Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model [LWN.net]

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 24, 2023 1:37 UTC (Sat) by developer122 (guest, #152928)
Parent article: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

While this is a pretty lukewarm legal take ("it's murky"), it's pretty damning of redhat's character.

I have to think the company must have expended considerable effort and expense in their decade-long campaign to take over and eliminate CentOS.
How does their generous, un-refusable offer of employment to various key members of the CentOS community compare to the scale of their funding of other developer positions? How many developer roles could they have funded for the cost of dismantling the CentOS project?

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Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 24, 2023 10:08 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (2 responses)

Red Hat did not have to expend considerable effort and expense to take over Centos. They just had to offer decent salaries to the couple of people who were working themselves to death trying to keep it alive, and give them access to their own (working modern and scalable) build farm.

Centos was starved and killed by its own supporters.

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 24, 2023 11:19 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Red Hat did not have to expend considerable effort and expense to take over Centos. They just had to offer decent salaries to the couple of people who were working themselves to death trying to keep it alive, and give them access to their own (working modern and scalable) build farm.

Not only that, RH invested a lot of effort into retooling the entire CentOS and RHEL development pipeline so that it was done completely in the open, and completely opened their internal tooling so that everyone could use it, making it vastly easier for the likes of Alma and Rocky to both spin up their own efforts, and keep them going. Now, the only tooling difference between RHEL and its clones is the git repo the build farm pulls from. Whereas Pre-RH CentOS (and similar efforts) basically had to construct their own revision control/tooling/environments from scratch and shoulder the entire burden of keeping it going.

> Centos was starved and killed by its own supporters.

Exactly. It's another variation of "I don't care about farmers going bankrupt left and right; I get my food from the grocery store" mentality.

Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Posted Jun 24, 2023 14:56 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

> Not only that, RH invested a lot of effort into retooling the entire CentOS and RHEL development pipeline so that it was done completely in the open, and completely opened their internal tooling so that everyone could use it, making it vastly easier for the likes of Alma and Rocky to both spin up their own efforts, and keep them going.

Sure, but none of that was necessary to take over Centos (and a lot of it was already under way before the Centos take over). It was done to try to convince the few entities that *did* contribute some engineering Centos-side, to continue in a Red Hat context. Not sure if it was worth the effort, really, while it did avoid complete Centos implosion it weakened Fedora understanding both outside and within IBM. If IBM management really believes “useful productivisable” centos stream condenses out of thin air without something like “non business critical” Fedora bellow they’ll be in deep trouble in a few years.

By the time Solaris and AIX marketshare sank except in a few niches (for the second) they still had not finished the transition from ksh 83 (as in 1983) to ksh 95 (as in 1995). That’s where trying to trim “non business critical” bits leads.