This is a masterfully Orwellian post. So, Redhat is threatening their customers with withdrawal of support that they depend on quite deeply, if the customers exercise their rights under the GPL. In response, the community got upset. Redhat’s response is:
I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular —especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. The details — including open source licenses and rights — matter, and these are things Red Hat has helped to not only form but also preserve and evolve.
So, as of 15 years ago, the total value of what Redhat is selling was estimated at around 10 trillion dollars. The fraction of that that was created by Redhat is, fair play, higher than most companies that distribute FOSS software. They are, in terms of code, a significant contributor (especially in the kernel). But what they’re building on in the first place is this multi-trillion dollar thing that they got for free. The only caveat was that they need to maintain the same freedom for others that they made use of.
So, when people ask them to do that, they say:
I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.
I see. It’s yours, and we’re not allowed to repackage it for our own “profit.” Because:
Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable.
Got it.
Orwellian?
Nah, that’s just corporate speak.
Anyway, back to my Debian servers…
Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable.
Then it isn’t really open source is it…
Ding ding ding
It’s especially funny since very few people involved in this equation are trying to “resell” anyone else’s work. There is basically only one big party that’s doing it, as far as I know…
🍆
What?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/redhat/redhat-images
There are subscription costs built into the VMs on public cloud. Azure gets the money for the compute but a percentage goes to the company maintaining the distro. Its quite a large revenue source.
Do you know of any major Linux distribution besides RHEL that charges a subscription fee? I don’t.
Edit: I poked around the site a little more. I had quite a bit of trouble sorting out what the comparison was between costs of different Linux distributions, but (a) it looks to me like the cost of Redhat is exactly the same as the cost of Ubuntu (b) it looks like there may be some sort of bundled corporate support as part of the package, for which I’m sure there’s a cost © their list of which distros to include (Redhat / SUSE / Ubuntu) is quite weird coming from the Linux world. Most providers I’m familiar with default to Debian for servers.
Regardless of that, my question was independent of a support agreement: Do you know of any major Linux distribution besides RHEL that charges a fee and requires an agreement with the manufacturer to use or download their production version?
Yeah it requires a little investigation but here is a breakdown:
Ubuntu (Canonical) Free Pro - pay as you go (gives package patches) Pro + Support - pay as you go (SLA)
RHEL (Red Hat Inc) Premium - pay as you go (patches only)
CentOS (Many image providers) Free
Debian (Debian) Free
SLES (Suse) Premium - Pay as you go (patches only)
Oracle Linux (Oracle) Free Support - pay as you go
Prediction: RHEL dies in the next 5-10 years anyway while everyone moves to free options. Considering the amount of containerization being run on production systems, whatever VM is running docker or k8s doesn’t need to really be managed to the same level that VM/bare metal webservers required in the past.
Sure, some big orgs will still foot the license fees, but considering CentOS/RHEL was the standard previously, I don’t really see a benefit for corps to pay those fees any longer. Most will probably move to some random free stable distro for their VMs, and run any production resources via lightweight containers based on something like Alpine.
I think you’re underestimating the value organizations and enterprises put on having high quality support available at a moments notice. Particularly first party support.
For now. Like I said, the amount of work being done on the host level is going to decrease as organizations move away from traditional monoliths and into purpose built microservices.
Yes, some companies will still run their environments like it’s 2014 in 2025, but that percentage is going to decrease considerably when the productivity, cost, and maintainability gains of orchestration tools like kubernetes are realized.
I went from being a traditional bare metal sysadmin surrounded by a team of 30+ to a cloud admin that could do the work of 25 datacenter techs to a DevOps Engineer who can do what would have taken dozens of sysadmins to do 10 years ago.
Businesses can tolerate their tech debt for awhile, but eventually economics takes over and those businesses either adapt or fail.
I just don’t see something like RHEL existing in its current form without being the de facto enterprise standard, and moves like this make companies more likely to look for alternatives.
I know the vendors I work closely with are all moving away from that model.
I completely agree, but I don’t agree that RHEL can’t pivot to this new model. And their first mover advantage as the “enterprise operating system” won’t go away.
I guess your point is that their mismanagement of this situation is evidence of their eventual downfall, but I just don’t know if I buy that
I think their position in the market allows them to make these types of bad decisions without much fallout. If anything this just buys them more time
To me it feels like a candle flickering before it goes out.
If they weren’t bleeding revenue, they wouldn’t be shaking up the status quo in such an obvious, unpopular way.
I’m happy to be wrong, but I just don’t think they have staying power.
Not to mention how long it takes a big org to migrate, even between versions of rhel. I’ve seen 6 -> 7 migrations happen inside the last month.
We migrated from 6->7 in just under a year (university). Under a month could be seen also as risky, but great that some have the liberty of speedy migration paths.
I fear you’ve misunderstood, the org has been migrating for the last 4 years, my point is the migration from 6-7 is still ongoing when both 8 and 9 have been released. A 5-10 year exit from rhel is super optimistic for some orgs.
Agreed. It’s all about support. Anything less will more than likely not be entertained.
It seems the HPC space is moving this direction. Lots of labs are looking to transition away from RHEL.
Time won’t solve how people are. Most people will treat free as free of charge instead of freedom.
