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.
I would say its wrong/unethical and could make an argument that it undermines the spirit of the FOSS community in general. I think the rebuilders/mimics are exploiting the GPL in a “race to the bottom” situation where they’re just going to copy that code and sell it for cheaper and cheaper. It’s like a shitty middle man who’s only value proposition undermines a stalwart of the open source community.
All that does for the FOSS community is harm. If a company, who has seriously been a champion (even with all their flaws) of FOSS, can’t do business in this space because of this, we ALL lose out.
If you want to rebuild and provide a free copy of Redhat where you’ve added literally nothing of value, go for it. But when you start outbidding Redhat on contracts because you are taking their hard work for free? That’s absolutely shitty and wrong. No one should stand for that even if they “technically” didn’t violate the GPL.
I honestly don’t blame Redhat for this and the angst being thrown their way misses the fact that these rebuilders are being super shitty.
Irrespective of whether the rebuilders are shitty or not, RH is clearly trying to restrict GPL and expecting to get away with it because they can pay more for lawyers. If they believe that other people using their source is making money unfairly, change the licensing. You don’t get to keep GPL so that you get all the benefits, contributions and goodwill from the community for free and at the same time claim that people cannot excercise their GPL rights. They’re free to make everything they build by themselves closed source.
I guess we’ll see if the GPL has been violated. I actually think, if it hasn’t been violated, it sets a weird precedence.
This is a situation with sides and two of them are being shitty. The third side, the users, are getting caught in the middle.
I’m perfect happy with having a seperate licensing so that software they build is open source but has paid commercial licence. I just find this current move crappy.