I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

I don&#x27;t think this sort of emotional, loose-facted &quot;hot take&quot; style response is real constructive. I&#x27;m unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I&#x27;m re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don&#x27;t believe that Red Hat&#x27;s leadership cares a whole lot about open source anymore. If they do, they&#x27;ve demonstrated that they are willing to harm open source in order to (short-term at least) increase sales. (congrats salespeople, you finally won and killed CentOS. And congrats to all the people who used to tell the salesperson &quot;I can run CentOS for free, why should I buy RHEL?&quot;)<p>But that said, as far as I know, <i>one guy</i> used the term &quot;freeloaders&quot; and the context wasn&#x27;t clear at all who he was talking about, and certainly not clear whether that is one person&#x27;s opinion or the company&#x27;s opinion. I find it incredibly unlikely that he was talking about people who used CentOS and actually contributed to the community. But either way, attributing that to Red Hat as a whole is completely unfair and unproductive. Every big organization is going to have at least one person with an opinion they don&#x27;t agree with, and painting the entire org with the brush of one person is fallacious.<p>What&#x27;s the goal here? Is it to polarize into good and evil sides? Get people to dig in and defend their ground for fear of the &quot;other side&quot; seizing their words or decisions and holding it over them?<p>I like a lot of OP&#x27;s content, but I am a little worried that he&#x27;s a little too immersed in the Youtube success formula of tapping into emotions (particularly rage and anger) and it&#x27;s driving him to a very emotional take on this issue.

I&#x27;m sympathetic to Jeff&#x27;s position, but this is I believe the <i>third</i> post from this individual about this topic to reach the HN front page in the last week.<p>At this point I feel like there&#x27;s no more blood to be wrung from this stone. Jeff is free to take his ball and go home with it - just like Red Hat, in fact - but I think we&#x27;re past the &quot;this is notable news&quot; phase and another post from Jeff about his frustrations doesn&#x27;t really further the conversation.

To quote Jeff:<p>&gt; Here&#x27;s how it used to work:<p>&gt; Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux<p>&gt; They would release a new version.<p>&gt; They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch<p>A few remarks. The &quot;add magic sauce&quot; part is gone, all the secret sauce, or black box machinery is out in the open in CentOS stream. Red Hat no longer does any RHEL development behind the corporate firewall, and does everything out in the open in CentOS Stream. There is one caveat for security CVEs, but effectively those go into CentOS Stream and RHEL at the same time when the CVE embargo expires.<p>What this comes down to is wilfully ignoring CentOS stream. All the clones of RHEL can simply track CentOS stream, and even replicate all the &quot;Secret Sauce&quot; that is the CentOS Stream CI&#x2F;CD workflow. The process of replicating RHEL is so much easier today than ever before.

&gt; [^1] Red Hat seems to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer as of this writing, but nothing official has been announced yet. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;fareszr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1673145072714665984" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;fareszr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1673145072714665984</a><p>Hey I&#x27;m the one who wrote that tweet.<p>Mike, who first noted this on Mastodon, just updated his tweet (toot?) to say that his contacts at Red hat confirmed that this is a bug, the dev Subscription is still limited to 16 servers.

RHEL has a major ecosystem advantage related to drivers that they may not be aware of. They risk ruining this, as I will try to explain.<p>At the time industry started to take Linux seriously, RHEL was the dominant distro. As a result, and by accident, RHEL+derivs became the primary target for commercial hardware drivers. As an example - it&#x27;s easier to get obscure low-latency network and packet-capture cards working on RHEL+derivs than on other systems. RHEL+derivs is the assumed standard when you talk to firms that make that kind of stuff.<p>As a result of driver support, redhat derivs became the standard for commercial deployment. Redhat did not get this volume. The deployed volume is with all the Centos&#x2F;Rocky&#x2F;Alma that is deployed in hedge funds, prop firms, oil search grids, etc.<p>As I see it, this driver situation is the real value in the Redhat ecosystem. The userland is a bit of a mess, the package manager does not impress me. But I deploy RHEL-derivs because drivers work with no hassle.<p>If Redhat were able to cancel the derivatives, they would trigger the tipping point where industry ceases to treat RHEL+derivs as the standard driver target. Firms using centos on five thousand servers are not suddenly going to start paying USD 350 &#x2F; year &#x2F; server where previously they paid nothing. They will move to Debian, and eat the pain of the transition. Commercial driver culture would swiftly follow. That culture change would not take years. It would take days.<p>I think Redhat&#x27;s per-server sales model is naive. USD 350 &#x2F; year gets you a license with no support. This probably gets some commerce from small-business, and a bit more from firms with traditional service expectations.<p>But is that really where the opportunity is?<p>When I set up a data-centre presence, I want to PXE-boot each server. This way I can modify the system image for the grid by creating a new PXE image and rebooting hosts. Getting to this setup is fiddly. I wish there was an off-the-shelf solution from Redhat that did a good job of it. USD 2000 per year per site per 100 servers, including support for the PXE device itself. Redhat could coexist with the derivs if it took this path. If they built this as an appliance, that product could become ubiquitous like firewalls and network switches.

The Software Freedom Conservancy legal analysis of RHEL and GPL that OP links to is the most interesting part to me. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfconservancy.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;jun&#x2F;23&#x2F;rhel-gpl-analysis&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfconservancy.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2023&#x2F;jun&#x2F;23&#x2F;rhel-gpl-analysis...</a>

The IBM MBAs have finally taken over Redhat. Anything to squeeze another dollar out, even if it&#x27;s counterproductive in the long term.<p>We knew it would happen. Honestly I&#x27;m surprised it took this long.

&gt; Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn&#x27;t build and don&#x27;t own.<p>I feel like this ignores the fact that Linux&#x27;s continued success is, in large part, a direct consequence of its ability to compete for government contracts by way of Red Hat pursuing compliance and funding development to that effect, in addition to a massive amount of Linux development that Red Hat <i>does</i> directly fund.<p>Like, yeah - they&#x27;re not the only reason Linux is successful, but RHEL&#x27;s success definitely played a big part in making it suitable for the datacenter.

Some reasons why Stream is not replacement for Centos alike (Alma, Rocky, ...).<p>1. Stream can&#x27;t be used as base to build el-compatible packages. There is no any guarantees Stream doesn&#x27;t break ABI compatibility.<p>2. Stream has no large (several years) support cycle and can&#x27;t be used as a stable system. Yes, there is a big community who don&#x27;t need a paid licensed support from a RH and ready to help with bug reports and testing.

I 100% support and appreciate Jeff&#x27;s (and everyone&#x27;s) right to take a stance when it comes to how they spend their time. We have a finite amount of time available to us, and should spend it on what&#x27;s important to us, especially as that changes. See Jeff&#x27;s blog post on &quot;Saying No&quot;[1] that really hits home with why this is important.<p>What I&#x27;m having trouble understanding is the overwhelming use of IBM-related anecdotes (regardless of historical truthiness, and I&#x27;m not making any claim that it&#x27;s wise or unwise to be wary - that&#x27;s to each their own), reframed statements painted to appear like Red Hat&#x27;s made brash statements about its community, and the general gall needed to make statements such as &quot;tell your employees to stop [doing a thing]&quot;.<p>I get that this event may have felt like a violation of trust, and that a violation of trust probably hurts the most. To that end, I suppose emotional responses make sense. But it would have been significantly less cognitive load (on ones self, as an open source maintainer&#x2F;contributor) to just pull your support and move forward.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jeffgeerling.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;just-say-no" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jeffgeerling.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2022&#x2F;just-say-no</a>

Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the &quot;freeloader&quot; comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything.<p>If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on the developer program with free subs, and removing pain in the ass subscription limitations which is why people want to use Cent&#x2F;Rocky&#x2F;Alma to begin with.

I was quite upset with the abandonment of CentOS. Now RHEL is pushing even more. But, let&#x27;s forget the ethical quandary they walked into.<p>As others pointed out, this is self-defeating business direction.<p>Vast majority of government Linux systems in several countries was CentOS and RHEL. Lot of the improvement can be directly traced to FOSS improvements, outside of RHEL. Majority of the recommendations to use Cent &amp; RHEL in government systems came from the users and developers.<p>It is clear today that users &amp; developers (aka customers or consumers) <i>can</i> make serious impact to a brand by simply refusing to do business with the organization that upset them.<p>Pivoting from CentOS&#x2F;RHEL to another distro is significantly easier then pivoting from a tangible product or store.

I&#x27;m surprised at all of the drama surrounding Red Hat&#x27;s decisions. Red Hat is a for-profit company and not a charity. They (Red Hat) don&#x27;t make any claims of offering RHEL for free to the whole world. If you want that, Canonical&#x27;s Ubuntu may be a better option for you. Am I missing something?

Time to rally around the flag here. This is an incredibly hostile move by Redhat - and the attitude that only they provide value in the ecosystem is incredibly toxic and a direct threat to what open source stands for.

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war…<p>After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server.<p>After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported.<p>Why anyone would want to waste their time being a tester for a commercial product is very strange to me when there is Debian and even Arch which (for a rolling release) seems to be substantially more stable, better documented, etc.<p>I understand why it exists and it has its place but absent a few specific scenarios I have no idea why it would be a first choice for anyone.

Sounds like it is time to fork and own it. Just as legal as what IBM is doing and people might vote with their feet rather than pay the IBM tax.<p>There&#x27;s enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I&#x27;m guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a few smaller companies there should be enough to pull together an independent fork, a and leave IBM to piece together long term support by themselves. The goal would be to have a stable long term version but I&#x27;d say IBM&#x27;s involvement might be optional at this point. And what&#x27;s left of Red Hat might be tempted to jump ship. Shape it like a foundation and make sure that there is no single corporate owner that can change their mind and you have a fine basis for decades to come.

We should be calling Redhat what it really is these days - IBM. It’s not the old Redhat that many of us used to depend upon - IBM chipped away and it and pretty quickly too, they’ll run it into the ground and flog it off at a loss.

We started leaving red hat and red hat derivatives (centos) in favor of Debian when they were bought by ibm, assuming things wouldn’t turn out for the best.<p>While I was never a huge red hat fan, I do regret what’s happening now - I think that having a major corporate backer of open source code was very important. Other companies have since at least partially filled the gap, but still, I don’t like this. I guess that the red hat of the 90s is no longer the same company- time flies.

For all the RHEL to Debian refugees, here are some Ansible roles. I made the jump when they killed CentOS:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;liv-io&#x2F;ansible-roles-debian">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;liv-io&#x2F;ansible-roles-debian</a>

I&#x27;m a &quot;second generation refugee from XIV&quot;. XIV was a storage company started by Moshe Yanai, it pioneered many things in storage world. It was the catalyst that created many talented storage programmers that created their own successful companies: Infinidat, XtremIO, Weka, Elastifile, and many more.<p>IBM acquired XIV... and ran it into the ground. To anyone who had this kind of experience with IBM the possibility of RHEL dying under the guidance of IBM was almost as good as certainty.<p>My guess is that RHEL in not such a long time will take it&#x27;s proud place somewhere between zLinux and AIX, and most will never hear from it again.

Why can&#x27;t AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux drop their bug-for-bug compatibility commitment, and become stable distributions in their own right, based on CentOS Stream?<p>I think this ecosystem would gain a lot from these distributions having their own identity, instead of being just 1:1 copies of RHEL.<p>Change my mind. ;)

I&#x27;m done with everything related to Redhat after Redhat8(no it&#x27;s not RHEL 8, it&#x27;s their non-enterprise distro before it&#x27;s ditched and Fedora was invented as far as I can recall), yes it&#x27;s about two decades ago.<p>I since switched to Debian ecosystem, and never looked back. I was pissed off enough to never use any rpm-based distro ever since.

I&#x27;m running Debian for a week now and it works great. I only regret not jumping the RH ship earlier.

&gt;Red Hat seems to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer as of this writing<p>-- EDIT: I read twitter, seems it <i>may</i> mean number of machines as opposed to open sockets. But a very confusing post.<p>I stopped with RHEL 2 months ago at work, I use Slackware at home.<p>What does that quote mean, if I get a RHEL developer license, am I limited to the number of open sockets ? That almost goes back to the per user licenses in the old UNIX Days. If I ever had to use RHEL, I would now say no just because of this.

Red Hat is done with you also. IBM right now only cares about paying customers.

And another comment section full of people who don&#x27;t understand the GPL but are very confident about their wrong takes.

Would it be feasible to sed-replace the RHEL and&#x2F;or Fedora selinux and container-selinux rulesets for use with other Linux distros?<p>AFAIU only SUSE can run both AppArmor and SELinux?<p>And browsers are running as unconfined in selinux with like all major distros; even on ChromiumOS (which was based on Gentoo, Gnome, and Chrome) where WASM or a paid shell (or 15-30% cut from the <i>Play Store</i> only) is the only way for the kids to Python on the Chromebooks we bought them for school.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be great for them to not have to switch OSes and distros throughout the day.

I hope I&#x27;m not misunderstanding this, but isn&#x27;t the current arrangement perfectly valid under GPL? GPL states:<p>- If I provided _modified_ binaries<p>- I also have to provide the sources<p>That&#x27;s what&#x27;s happening now for people that can download the binaries.<p>What happened before was:<p>- _Anyone_ could download the sources<p>(Not a GPL requirement).<p>So, now, IIUC if you can download the binaries you can download the sources. If you can&#x27;t download the binaries (not a customer, for instance) you can&#x27;t download the sources.<p>The contract termination is not related to GPL in this sense.

Just gonna plug Suse that basically does what Red Hat + CentOS (not stream) used to be. Even more so because OpenSuse Leap is now binary compatible, not just source&#x2F; bug compatible like the RHEL flavors, the binaries in the Leap repositories are the same ones that are in the SLE repositories and you can switch from Leap to SLE with no issues. Amazing distro, it runs my home lab and would not change it for anything.

RHEL isn&#x27;t a choice for a lot of us. If you work in finserv&#x2F;government (especially DoD), many&#x2F;most of the time RHEL is effectively the only option.

If the SFC loses this case I wonder if this will lead to the creation and mass adoption of GPL v4 explicitly forbidding this loophole(and others which have popped up over the years).

I will never understand why someone would choose to use RHL over Debian flavored distro unless you want the enterprise support they provide. In which case, you reap what you sow.

How many times is everyone going to be so &quot;shocked&quot; when a corporation screws them over in a business descision?<p>Why would you have picked Red Hat in the first place?<p>Choose an independent distribution for more technical and end user oriented project trajectory.<p>Archlinux was the poster child for this until it basically fell to Red Hat with systemd adoption.<p>At this point Voidlinux is the most robust independent distro...

What about the small companies that started using CentOS then grew to needing enterprise support and switched to Red Hat? I&#x27;m sure they considered this before making the change, but I always assumed this was at least part of the strategy. Now there will be no free entry point that can be converted with a simple repo-swap.

Our team has seen 2 breaking changes in the past month from RH that caused problems in production. One in RHEL7 and one in RHEL8. It&#x27;s definitely making us question the wisdom of the RHEL LTS approach. The LTS part is not what we&#x27;re seeing.

I don&#x27;t mean this antagonistically and I realize I am lucky to have this perspective maybe, but all of this just reinforces a thought I&#x27;ve had for a long time, I feel bad for people forced to use these types of enterprise-y Linuxes.

I&#x27;ve heard people on HN say you can&#x27;t build a huge business off open source. That Red Hat was a one-off.<p>Maybe this supports the narrative? Assuming it goes poorly I mean.

Redhat will simply find themselves not supported if none of the open source projects can run CI against their distro.

Video version of this rant:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36488156">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36488156</a>

I havent seen a single server or workstation running rhel in the data science field, the most used distro in ds already was ubuntu and with the launch of pro covering the universe repository for security updates, I cant understand why redhat is making this move, cant see the endgame.

Glad to see redhat go down the shitter. I was never a fan, but that&#x27;s not the reason to hate on redhat. Everything is behind a paywall or a license. They just seemed like another Microsoft, especially when they started licensing Linux on at a per CPU core level. I think the only thing going for it is their support, but in my 20 years in the industry I&#x27;ve only ever used vendor support like once or twice, I&#x27;ve usually overcome obstacles on my own. At a previous workplace we had Ubuntu without licensing or support. The company tried to make us switch our infrastructure to redhat because they wanted indemnification. So we instead purchased Ubuntu support&#x2F;licensing and again - never once did we use it or need it. Virtually everything we built we figured out ourselves. So when it comes to vendor support, I usually don&#x27;t give a shit.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think this sort of emotional, loose-facted &quot;hot take&quot; style response is real constructive.<p>Of course not, but it gets you a lot of attention.

I think any GPL-licensee who charges for support is in no way encumbered by the GPL if they withdraw that support for any reason they choose.

What is the actual issue here? It&#x27;s not explained well.<p>Is that the CentOS Stream is not a <i>bona fide</i> community distro, but simply a sneaky name for something that is actually &quot;RHEL Beta&quot;?<p>The article refers to subscription paywalls; so I&#x27;m assuming they apply to this CentOS Stream thing, which indeeded makes it totally-not-a-community edition.<p>Which makes it a dickhead move for it to be using the name.<p>Technically, it would way more sense for a <i>bona fide</i> community OS to be the upstream for the commercial one with the paywalls and subscriptions, than to be making community editions downstream. But it looks like CentOS Stream isn&#x27;t it, so the point is moot.

&gt; They used to have edgy ads quoting Ghandi and ... It&#x27;s funny they used to be so devoted to that Ghandi quote ...<p>It is Gandhi, not Ghandi!

I wish I could get rid of RHEL. Forced to use it - and pay through the nose - with a state agency I&#x27;m doing contract work for.

Could somebody who maintains a particularly important open source software change the license to say basically “you must release your source code to anyone who requests it free of charge whether they are a customer or not”? Yes Redhat is a for profit company, but them deciding to make a business off of software that has licenses that might change to their detriment is their problem. Oh wait is that what they are doing to others now too? Well I guess that’s what happens..

IBM trying to shake some loose change out of Red Hat users and copying Elastic&#x27;s homework with the licensing switcheroo?

Will Red Hat start discreetly tagging source code releases per subscription to find out who is sharing source code?

Nowadays I feel like a fool , why should I do open source contribution? To enrich these big corporation that thank you with that behaviours and pissing a you professional category ?<p>- They stole your code embedding it in close commercial crap without credits for the authors nor source code publishing;<p>- They stole your code using it to create AI appliance that are absolutely not intelligent but act like indirection layer to nullify the license and than they say that developer can be substitute but those &quot;AI&quot; appliances;<p>- As Mr. Geerling point out, now they shamelessly pass on the GPL license without fear of retaliation;<p>I hope that the community will do its move, first of all updating the GPL to explicitly forbid this loophole, I&#x27;m talking about paywall and illegal restriction of the source code distribution. Moreover , I think some kind of open source licence enforcement organisation should exist. Licenses without enforcement are hot air. For plenty of that organisation Open Source programmers are only simpletons , not dedicated peoples building their fortune. IMHO, I would like to see the possibility to bill for commercial use of open source code easily with license that explicitly cover this area and, again, organisation doing enforcement. Time is a priceless resource and IMHO is inconceivable that corporation etc reduce open source programmers to the role of slave workers of third world countries.

I think this is just the beginning of a whole wave of open source behind paywall type of deal. Ubuntu put the Amazon store app in their distro, for Christ&#x27;s sake.<p>The only downside I see to this (I don&#x27;t care to get involved in the ethics or centos or &quot;freeloading&quot; debates&#x2F;conversation) is gatekeeping &#x2F; whistleblowing may get much harder. Granted, I don&#x27;t care to or have ever looked at RHEL source code, but there is a lot of independent observers out there looking at code that runs servers and desktop software for very important things. Projects in my area that come to mind are scientific Linux and those spins that were directly supported by fermi and the like, and were based on RHEL. That code got put on all kinds of servers and desktops in very important applications.

Fantastic opportunity for someone to found Blue Hat.

What are my alternatives?

People talk about how pre-IBM RedHat was somehow a good player. Perhaps that is true on the Linux side, where there were more eyes. Outside of Linux, I can say they were definitely toxic after acquiring JBoss, locking down previously open-sourced features, shipping bugs that could only be fixed if you had access to the enterprise contract, deleting content from the Wiki that they wanted behind the paywall of the enterprise contract. Even if some of that started pre-acquisition, it certainly accelerated post.<p>It&#x27;s amazing to me that anyone upstream would lift a finger for RedHat at this point.

IBM behind the scenes squeezing every drop of value out of Red Hat…sad to see but this will continue

Can someone in Red Hat&#x27;s engineering org walk into the CEO&#x27;s office and bitch slap the common sense back into them? Bc I am sick of seeing Red Hat being sacrificed to the alter of &quot;shareholder primacy.&quot;

Embrace, engulf, extinguish.<p>Looking at you as well, systemd and Pottering.<p>I am an embedded engineer and this act of engulfing is also stifling me and my effort to provide a reliable and easy-to-maintain Linux&#x2F;GNU away from the likes of RedHat.

Is this a clickbait title? Or do I misunderstand the word enterprise?<p>They are not done with using Linux for &quot;a project or undertaking, typically one that is difficult or requires effort.&quot; or &quot;a business or company.&quot;<p>They are no longer going to use a specific version of linux that was made by &quot;a business or company.&quot;<p>Do people really care that much about linux distros? Between 2 decades of personal use and a few years of professional Fortune 20 use, linux seems to be linux to me. (Could just be that I have stuck to Debian flavors)