RHEL has made a new announcement to control the distribution of its source code.

I unfortunately predicted this back in 2021. Not to act tough that I am right now. Or that I'm now mr big show: Effectively CentOS Stream would be renamed to CentOS. But more that the impact would be too great, when Red Hat - Suddenly closed CentOS 8 and also immediately limited access to the source code, simultaneously.

Fact that billion-dollar companies like Rakuten are sitting on Rocky. And Red Hat is still losing a lot of money, just shows that they are trying to squeeze more and more options so that all these big customers will buy directly from Red Hat.

Advantage on the other hand. Rocky needs to deliver with big clients like Rakuten. So they will probably come up with a solution. Besides, paid customers still get the source. So then you grab the cheapest license for 1 single CPU and you're still there. Or you file a lawsuit. Red Hat uses open source code and because of the OSS license, is obliged to disclose the source.

 

A RHEL package maintainer is most likely or in this case was most likely employed by Red Hat.
If your contract states that you maintain x number of RHEL packages and refuse to do so.

Then you are committing breach of contract. I don't know the situation in the US, exactly. But in Belgium and the Netherlands refusal to work means a possibility of instant dismissal by the employer. And then, quite simply a colleague is going to do your job.

The advantage of open source is that Red Hat copies the source. Actually, you don't need volunteers for that. It looks like owner IBM is cutting heavily into this sponsored work. Workers can fight back. But in fact, there are very few jobs in open source land anno 2023.

Why would an employee hire expensive paid programmers, with much of their delivered work going back to anyone who wants it. So too the competitors. Most apps and services are web based and
proprietary software for a reason.

 

Update: AlmaLinux is going to use and filter Stream and Oracle Linux sources to deliver security updates in the near future. "These updates will be carefully curated to ensure they are 1:1 compatible with RHEL".

As their board is currently discussing about the next steps for AlmaLinux at this time. I am very curious to see what AlmaLinux and other forks will come up with, as solution. Because there are quite a few RHEL forks that all have the serious problem. As the single code source is closed now.

 

Yup, that is ALOT more work.
From now on I think that several RHEL clones will start to disappear. Perhaps even that only Oracle, Alma and Rocky will remain. 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL, obviously does not mean that everything is completely equal. It is 100% compatible. "Oracle Linux (OL) is 100% binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)". But Oracle does add own additional non-upstream code.

There are a number of options just quickly popped out of my mind.

- The current forks are soft forking Oracle Linux without Oracle changes, debloating Oracle changes and rebase/mix Red Hat code from Stream and the RHEL SRPM's. Those SRPM's are still available through the Red Hat paid customer portal. Then you don't literally rebuild the RHEL SRPMs, which Red Hat's paid consumers terms and conditions do not allow you to literally distribute them. But copy out the GPL code and inject it into the Oracle SRPMs. It is not without risk either, as long as Oracle's source is open, because there is no reason for them, now that Red Hat has closed its doors.

I don't believe Red Hat has much influence on this: "RHEL changes will impact a lot of folks, including the entire web hosting industry with control panels like cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin". All the panels you mention already can run on Debian/Ubuntu as well.

The biggest problem and impact on the shared hosting industry are the absurd price increases for shared hosting panels. The examples you mention have become incredibly expensive. Then you need the additional CloudLinux OS otherwise your server will crashed sometime with noisy Neighbours. Then extra Backup software, auto-installer for web-software like Softaculous, all-in-one billing and automation platform, kernel-care or equivalent, chat feature etc etc. A server with power costs almost nothing anymore. You spend so much money on software. That shared hosting for unknown no longer pays off.

Perhaps it could be profitable for some large private customers, where you want easy management and almost no looking back. That could be a good use case. But for shared hosting that it is normally intended for (low-end). Shared hosting is a thing of the past for that, though.

Don't worry.
That's what the Centminmod community and Alma's and Rocky's are for.
It always works out.

 

Of course, it is less work if you divide tasks.
But hey, they are competitors overall for a reason.

Otherwise Alma and Rocky could have started a project together.
Oracle has been around since EL4 so I'll leave that one out for now.

Oracle is damn large with c. 164,000 employees. That company is so big,
they probably arrange that themselves. Can work together easily but probably don't want to for various reasons. They simply don't need the other one.

Alma and Rocky are much smaller. Should work together. Then it is more obvious. That they both undertake something.

 

Nice. Oracle Linux seems to be not effected as it is releasing the same updates as upstream.
After the Red Hat statement and without source on git.centos.org (I briefly checked that).

 

That seems unlikely to me and also unmanageable to me for a fork. You can't continually track bugzilla and other media for changes as a fork, without an official release. After all, you don't know what exactly is going to change. Only the developer knows that.

And you obviously can't access the Red Hat developer's private repo where the project files are either. So it's waiting for Red Hat to release an update.

It goes or went pretty simply. There is a tracker on Red Hat Errata. The fork sees updates. Syncs git.centos.org. Review any changes to be made (often rebrand related), rebuild the rpm, test, release.

 

It is the same marketing bla bla as "Stable, Continuous Delivery" and "Always Ready RHEL", which would be as a so-called serious replacement for Stream > RHEL.

A user on the CentOS forum puts it pretty clearly:

"The entire premise and the only reason anyone uses CentOS is because it's rebuilt RHEL. Congratulations on undermining that."

Red Hat is clearly looking for excuses from competitors:

"SUSE, Canonical, AWS and Microsoft all create Linux distributions with associated branding and ecosystem development efforts. These variants all utilize and contribute Linux source code, but none claim to be “fully compatible” with the others."

"Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere."

Now I can start responding to every quote from this Red Hat Vice President. Naming it as "a real danger", while you yourself use, and have become very big as company on someone else's open source code. Is highly debatable.

This post only creates more whining. So very questionable post, it just shows that they don't mention the real reason. And we have discussed the real reason many times in the CentOS EOL topic.

 

Regards CloudLinux, I used it for many years v7, found it rock solid, updates for security always good and there support was excellent, within hours, haven't used it for some 3 years now but was a long time customer when I had co-located dedicated servers.....

With regards Rhel and CentOS - somewhere down the line it will be "all about the money" (in my opinion) as thats generally the bottom line with big corporations......