Red Hat Drama Keeps Getting Better and Better

Today, the BeginLinux Guru adds a bit more commentary about the continuing drama that's coming from Red Hat. If you're a Linux administrator or an aspiring Linux administration who wants to improve your Linux skills, what Red Hat is doing could affect your ability to set up a proper learning lab.
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[@mitchelvalentino1569]

Fantastic take. You weren’t too harsh, just on point-as you should be, since this is an important topic. It’s far easier to maintain freedom that we have than to regain freedom we’ve lost. We should never take libre and open-source software for granted, since it’s a miracle it even exists at all. I’m grateful you and others can remind Linux users of the importance of FOSS values, from multinational corporations like IBM to small-time hobbyists and tinkerers alike. It’s ironic that IBM and their proprietary inclinations have resulted in decades of losses and acquisition churn, whereas Red Hat built a profitable company on proud open-source values. They’ve chosen a new direction, yet I think in the long-run they need the Linux community more than the Linux community needs them.

[@geekoacolyte]

It doesn't matter whether it is right or wrong - they have an army of lawyers to argue their (i.e. RH/IBM) case. The GPL is a legal document - most of the confusion stemmed from the fact that we techies tend to read it from our POV - it has to be interpreted by lawyers.

[@mitchelvalentino1569]

@@geekoacolyte true, but EULAs don’t necessarily have standing just because someone agrees to it. Many tech companies have had their EULAs revoked or nullified. Red Hat’s is not codified, and there is no strong copyleft precedent yet. Litigation could turn IBM/Red Hat on its head, especially if the judge or jurisdiction is favorable. There’s a lot of gray area here, and when I look at it, I see a lot of legal hubris and thin ice. I see the GPL taking precedent over any EULA, because the latter is contingent upon the former. I also see loopholes :)

[@mitchelvalentino1569]

@@geekoacolyte very good point on us techies reading it from our POV 👍

[@Dennis-Earl-Smiley]

Regardless of outcome, time to fork all redhat previous source code. Then make our own stuff from it, our way. Then boycott official redhat products and let them go out of business.

[@banatibor83]

Lol. As a single user you do not have reasons to use RedHat, but think like a business. You have a multimillionare company, providing services what would you base that company on? A community distro and when something goes south you pray your guys find the solution on stackoverflow or on a company which can lend you experts, especially if you bought support. When big money is on stake you want insurance.

[@MiningForPies]

This is so funny. Thinking red hat will go bust because a small selection of (none enterprise) users will go their own way. If you hate red hat that much, and don’t value their contributions - why fork their work? Use another base.

[@ponirvea]

Great video, but there's a transformer hum in the background. Noise cancelling the videos or recording in an isolated space would help make the videos more accessible and easier to consume for people with sensory processing issues.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Oh, dear. Sorry about that. It's actually not a transformer, but rather a mining rig over in the laundry room. I didn't realize that it bled through.

[@jickjackyou]

Red Hat has unfortunately been going downhill since it forked into Fedora and Enterprise Linux. The company made a big public relations mistake back then and it's continuing to do so today. I don't think the subscription model is at fault so much as its enterprise customers are concerned. The fault is they abandoned an otherwise devoted fan base while not really gaining anything (we still have non-Red Hat forks, like CentOS prior). It's been downhill ever since with one bad decision after another. They opened the doors to people considering other distributions who weren't enterprise users and weren't their target customers. That led to folks like me looking more toward Debian and other forks (decades ago). I founded a few companies in 2008 and my company hasn't ever run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on any of our servers even if that is a better product in some respects (slightly longer support cycles which is our #1 concern). I left Red Hat for Debian and Debian based distributions and we never even considered Red Hat by the time I founded a business. It's sad to see distribution after distribution make the same mistakes of pissing off the GNU/Linux community. Not everyone does it- Linux Mint has a working business model while NOT pissing off its user base. They didn't move to Unity when Canonical f'd up the user interface because it wasn't in their users interests. They didn't adopt Snaps either because it wasn't in their users interests. There are gripes here and there for sure- but they're not doing the things that others have done to piss off their user base or the larger GNU/Linux world (looking at you Lindows, Canonical, IBM, and others). You don't have to be perfect, but you do need to consider the spirit of the GPL, the consequences of paywalls, and seriously account for changes that may piss people off (aka Amazon integration with Ubuntu, new user interfaces, do some beta tests and don't jump ship if that doesn't work out, etc).

[@grokitall]

on the common phrase about the paywall, it is technically accurate as you have to agree to extra terms, one of which allows red hat to decide arbitrarily with no appeal that you are not a developer and thus need to pay them per seat licenses to keep getting access.

[@hightechsystem_]

So much great software went to die under IBM.

[@RyanLelek]

It definitely marks the end of an era. Great opportunity for Rocky/Alma to offer competing support contracts if they have the team or partner(s). I looked up the price for RHEL simply to see, and $349 for the very limited version for physical hosts only and $799 for the fully-featured one is way out of line. Very unlikely people will pay that on their own, and similar to what you were saying, the techies help influence what gets into enterprise in the first place with training, bugfixes, etc

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Yeah, you're right. And, even if I were to pay that price, it still wouldn't be suitable for me to build a lab for learning, training, or writing documentation.

[@crapphone7744]

Oddly close to Windows server pricing.

[@undavybe]

You forget RHEL or for that fact of the matter any other product offered by Red Hat is geared towards the Enterpriser customer, not the individual. When RH OS turned into RHEL, that was the target audience. Those support contracts have very high and demand SLA's that require sometimes under 4hr response times, so of course prices are high. But the support contract prices will vary from customer to customer based on various different factors. Yes individuals aren't gonna pay that, but you can still enjoy RHEL without the support with a dev license

[@rosomak8244]

People buy this kind of support contracts in corporations because those serve basically the role of insurances against possible responsibilities. It's all about risk mitigation in the enterprise management world. They don't pay them for the "support" in terms of hand-holding on the job. However imposing on your customers possible additional risks (like a contract termination) will give them serious incentives to reconsider.

[@RyanLelek]

Clarification. Of course this cost is geared at companies that like to throw cash at problems. That's not what I'm saying and not what I understood from Donnie's video. The problem is the cost is way too high for individuals to get involved in the ecosystem. As Donnie says, Microsoft has a free trial mode on its server products (3 months from my memory) that allows tinkerers to tinker, learn, and train. RedHat provides no such path and that will damage them in the long run as the ecosystem moves to distributions that are accessible

[@nicolaskeroack7860]

Gure definitely looks linux approved lol Classic beard of the sage guru

[@DavidCoutinhoCG]

Im downloading all fedora source code from 37, 38, and rawhide, i want to join some guys to fork fedora for good.

[@DavidCoutinhoCG]

imagine a world where alma and rocky join hands to develop in this fork and not fedora, thats what im looking at, let fedora and rhel rot.

[@demodemo5991]

If it is not for compatibility with red hat, then it is meaningless whether it is centos, fedora, or other source code forked from red hat. Because you can use any other linux distribution, not derivatives based on the source code of red hat enterprise linux.

[@DavidCoutinhoCG]

@@demodemo5991 i already gave up, im just a noob, dont know how to do that shit, but i dont care for "1:1" compatibility for red hat, i think what OpenELA is doing to become a new standard much better and superior, i'm saying a hardfork for good, so Oracle, Rocky, Alma, OpenSUSE fork of RedHat, i hope that they become the new standard for good.

[@MiningForPies]

3:00 something too many of the Linux community forget. You cannot demand the results of other people’s labour for free. If they want to charge you, they’re perfectly entitled to. If they want to give it away for free, that’s ok too. Too many grifters expect everything handing to them on a plate.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Actually, most of the source code that goes into any Red Hat Enterprise Linux is code that the Red Hat developers obtained for free.

[@MiningForPies]

@@beginlinuxguru7354 which is freely given away and licenced that way. If I choose to freely give away my code (not that anyone would want it) it does *not* grant me the right to claim your work in return. Besides I was more referring more to the section of the community that gives nothing back at all. Aka 99% of the people you see commenting on these videos.

[@rosomak8244]

Please don't stallmanise the terminology about operating systems. It's Linux. Linus didn't cooperate with Stallmann at all.

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

Regardless, it doesn't affect the overall point that I'm trying to make.

[@undavybe]

Might wanna research what GNU/linux again and what a GNU/Linux based system is/consists of. Also there is no "paywall" for the RHEL source code, you can get a free developer license and access the source code. RH are just putting service agreements on the the use of what you can and can't with the source code, otherwise you service contract will be revoke. If you read the TOS for most things, you maybe already violating them in everyday life. RH gives back thousands of lines of code back to multiple projects and yes other contributors give back (these are individual & large corporations) and don't directly paid but nor does RH. Its a pool where everyone can pull out of and use.

[@milohoffman274]

Found the IBM employee

[@undavybe]

@@milohoffman274 How Original. That's all you have to come back with?

[@beginlinuxguru7354]

I hate to tell you, but you completely missed the point of what I was saying.

[@undavybe]

@@beginlinuxguru7354 I just saw your other reply and watched the video again. It seems like RH doing this, just makes this more of an inconvenience for you. You said you can't "easily" do it but you can still do it. I mean yer you know have to register a machine and you're limited to 16 nodes. The installation with the registration can be automated through Ansible or a kickstart, these aren't difficult things to do and just one extra step. Plus thats a good thing to learn for real world ENT environments. Plus you also stated you have options like vm & snapshots to overcome this certain hurdles.