the work that Red Hat (I was surprised to find out that it is NOT the Rebuilders) does to debrand the Red Hat sources, why they’re pulling that back on those unbranded sources, and that they understand the ramifications of doing so. It’s also interesting that Mike is of the opinion that there is nothing wrong with doing a Rebuild, and he defends them by stating “that’s the cost of doing business”. Noah and Mike go into many of the nuances of the decision and again, it’s really worth listening to. Mike also talks about “bad faith” when dealing with the Rebuilders at 40:30, which I think explains Red Hat’s decision. I got the distinct feeling he’s bound by some ethical code so he won’t/can’t say too much though.
There’s also this discussion about Rocky Linux securing a contract with NASA:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968
that had a lot of internal discussion at my company this week, which given what’s just happened may shed some more light on Red Hat’s decision.
There are always two sides to every story but in this case there are three sides to this story.
On one side, you have Red Hat, a long time champion of open source software, that has poured billions of dollars into open source development, and which has 1000s of employees who not only on ‘company’ time but in their own time manage, develop, contribute, and create open source code. They have funded countless successful and unsuccessful projects that we all use.
Against Red Hat are two largely distinct groups. The first is the Rebuilders themselves, who Red Hat has claimed ‘don’t offer anything of value back to the community’. This is not meant to be a statement on the usefulness of the rebuilds (Rocky, Alma, Oracle, etc.) but rather a very directed statement on whether or not the rebuilders are providing bug report, feedback, and contributions to the packages that Red Hat has included in RHEL.
The second group, which stands somewhat behind the Rebuilders, are the Rebuild users. One could argue that the users are caught in the middle of Red Hat and the Rebuilders, however, I think it is better to look at them as being an equal ‘side’ in this discussion.
The Rebuild users are in a very unfortunate position: they’re about to lose access to a free product that they’ve come to depend on. They are, as expected, unhappy about Red Hat’s decision to stop providing access to RHEL sources. My next statement is callous, and I expect it to be read as such: You get what you paid for. That is not meant to indicate anyone is cheap, it’s just that you shouldn’t have expectations when you are using something for free.
Here’s the interesting part for me. As far as I can see, none of the users are jumping to the Rebuilder’s defence of Red Hat’s accusation that the Rebuilders provide nothing back to the community. And, as far as I can tell across various social media and news platforms’ comments sections, largely the user community AGREES with Red Hat’s position. Informed users – not all users – are using a RHEL Rebuild knowing that there is no benefit in doing so for the community.
I have yet to read a reply from the Rebuilders where they categorically deny that this is the case. And to me, that’s glaring and damning of the Rebuilders’ position. Even the ‘defenders’ (for lack of a better word) of the Rebuilders have yet to provide a response.
Yeah, that’s probably part of why I feel so strongly about this. I relied on CentOS in my dev/test pipeline for years, so I’m effectively one of the individuals that was rug-pulled. Will Red Hat now try to squeeze us for license revenue again, at a time when sales are tight and cost controls are even tighter? Will I need to rework my dev/test pipeline to use AlmaLinux or RockyLinux, and maybe rework it again if Red Hat’s restrictions end up making those not a 1-for-1 replacement for RHEL testing? The uncertainty is unwelcome.
Possibly not, though I have to wonder whether Red Hat would still enjoy their current market position if they hadn’t been allowing this to begin with. That others could easily build on top of what they built is part of what made RHEL probably the dominate enterprise Linux distro on the market today. It’s the one I see installed most often at customer sites at any rate.
I’m not sure this maps 1-to-1, but it feels like Red Hat might end up enshittifying their own OS in an effort to extract more revenue from it. Doing so could easily backfire on them. Any restrictions they add to generate more revenue also add friction for third-party developers looking to interoperate with the OS. Some of them may choose to stop directly supporting RHEL as a result. Too much of a pain, let some RHEL customer take care of that. But most Red Hat customers are paying for RHEL because they don’t want to do those sorts of things. They want to install the OS, install the software they need, and get on with whatever their core business happens to be. Over time, this could corrode the value of RHEL itself.
I do not think they would have grown as much without being so open to start with. But that does not change the moral implications if they had been closed to begin with. In fact I think the opposite, it feels much worst what they are doing because they used the openness to grow so much and gain market share. But then once they are dominate in the enterprise space they try to pull back control and restrict what people can do. It feels like being used to gain popularity and favour only to be betrayed for a bit more money in the short term.
Yes, I believe they will/are doing this. Seems to be an inevitable thing for profit driven companies to do. We are seeing so many companies doing this in recent time.