Comments on: IBM Red Hat Puts RHEL Source Behind Paywall

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 12:34:58 +0000

@casper I think you will find that the FSF consider a .spec file for a GPL package to be a derivative work and covered by the GPL. The issue wider issue is lots of packages in RHEL are not GPL licensed. There is plenty of BSD and Apache licensed code for which RedHat don’t have to redistribute anything.
It’s a short term money making scheme that destroys the value of the RHEL ecosystem to me as a paying RHEL customer. We are likely to go elsewhere for a mix of paid and rebuild systems. SLES/OpenSUSE LEAP is looking very attractive right now.

By: Casper

Casper — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 06:44:17 +0000

How about discussing what they actually have decided to do – they are limiting the access to their src.rpm’s which is their IP. Redhat have always pushed security and bug fixes upstream, meaning you can get the tar.gz with the source to all the binaries they provide – from upstream.

The src.rpm provide the source and the .spec which makes it easy to generate an .rpm – and that is something else than limiting access to source code. Redhat could actually just extract all the source’s from their src.rpm’s and provide them – there is nothing in GPL which talks about providing the build system – which rpm basically is.

I to some extend understand them, there are people who run CentOS/RockyLinux/ao. commercially, they maybe have a few RHEL licenses and when they run into a problem, they duplicate the problem on their RHEL servers and open a case with RHEL. On the other hand the hobbyist at home will be hit by this as they often do not have the money to by an RHEL license.

But it’s IBM and they have never really been customer friendly.

In the short run RedHat/IBM will make money from this, as customer will scramble to get their servers converted to RHEL to be able to get security fixes, but in the long run many of these servers will get converted to something like Debian or Ubuntu (I fear that ubuntu could pull the same one over time – no updates without money) and then RedHat will loose money.

On the other hand the enterprise needs support, and ofter they are willing to pay a premium to get it.

By: Eric Olson

Eric Olson — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:33:28 +0000

Whether sixteen systems is enough for a homelab is different than the hassle of dealing with license activation. At any rate, with today’s single-board computers and mini micro systems it’s easy for a home lab to have over 16 separate hardware devices–especially if the lab focuses on redundancy, fault tolerance and clustering.

On the other hand I don’t know how those free licenses work so maybe it isn’t so bad. How does the licensing requirement interact with VMs, Docker, Singularity and other containers? Are there problems with creating hundreds of RedHat-based Docker images and deploying them in a homelab where the hardware is not even running RedHat?

The difficulty as I see it is the same problem IBM has with the Power and Z architectures: There are no entry-level machines attractive to individual developers.

My opinion is in the case of hardware that entry-level for an individual developer means 8-core desktops with price and performance competitive to current AMD Ryzen systems. For cloud it means instances competitive with Oracle’s 4-core ARM-based free tier. For software, entry level means unencumbered by the need to register a license whether free or not when provisioning hardware, VMs and creating containers.

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 21:08:18 +0000

You can use the free developer license to run up to 16 Systems in production. Nobody is forcing you to pay for you to use RHEL in your homelab, or as a small business.

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 15:20:07 +0000

I suspect that this is mainly aimed at Oracle. However, I think it will have a chilling effect on the community of RH-like Linux users. I expect to see IBM killing the golden goose…

I actually stopped using RH after Red Hat 8 IIRC. That was the first time they tried forcing people to pay for using Red Hat.

I wonder if Canonical will get similarly greedy?

By: Benny_rt2

Benny_rt2 — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 13:48:18 +0000

I wonder if/how this will affect Oracle Linux. Currently I use free for use download Oracle Linux in my home lab (as long as not using for profit or in a corporate production environment).