LWN: Comments on "Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability"

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

TRauMa — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 07:57:39 +0000

Did you mean to comment this somewhere else because I fail to see the relevance here.

This might violate GPL

TRauMa — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 07:39:46 +0000

What Red Hat, apparently, is concerned with is organizations buying support for say 10 servers and then filing bugs and support requests for 50, which is easy to do if 40 of them run on something that is not Red Hat in branding, but bug for bug compatible. As far as I can tell it's the reason that buying Red Hat is so expensive and uneconomical for small shops - if Red Hat offered an affordable small license, many of their customers would use it to run their server farms on it. When they have to buy a somewhat big package because there's nothing small on offer, they can't gamble the system quite as much. And now Red Hat tries to strangle the bug for bug compatible versions.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

edgewood — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:26:40 +0000

That seems to be a bug rather than a deliberate change. One of the original reporters has updated his toot after hearing from several Red Hat employees: https://fosstodon.org/@omenos/110602377978605193

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

apple4ever — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 22:06:35 +0000

> So.. who do you expect to pay to keep maintaining the software you depend on?

Someone who has reasonable prices. See jccleaver below who already described the problem.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

richarson — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 20:44:25 +0000

As I said on another post, we have sufficient in-house expertise as to no need supoort most of the time, so we knowingly accept the risks, or better try to mitigate them (e.g. with HA) as much as possible.

The problem is, the main free alternatives that we're using (CentOS/Alma/Rocky) now are at the real risk that RH decides to cut them off.
I don't really think that's what RH wants to do but I'm afraid that it will eventually happend.

I like RHEL-based systems, I'd like to keep using them, but it *is* too expensive for us if we have to pay for all of our servers.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

richarson — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 20:36:37 +0000

I donate money to open source projects, a lot of peaople and companies do the same.

And I don't expect support from them, stop trying to put words in my mouth please.

This might violate GPL

farnz — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:26:58 +0000

The question would be whether a legitimate expectation that you will violate the contract you agree to when buying the service is sufficient to refuse to sell you a service covered by that contract - my understanding is that such a violation is one of the exceptional conditions, even in business to consumer sales (albeit that the permissible contract terms are very restricted in B2C sales in France).

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

pizza — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:14:47 +0000

> Red Hat Developer for Individuals subscription that allows you to run up to 16 instances of RHEL

That's now been raised to 240 instances:

https://linuxiac.com/red-hat-boosts-free-developers-subsc...

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

xman — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 19:14:28 +0000

Honestly, I think this is going to just play in to cloud providers' hands. Choking the "free" Red Hat world is going to make vendors and users alike flee to the distros managed by their cloud providers... ultimately weakening Red Hat's hand.

This might violate GPL

matp75 — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 18:34:38 +0000

It may be illegal in France, see https://www.inc-conso.fr/content/refus-de-vente-ou-de-pre...
but looks like from this page , it is dependent if the buyer is considered a consumer and there are very few exceptional conditions.
I have seen it used between 2 business for software (just could not refuse to sell at list price) (the vendor sold it to not be sued even if the buyer attitude was very incorrect and unfair at that time)

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

parmstrong — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 18:26:27 +0000

"If I could, I'd compare to Windows or (maybe) Photoshop - licenses are there to pay for the product - fine.
However, if I were somebody starting out, didn't have much money or no ability to _pay_ for those productions, it leaves with me with options:
* Go for a free alternative (this generally means lacking in features, but free)
* Pirate the software"

There is another option.

Some people may not be aware that Red Hat provides RHEL and a lot of other bits for FREE. Simply sign up at http://developers.redhat.com
Create an account with your personal email address and you have access to the Red Hat Developer for Individuals subscription that allows you to run up to 16 instances of RHEL (and other Red Hat Software) in PRODUCTION for individuals. This is designed to get individuals and startups off the ground with software they can depend on. Also, huge community and tonnes of help.

Disclaimer: I am a Red Hatter.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

wtarreau — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 04:50:18 +0000

Maybe, maybe not, I can't know since you're posting under an alias. In any case if you've dealt with so many servers you certainly understand the value of not going through major upgrades for no reason and only applying the regular fixes that come with enterprise distros.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Cyberax — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 20:12:05 +0000

> If I (or actually, my bosses) had to pay for every system we have, we'd be bankrupt.

What is the value of your systems being inaccessible for a week? Is it more than the cost of licenses for your machines? RedHat also supports popular public clouds with pay-as-you-go model.

So basically, either you pay for support, which is not cheap, but neither is it too expensive; or you accept the risk and go with one of the countless free alternatives (Debian, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, Fedora, Gentoo, ...)

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

pizza — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 19:33:47 +0000

> If I (or actually, my bosses) had to pay for every system we have, we'd be bankrupt. And I know we're not the only ones in that boat.

So.. who do you expect to pay to keep maintaining the software you depend on?

....If you're being honest, the answer is "As long as it's someone else, I don't care."

(Personally, I don't mind folks making money off of my code. But I have a problem with folks expecting me to support them, on their schedule, for free)

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

richarson — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 18:54:50 +0000

> > Speaking for myself: stability over a long period of time (10 years) is the most important thing, bit-fot-bit compatibility is actually not high in my priorities list.
> ...Yet neither is important enough to actually pay for. Isn't that the whole point of this entire discussion?

If I (or actually, my bosses) had to pay for every system we have, we'd be bankrupt. And I know we're not the only ones in that boat.
I only stated (or maybe tried and failed to state) that our choice of CentOS/Alma/Rocky was mostly based on the longer support time of those distros.
And 99.999% of the time, we don't really need RH's support (we have in-house experts) so I can't justify paying all money for licenses.

> > So at this point, migrating to another distro is starting to sound less and less like an annoyance.
> Sure, but keep in mind that you'll be trading one set of pain points for another. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.
Oh, I'm aware, but we already use Debian and Ubuntu for some systems and since we have expertise, adapting should not be a huge problem.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

pizza — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 12:31:54 +0000

> Speaking for myself: stability over a long period of time (10 years) is the most important thing, bit-fot-bit compatibility is actually not high in my priorities list.

...Yet neither is important enough to actually pay for. Isn't that the whole point of this entire discussion?

> So at this point, migrating to another distro is starting to sound less and less like an annoyance.

Sure, but keep in mind that you'll be trading one set of pain points for another. Not necessarily better or worse, just different.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

ju3Ceemi — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 08:23:51 +0000

So enterprise will renew their hardware to save energy
Nothing related to RHEL

Mais tu sais, je me suis déjà occupé d'un parc de 3500 serveurs (à l'époque où j'étais ton client)
Peut-être n'avons-nous pas eu les mêmes expériences professionnelles, fréquentés les mêmes genre d'entreprise ?

Thank you for your feedback anyway

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

wtarreau — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 08:13:41 +0000

The 'E' of RHEL stands for "Enterprise". Nobody cares about your i5-2400 released in 2011 in this context, as it's not supposed to run this distro. And yes, most enterprise users will renew their hardware after a few years to save on energy costs. The fact that your 4-core 95W i5-2400 from 2011 is half as powerful as a 8-core 7W Core i3-N300 from 2023 is probably not a problem for you, but it's an enterprise's responsibility to divide power usage per performance unit by 27 like this over the years. Thus in practice a server will be installed with a distro and will run it until it gets decommissioned 3-8 years later. And that's also in this context that for such users the effort made by package maintainers to provide non-breaking updates that fix bugs and security issues is valued, because these customers basically don't have to think about the software anymore. On your PC or laptop you can devote time adjusting/fixing packages after an upgrade if you want. When you deal with 1000 servers you don't want to discover breakage every morning anymore.

I, too, used to find CentOS interesting for end users. It's just that lots of consultants install this at their customers' as a way to save money by not buying the original, hence avoiding to pay for the development effort done upfront. I'm not seeing a simple solution to this, to be honest. Maybe they should make a free version of RHEL which is trivial to activate and switch to a paid mode, to try lower the barrier of adoption, and pre-fill a number of visible config files with "this is an unregistered copy, if you value it please consider supporting our effort". But the constant guerilla between RHEL and forks is only hurting their users, community and their image by making the solution look not sustainable in my opinion.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

richarson — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 02:48:04 +0000

Speaking for myself: stability over a long period of time (10 years) is the most important thing, bit-fot-bit compatibility is actually not high in my priorities list.

Neither Stream (5 years) nor Fedora (13 months?) provide that.

Stream is similar to Debian and Ubuntu LTS in terms of support years but Stream is also more of a moving target than the other 2.

So at this point, migrating to another distro is starting to sound less and less like an annoyance.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

ju3Ceemi — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 15:40:49 +0000

Excuse me .. what ?

I am sitting on a i5-2400, released in 2011, running Debian 12 (released in 2023)
Do you really believe people have to change hardware every time they update the software ?

That is .. that is crazy

Also, when you pay a RHEL subscription for a server (at least 350$/y without support nor any stuff), you probably have some kind of business behind this
People with hobbies for their free time do not pay that money for the elusive right to use old hardware ..

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

wtarreau — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 15:13:05 +0000

> 10 year-plus
> This is so damageable to the world
> This kind of offer helps the damaged mindset from the 90ise that you can, sanely, let an environment live forever

Yeah for sure... Quite frankly, read what you wrote, all of this makes zero sense. You're taking the example of people that do not apply any single update to judge a model where a vendor makes the effort of providing updates so that responsible customers can maintain their software up to date.

For sure some people like those making a living of selling hardware might prefer to see landfills full of obsolete cars because the software that runs on the central computer isn't supported anymore, make a business of desoldering components from obsoleted smartphones, or doubling the price of energy delivered to a vulnerable neighbor country while they're running maintenance operations to replace the hardware in power plants due to the new requirements of a major software upgrade. But there are also a lot of people who want to keep safe software running fine on existing hardware without changing prerequisites every 3 years nor facing regressions due to forced major upgrades.

You seem to be ignoring an important fact, which is that a linux distro is primarily a redistribution of a collection of opensource software, and that a lot of them are done as side jobs, and not in a professional manner, meaning that forward compatibility is not the most common thing. As such performing a distro upgrade almost guarantees a number of regressions or breakages that are sometimes OK on your laptop but not at all in many environments. Distro vendors providing 10 years support go through that effort mainly to protect their customers from this.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

timrichardson — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 00:48:06 +0000

You may as well call free software a cancer. That's what these arguments sound like.

Red Hat built its business on open source. It turns out not be convenient, apparently.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Cyberax — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 17:01:51 +0000

RHEL gives free (as in "no cost") licenses to developers: https://developers.redhat.com/about

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

jzb — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 16:31:36 +0000

Have you supported any products of note against "anything compliant with a particular standard" yourself?

What the vendors are doing is not slimy, lazy, or hostile here. First of all, the idea that there even exists a "particular standard" to be compliant *with* is questionable given the number of dependencies that any given application might have. What standards would you suggest that are adequate to say that a database or streaming/messaging platform is supported?

Let's say I want to ship a product based on Apache Kafka. Please tell me which standards I can target that are available in shipping operating systems that guarantee if I target them I can also promise support.

The most reasonable way for a vendor to develop, test, and support an enterprise type application is to pick specific versions of popular operating systems and work against those. Because we're not just talking about "it compiles and runs" -- we're talking about being able to support a customer with heavy workloads and a contract with an SLA that says downtime costs you, the vendor, money.

Let's stop here

corbet — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 16:23:21 +0000

This isn't something that will be resolved to anybody's satisfaction on LWN, and is certainly off-topic; let's please stop this thread here.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

jzb — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 16:14:50 +0000

"So really, when you think about it, they are running bleeding edge software versions that got limited testing, patched by people who know less about it than the original developer."

Really, when I think about it, I am aware of the amount of testing that goes into RHEL and feel fairly confident that if what I need is a long-term stable operating system it's going to meet my needs.

The original developer / project, in many cases, hasn't done nearly the amount of testing against what they've released vs. what ends up in RHEL. Calling it "bleeding edge" is silly. The reason many people want and pay for RHEL is because they know that there's additional testing vs. the vanilla upstream.

I would grant you that the original developer has more context for the original software. Whether they know more than the person patching it, overall, is not guaranteed. Whether they're better at security or fixing security issues is definitely up for debate.

You seem to be simultaneously arguing that you really want to run RHEL, and that it has little value, which is mystifying to me.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

jzb — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 16:02:01 +0000

"But what I want"

Is irrelevant, really. I mean, you're entitled to want whatever you want, but Red Hat as a business is not obliged to make it possible. They've come a long way from the early CentOS days to try to meet the needs of people who don't match their customer profile. If signing up for a subscription and dealing with subscription processes is still too much trouble for you, then there's plenty of other Linux distros that are really good for most use cases.

But if you want or need "bug-for-bug" compatibility with RHEL -- if CentOS Stream and their Red Hat Universal Base Image aren't close enough for your needs -- either meet them where they are or don't use RHEL.

I get that Red Hat's subscription process adds friction. I use their no-cost developer subscription myself for a workstation and server. It adds a little bit of time for me to sign into their web-based system and generate images that are already subscribed. But it's necessary because I want to use RHEL for a workstation for work and my $dayjob has a software requirement that depends on either a specific version of RHEL or Ubuntu, and of the two I'd prefer to use RHEL.

There is a point where it becomes unreasonable to expect Red Hat to make available or allow "bug-for-bug" clones of their *product* with zero cost and zero friction.

The reason people want very specifically RHEL and not CentOS Stream is all the stuff outside the source code that Red Hat adds that makes, say, "RHEL 8.5" attractive but "CentOS Stream 8.5.2111" unattractive. The certifications, documentation, regression testing, and very specific compatibilities that go with RHEL 8.5 but not Stream.

If you're not a customer, you're not entitled to that. Because it's not merely about the source code at that point, it's about a whole lot of other work that is well beyond the software and that costs a ton of money beyond development.

Note: "I want to make some Docker build image...without having to worry" about an account is doable today, if Red Hat UBI has the packages you need. They do make a Docker image freely available based on RHEL that requires no relationship with Red Hat at all. See this for example: https://hub.docker.com/r/redhat/ubi8

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

rbtree — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 15:01:24 +0000

I have about as much responsibility for another country's actions as you do. My home country is much more peaceful than yours ever was if you're from any of the NATO states, so you both should probably have a good look in the mirror instead of lecturing others.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

paulj — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:53:56 +0000

Interesting precedent this, to target sanctions at citizens generally (resident or not) of countries that engage in aggressive wars abroad, and require reparations for past aggressive wars before lifting such sanctions. It would be good to apply that evenly. USAsians and UKians take note.

Anyway.. we are certain to incur the wrath of our dear editor if we continue.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

zdzichu — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:42:05 +0000

End the aggression, pay the reparations and sanctions maybe will be lifted.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Freecoffee — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:40:16 +0000

From the security perspective new is not always better, and the work RHEL does is epic at this point.

There was a time in computing when everything could be free/semi free and open but all that leads to now is lack of viability and longevity of the work.

If anyone has not noticed the billion hours of coding in flash sites that evaporated from the internet.

I have worked in development for companies and the honest truth is no one can afford to direct resources to perfection and recreating the wheel.
Yes ivey grows over entire areas of apps and buisness processes and in a perfect world there would be maintenance but that is not any company I have ever worked for.

On a side note the cloud is great until you need to have stable costs. It does not give an operation a lot of leverage in negotiation when you are dependant on the cloud for your buisness infrastructure. No asset model what could go wrong.

Red Hat becoming IBM

Wol — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 11:05:49 +0000

Driven by the fact that we're all pushed into investing our money into pension funds ...

Where the managers are rewarded for making a profit, and not punished for making a loss, so it's in their interest to ride a roller coaster. Who cares if they make a loss some years as a few shells they've sucked dry go bust. Just be glad you're starting from lower down so when you find a new victim to suck dry you can award yourself higher bonuses.

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

Wol — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 11:01:46 +0000

> I’m sure the history of technology parasites predates open source, but that’s when my career started, so I’ll begin there.

Edison? His (rejected) patent claiming to invent the light bulb post-dates his visit to a light bulb factory ...

Cheers,
Wol

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

rbtree — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 09:17:22 +0000

Go ahead. I've been paying for LWN for years before your sanctions cut off my access to banking services. And I am not even Russian.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

eduperez — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 08:53:18 +0000

> they should be saying "our app runs on anything compliant with a particular standard".

History has told us, over and over again, that being "compliant" with a particular standard, means next to nothing; there are countless "anecdotes" of software compliant in theory, but incompatible in practice.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

AdamW — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 08:19:35 +0000

I totally understand being angry at this, but - if you don't mind, and this is a genuine question - as a valuable community member, do you actually need an attempted bit-for-bit rebuild of RHEL for something? Is there anything for which CentOS Stream and/or Fedora are not doing the job?

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

taladar — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 08:00:37 +0000

> If you are using a RHEL clone in non-production situations they have no-cost subscriptions

But what I want as someone who already thinks supporting the ancient versions RHEL uses is a huge pain is to avoid the additional pain of licenses, not paying for licenses, the whole license nonsense itself. I want to make some Docker build image or test server without having to worry about making a RedHat account and signing up for some free license, connecting the system to the license server,... even if RedHat thinks that is the way my use-case should be covered "for free".

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

taladar — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:19:06 +0000

And the worst part about that is that all the knowledge about old systems you acquire in the process is completely useless in the future. At least if some bug only occurs on some bleeding edge distro like Gentoo you are likely to encounter similar issues and software versions on more stable distros a year or three down the line. Any time spent on ancient version support is a huge waste in terms of side-benefits like learning.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

taladar — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:13:07 +0000

There are also all those third parties which make software RedHat wants to be built for RHEL. Large companies might buy a license just to have build and test servers but if you are just an open source project you are less likely to build for RHEL if there is no free distro (both monetarily and free of the hassle of licensing nonsense) version you can use on your build and test servers.

Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

taladar — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:06:25 +0000

So really, when you think about it, they are running bleeding edge software versions that got limited testing, patched by people who know less about it than the original developer. But because said developer chose not to modify the version number people think their system is somehow "stable".