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Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/

From now on, only CentOS Stream's source code is available to all

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Red Hat has made RHEL closed source. This sparked much controversy and Oracle did a write up to accuse Red Hat's actions.

Do we consider Red Hat to be on some anti-open-source scheme? Should we boycott Fedora and other Red Hat-sponsored distros that are used to create this closed source distro? (And I'm not sure if RH's actions has violated the GPL.)

Maybe community-made distros like NixOS or Debian secured with Kicksecure will be better recommendations?

8 comments

taladar

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This is confusing, why post this now even though this is nearly 3 week old news. And why not at least add a summary of all that has happened since in terms of reactions from Rocky, Alma, Oracle, SuSE and the various opinions on how the RHEL license clause restricts GPL freedoms and why use the misleading term 'closed source' that has been widely criticized in the comments to the original article?

Mane25

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This has been one of the most overly milked and sensationalised stories I've seen.

kromem

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The article you linked even explains that this move is in compliance with the GPL.

If people think the GPL's loophole of allowing source to only be distributed to those receiving the binaries and agreeing to non-distribution terms is a problem, then the problem lies with the GPL.

As for if Red Hat is a bad guy here...

OSS needs alternate monetization in the future if things like this would be avoided.

Personally, I'm a big fan of interested parties paying for the production of software (or media, etc) upfront and then the produced thing being available freely.

Should we ever see models move to something like that, then in that ecosystem suddenly closing source is clearly more of a bad guy move.

Here, the article you link straight up has a line about the current model allowing downstream repackaging to deliver effectively the same product without paying Red Hat. It was likely only a matter of time for them to make a move like this.

All that said, I personally would never build a product on top of Red Hat's source for anything moving forward given the potential for further decisions along these lines blowing it up later on. But as someone who was never doing that to begin with, it costs little to commit to.

kebabslob

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This is misinformation. RHEL is still open source

Aeryl

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RH Closing source code and adding telemetry to Fedora made me go back to Arch. Can't trust these people

Mane25

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RH Closing source code and adding telemetry to Fedora

Neither of those statements are true, it's a shame when people make decisions on bad information.

BrooklynMan

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and what is the community’s response to SuSE’s decision to hard-fork?