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- cross-posted to:
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This is a MAJOR development with Redhat NO LONGER giving public access to the base RHEL source code.
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Man, that’s crazy. IBM gotta IBM.
No, Red Hat is not going closed source. The GPL only stipulates that you have to make source accessible to licensees and the licencees of RHEL are Red Hat’s paying customers. Red Hat has already stated that RHEL subscribers keep access to the sources via Red Hat Customer Portal.
According to AlmaLinux, there seems to be some licensing on Red Hat Customer Portal that seems to block republishing sources acquired from it. I wonder if that doesn’t run afoul of the GPL. It is an additional restriction on the source code, which terminates the GPLv2 automatically. Would be an interesting situation if Red Hat loses access to the Linux Kernel over this.
No, it isn’t.
It does make building a “bug-for-bug compatible” derivative slightly more complicated as you now have to find sources for each package version instead of blindly copying git.centos.org
Disclaimer: I’m a Red Hat employee, not working on RHEL
Blog post from RedHat: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
I have not read it yet, but I think this is what is going on.
Further reading.
Alma Linux: https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/ Rocky forum: https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/has-red-hat-just-killed-rocky-linux/10378/20
Seems likely that any derivative RedHat will have a harder time being 100% compatible with RHEL. Those that haven’t moved to being a derivative to Fedora will have to or just take on a lot more work long term. Some other unrelated projects might have issues too in how they support RHEL/Rocky/Alma. How and if this has a big effect will take a while to find out.
Debian has been on a downfall for years… Instead of focusing in code quality, Linux is getting politicized. Powerful entities like Blackrock disregard code in favor of political agendas. They also introduce closed source blobs and fundamental design changes that go against its very philosophy (systemd).
Is BSD the definitive answer?
It’s more surprising that the public source access lasted this long. I see this as a natural defense against the parasites like Rocky or Alma Linux, which only take, take and take.
