Why
Why
Posted Jun 25, 2023 10:36 UTC (Sun) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)In reply to: Why by NZheretic
Parent article: Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model
First, when you upstream, you will often work with someone whose salary is paid by Red Hat or one of its partners from money earned in the RHEL ecosystem.
Second, you severely undervalue the difficulty of maintaining something like RHEL. You need people able and willing to fix all the bits that go in RHEL, all year round, for a decade or so. It’s not a scratch your itch dev endeavour, where you write things on your own time, then go on holidays, then move to another project or bit of code because you’re fed up with the original one. You can not depend on specific deadlines like in an internal project, every single hour of the year is always critical for one of customers of RHEL. Getting that amount of sustained unglamorous work done takes big money (because people will accept doing unglamorous work for compensation).
Third,
> CentOS & Scientific Linux were created by government agencies
What those agencies did was take Red Hat work, and pay people to add and maintain a few components not present in RHEL, with a few fixes right and left. They never actually replicated the bulk of what Red Hat did. And they got fed up by this little effort soon enough, leading to CentOS & Scientific Linux demise.
In *theory*, it would save a lot of money to government agencies, big medium and small businesses, to finance a foundation charged with maintaining an alternative to RHEL. Hell in *theory* ISVs and IHVs could finance such a consortium themselves for a lot less money than they pay Red Hat, Google or Microsoft (but ISVs and IHVs have no interest in maintaining anything long term, they need the platform to exist for product launch and not much longer, and ISVs and IHVs compete with one another, so they are perpetually anxious about financing something that may benefit competition more than themselves).
In *practice* getting an awful lot of people and entities to agree among themselves in the name of paying less means BIG BUREAUCRACY. As in inefficiencies, infighting, high risk of getting stuck at some point because someone at some stage tried to avoid paying his dues. It took *years* for those people to agree on a way to pay *one* person, Linus Torvalds, a modest salary.
If it was *that* easy to make people work together no controversy would ever happen in Debian (haha), Canonical would not exist (people would have politely told Shuttleworth he was not needed) and RHEL’s marketshare would be zero. And Debian members love this stuff, they’re not a beancounter-ridden agency or business who would not care less about the software side.
Agencies and big business (who practice this kind of stuff all year round in the UN for example) are well aware of this difficulty. Which is why when they bitch about RHEL charges they’re not arguing about setting up a foundation they are arbitrating between giving their money to Red Hat, Microsoft, Amazon or Google (and sometimes get a few years of free ride before being forced to pay someone else some money).
Trying to set up a RHEL alternative is ridiculously easy, take the public Fedora or Centos stream sources, rebuild (hell you can even pay a one-time RHEL subscription if you want). Sustaining this effort without Red Hat doing most of the work for you, and convincing ISVs and IHVs to bet on your long term existence and performance, is ridiculously hard.