Jon 'maddog' Hall Defends Red Hat's Re-Licensing of RHEL (lpi.org) 101
In February of 1994 Jon "maddog" Hall interviewed a young Linus Torvalds (then just 24). Nearly three decades later — as Hall approaches his 73rd birthday — he's shared a long essay looking back, but also assessing today's controversy about Red Hat's licensing of RHEL. A (slightly- condensed] excerpt:
[O]ver time some customers developed a pattern of purchasing a small number of RHEL systems, then using the "bug-for-bug" compatible version of Red Hat from some other distribution. This, of course, saved the customer money, however it also reduced the amount of revenue that Red Hat received for the same amount of work. This forced Red Hat to charge more for each license they sold, or lay off Red Hat employees, or not do projects they might have otherwise funded. So recently Red Hat/IBM made a business decision to limit their customers to those who would buy a license from them for every single system that would run RHEL and only distribute their source-code and the information necessary on how to build that distribution to those customers. Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL.
Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! "
Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...]
I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started.
My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...]
I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business.
However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).
Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL.
For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address.
Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013.
Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.
Most, if not all, of the articles I have read have said something along the lines of "IBM/Red Hat seem to be following the GPL..but...but...but... the community! "
Which community? There are plenty of distributions for people who do not need the same level of engineering and support that IBM and Red Hat offer. Red Hat, and IBM, continue to send their changes for GPLed code "upstream" to flow down to all the other distributions. They continue to share ideas with the larger community. [...]
I now see a lot of people coming out of the woodwork and beating their breasts and saying how they are going to protect the investment of people who want to use RHEL for free [...] So far I have seen four different distributions saying that they will continue the production of "not RHEL", generating even more distributions for the average user to say "which one should I use"? If they really want to do this, why not just work together to produce one good one? Why not make their own distributions a RHEL competitor? How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it? SuSE said that they would invest ten million dollars in developing a competitor to RHEL. Fantastic! COMPETE. Create an enterprise competitor to Red Hat with the same business channels, world-wide support team, etc. etc. You will find it is not inexpensive to do that. Ten million may get you started.
My answer to all this? RHEL customers will have to decide what they want to do. I am sure that IBM and Red Hat hope that their customers will see the value of RHEL and the support that Red Hat/IBM and their channel partners provide for it. The rest of the customers who just want to buy one copy of RHEL and then run a "free" distribution on all their other systems no matter how it is created, well it seems that IBM does not want to do business with them anymore, so they will have to go to other suppliers who have enterprise capable distributions of Linux and who can tolerate that type of customer. [...]
I want to make sure people know that I do not have any hate for people and companies who set business conditions as long as they do not violate the licenses they are under. Business is business.
However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).
Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL.
For all the researchers, students, hobbyists and people with little or no money, there are literally hundreds of distributions that they can choose, and many that run across other interesting architectures that RHEL does not even address.
Hall answered questions from Slashdot users in 2000 and again in 2013.
Further reading: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst answering questions from Slashdot readers in 2017.
Is it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL.
So, my understanding is that Red Hat forbids you from redistributing the sources, which appears to me to be in direct conflict with the GPL. Specifically, the part that says "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein"
You could argue that the Red Hat source isn't licensed under the GPL, and so the GPL's copyleft provisions don't apply, but in that case, don't try to claim that Red Hat's actions are "the essence of the GPL" when it's the polar opposite of the GPL.
Re:Is it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, my understanding is that Red Hat forbids you from redistributing the sources, which appears to me to be in direct conflict with the GPL.
No, this isn't correct. You can sign up, download the sources and redistribute them. But, then Red Hat will cancel your account and block any further downloads, binary or source. However, you are free to do whatever you want (within the limits of the GPL and other licenses) with the source you already downloaded.
This isn't actually the first time a company has done this. There was a company offering alternative firmware for WiFi routers doing the same thing some years ago (and may still be).
Re:Is it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would argue that additional terms that place negative consequences on exercising the rights granted by the license would be considered a retaliatory restriction and thus in violation of the license, but admittedly none of this has actually been challenged in court, as far as I know. We may eventually see this challenged in court, though, either from one of the copyright holders to code which IBM is adding these additional restrictions, or by a customer who is penalized for exercising their rights under the license.
Re:Is it, though? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would argue that additional terms that place negative consequences on exercising the rights granted by the license would be considered a retaliatory restriction and thus in violation of the license, but admittedly none of this has actually been challenged in court, as far as I know.
You are arguing two completely different things though, and then applying the consequences of one thing to the other.
The GPL doesn't allow them to place restrictions on their customers distributing the source code.
But they have not attempted a copyright lawsuit against anyone for doing so.
You word this as "it hasn't been tested in court", but this is only a consequence of no one has gone to court to ask a judge to stop a legal action.
It's like me saying "If you paint your house blue, I won't talk to you ever again"
Then you say that me not talking to you again hasn't been tested in court...
Of course not. It isn't illegal to paint your house blue, and I never threatened to sue you for painting your house blue, I threatened to not talk to you again.
Redhat is allowed to stop doing business with a customer.
They are not forced to do business with you until you break the law.
They can stop doing business with you due to actions you take that are perfectly legal.
This is their stated purpose for this clause - "Stated Purpose"
That said, the future is wide and vast, and yes people and companies have the ability to tell lies.
If in the future they ever DO try to sue someone for sharing their source code, THAT would be a violation of the GPL, and I will be right there behind you cheering Redhats failure.
Re:Is it, though? (Score:5, Insightful)
The GPL doesn't allow them to place restrictions on their customers distributing the source code.
But they have not attempted a copyright lawsuit against anyone for doing so.
That's irrelevant to the point. Their additional license still contradicts the GPL.
They are not forced to do business with you until you break the law.
What law?
They can stop doing business with you due to actions you take that are perfectly legal.
They are shipping two contradictory licenses. This should be illegal.
Re: (Score:3)
The GPL doesn't allow them to place restrictions on their customers distributing the source code. But they have not attempted a copyright lawsuit against anyone for doing so.
That's irrelevant to the point. Their additional license still contradicts the GPL.
How so? You are still free to redistribute the code you purchased, just the RH will not provide you further revisions. Nothing in the GPL requires anyone to provide updated source code simply because they provided it to yo at some previous point in time; just as the recipient of teh original code is free to modify it any any way they chose and not provide the modified code to RH or anyone else if they do not distribute the modified version.
They can stop doing business with you due to actions you take that are perfectly legal.
They are shipping two contradictory licenses. This should be illegal.
There is nothing contradictory about the licenses. The GPL allows
Re: (Score:1)
There is nothing contradictory about the licenses. The GPL allows redistribution and RH's contract does not take away that right, it simply states if you exercise that right RH will no longer license future versions for your use.
IBM is shipping both licenses. One license (the GPL) which they are not allowed to modify, says that the recipients are free to redistribute the code, without requirements beyond this license. The other license (whatever the Redhat product licensing is) states that if you redistribute that code then they terminate the license. This is obviously restraint ("to moderate or limit the force, effect, development, or full exercise of") against the rights assigned in the first license. Since the license they can l
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
There is nothing contradictory about the licenses. The GPL allows redistribution and RH's contract does not take away that right, it simply states if you exercise that right RH will no longer license future versions for your use.
IBM is shipping both licenses. One license (the GPL) which they are not allowed to modify, says that the recipients are free to redistribute the code, without requirements beyond this license. The other license (whatever the Redhat product licensing is) states that if you redistribute that code then they terminate the license.
No, it states RH will no longer provide support or newer versions to that customer. They are terminating their contract and support for RH but you still have full rights under teh GPL, just you are on your own without having RH for support.
This is obviously restraint ("to moderate or limit the force, effect, development, or full exercise of") against the rights assigned in the first license. Since the license they can legally modify conflicts with the license they cannot, the obvious remedy is modification of the terms of their own license.
Nothing in RH's contract prevents the redistribution of GPL'd code received from RH; so it is not in conflict with the requirements of the GPL. RH is free to state they will no longer do business with anyone who exercises the redistribution rights and nothing in the GPL
Re: (Score:2)
> Nothing in the GPL requires anyone to provide updated source code simply because they provided it to yo at some previous point in time
Nope - a retaliatory action is a "further restriction". Any country judge would agree.
IBM is violating the linux copyright as long as they maintain their retaliatory policy.
IIRC the individuals may be held criminally liable under DMCA without corporate shield but somebody fact-check me on that.
IBM should switch RHEL to BSD if they want to play in this manner - Microsoft
Re: (Score:1)
> Nothing in the GPL requires anyone to provide updated source code simply because they provided it to yo at some previous point in time
Nope - a retaliatory action is a "further restriction".
I'm not sure it's a retaliatory action. IBM offers support under a specific set of terms, terms which do not limit your rights to use the GPL code in accordance with the GPL. If you do decide to redistribute, IBM will simply end their support relationship with you and not supply future updates, but you still have full access to GPL code as well as any IBM specific code that you ere granted a perpetual license to use as well. IBM would simply provide contracted support until the contract ends and then not
Re: (Score:3)
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
The two licensing agreements, which must be taken together to receive the source from RH, are effectively one agreement. You can't get source from RH by accepting only the GPL or only RH's service agreement. Anything in the service agreement that prevents you from doing something with the GPL is going to be problematic.
RH is going to face some battles over this text in the GPLv2:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.
The counter argument is that the
Re: (Score:2)
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
The two licensing agreements, which must be taken together to receive the source from RH, are effectively one agreement. You can't get source from RH by accepting only the GPL or only RH's service agreement. Anything in the service agreement that prevents you from doing something with the GPL is going to be problematic.
RH is going to face some battles over this text in the GPLv2:
To me, the question is"does RH's service agreement limit your rights under the GPL?" The answer to that is, IMHO, no, since you still can copy, modify and redistribute the code as allowed by the GPL. RH simply will no longer support you or provide updated code, neither of which is required by the GPL.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
The counter argument is that the service agreement terminates and you still have the source. You'd have to agree to new service in order to receive source from RH on a future date. And theoretically they'd eventually lock you out if you renewed a single machine every year, downloaded all the source, and then had your account canceled. Assuming they even caught you right away.
And while inconvenient it amounts to paying for GPL source, which is allowed to a point in section 3b.
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
Key here would be for RH not to release binaries to anyone that isn't a paying customer. Then they can offer the source for free as part of that aforementioned section 3b. If they want to terminate your service agreement, they will of course have to lock you out of binaries as well. Any binaries you received before the termination, means you still get to have the source for "the cost of distribution" even if your service agreement has been terminated.
RH could still make available the required code that you had received, just not any later revisions, and thus comply with that section of the GPL.
It's not clear to me which side will win. But I believe this is controversial enough to face a test in court.
It would be interesting. RH is entering into a commercial agr
Re: (Score:2)
IMO it is in the interests of the free and open-source software community that this would be tested in court in both common- and statute-law jurisdictions around the world.
There are only two likely outcomes:
* The no-further-restriction clause is generally upheld, and IBM/Red Hat may no longer prevent the republishing of GPL code given to its customers (though they can still block any non-GPL code).
* The clause is not generally upheld, in which case, a GPL4 will likely ensue tha
Re: (Score:2)
But you *paid* for the software, thereby gaining access to the source. Then you distribute the source and are being penalized by not getting what you paid for anymore (support).
So you are being penalized in contract law for exercising your rights under copyright law. The two are inextricably linked, no? The contract was made *after* Red Hat exercised its "copyright rights", with the explicit intent of removing contract rights if the customer exercised *their* "copyright rights".
Will this truly hold up in co
Re: (Score:2)
But you *paid* for the software, thereby gaining access to the source. Then you distribute the source and are being penalized by not getting what you paid for anymore (support).
So you are being penalized in contract law for exercising your rights under copyright law. The two are inextricably linked, no? The contract was made *after* Red Hat exercised its "copyright rights", with the explicit intent of removing contract rights if the customer exercised *their* "copyright rights".
As long as RH continued to support it for the duration of the contract and then declined to renew you have received what RH was contractually obligated to supply. You have no loss. Once you decided to redistribute you no longer were in compliance and thus demonstrated you no longer accepted the terms of the contract and RH exercised its right not to renew. The original contracted expired and there was no agreement on teh terms for renewal.
In addition, RH can still provide you the source as it existed whe
Re: Is it, though? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I do view IBM/Red Hat's behavior as a civilly actionable violation of the GPL's no-further-restriction clause. A contract can impose requirements on IBM/Red Hat that would not exist otherwise.
However, I'm also pretty sure they aren't criminally liable UNLESS it is ruled that their current practice violates the GPL and then they continue to do it anyway.
Reason: criminal conviction normally requires intent or mens rea. (There are many claimed exceptions, but no relevant ones that I can think of here, a
Re: Is it, though? (Score:2)
The GPL gives you the right to redistribute source
The GPL disallows any restriction of this right
IBM uses the GPL license
IBM restricts redistribution of source by a retaliatory measure (firing the customer).
The secondary IBM license contradicts the GPL license.
IBM may persuade a few judges but customers are harder to persuade. Look for controlled descent into terrain.
Re: (Score:2)
IMO, they stand a very good chance of losing in court, and even if they win, it will result in revised versions of the GPL that explicitly prevent this kind of behavior, and by redistributing software under this GPL-next-version license, they will be explicitly agreeing not to pull another stunt like this at least with respect to that particular piece of software.
Now, I do agree that this move ultimately hurts IBM/Red Hat more than anyone else because it's going to drive away the great bulk of their custome
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
My reading of the Red Hat agreement allows source code redistribution. The "works" (that is, the binaries) are closely limited.
Linux licenses under GPLv2 only, and its clause allows any third party to obtain the source code (unless the source code is provided along with the binaries). That onslaught of articles stating only the recipient of the binary must be provided source comprises misinformation and that appears purposefully. We should not be confused by other licenses, not applicable to Linux.
Re: (Score:1)
On the other hand, Linus and the Linux project are not interested in pursuing GPL violations, they have stated so publicly and have allowed projects like Android distribution to simply violate the license for well over a decade (almost all driver binaries in Android are statically compiled into the Linux kernel). To that effect, the Linux kernel may as well be public domain, you would have to organize Linus and all the Linux contributors (including the massive contributors from IBM and Red Hat) to sue Red H
Re: (Score:2)
However, you are free to do whatever you want (within the limits of the GPL and other licenses)
Why should I care what the licenses say? It's not as if people abide by the licensing of video games, music, or movies.
Re: (Score:1)
Even that isn't entirely correct. First of all, you can't distribute the sources anyway, because that would violate RedHat's trademark. Thus, like Alma and Rocky you have to at least grep through the sources and change that. Moreover, not everything in a distro falls under GPL, which is what RedHat is using to limit further distribution of exact sources. Basically the build configs, templates, configuration files etc, everything that makes RHEL, well, RHEL, is not GPL. You can simply go upstream and get a C
Re: (Score:2)
Basically the build configs, templates,
The GPL requires the build configs to also be provided with the source:
"The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. "
Re: (Score:1)
That means the Makefiles, nothing more. I'm talking about the overarching build configs that say what versions of the package need to be compiled in order to make a distro. The things that make RHEL a Red Hat distro and not Ubuntu, all the 'special sauce' beyond compiling a binary. They are strictly complying with GPLv2 in that they release both binaries, source and RPM build recipes on git.centos.org.
Re: (Score:2)
That means the Makefiles, nothing more. I'm talking about the overarching build configs that say what versions of the package need to be compiled in order to make a distro
You are describing the spec files. The spec files define specific versions of packages, where they should be installed and also include things like diffs and configurations, they clearly fall under the category of "scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable"
Note, however, that what this entire discussion ignores is that not all the packages are licensed under the GPL, there are probably some that don't require source distribution.
Re: (Score:1)
I would strongly disagree with that notion. The files are used to download, unpack and move files and configurations, the compilation and the binaries and scripts to control compilation happens on the RH servers. If you take that assumption, WinZip and every scripting language should be open source because it can be scripted to open RPM and move files.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Truth Social's terms of service [truthsocial.com] also forbids users from exercising their rights under the AGPL:
7.19: "As a user of the Service, you agree not to ... copy or adapt the Service's software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code."
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I am not a lawyer, nor a Red Hat employee, so:
Lawyers who have looked at this license and the GPL have consistently concluded that the GPL doesn't actually require Red Hat to *continue* a commercial relationship with a customer who chooses to redistribute the software, provided that they don't take any further action to stop them from doing so.
I think it's not an interesting question, though.
Even if you thought that discontinuing a customer's contract could be construed as retaliatory, and you wanted to mak
Re: Is it, though? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Outside of this legal point, I do however agree with Mad dog here. Open source needs to be funded somehow, RH/IBM has arguably done more than any other company to fund it. I wish their previous arrangeme
It's not about whether it's "right" or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's more about whether RH is forfeiting too much mind share with their strategy.
For example, back in 2003 or so, the Linux distribution landscape was basically Redhat, with a bit of debian for having apt for so long and redhat failing to provide yum fast enough or properly adopt apt-rpm. So one move they did was finally have yum roughly compete with apt, which might have sealed the deal for redhat bent "the" distribution of choice for anything vaguely serious.
But then they did the split between fedora and commercial only redhat, at a time when Ubuntu came along to nail the void opened by redhat uncertainty. Now Ubuntu has huge mindshare, with redhat arguably being saved from obscurity by redhat clones keeping stubborn folks comfortable that they can sort of keep on with familiar.
If they succeed in squashing rhel clones, there is a risk that canonical picks up the mindshare. RHEL pricing is one thing, but it's also annoying to have to track your entitlement and manage it around, versus every other distribution just letting you deploy and tracking support entitlement separate of the software, which makes it much lower friction to deploy and operate. They offer UBI for container, recognizing that container is impossible to do entitlement sanely, but they invest explicit effort in preventing UBI from being *too* useful by itself.
So they run the risk of canonical or perhaps Oracle or suse becoming the new steward of "the" default "Enterprise" distribution.
I can understand being pissed at customers having token subscriptions. I could understand support contracts stipulating that use of rhel clones in production invalidates your support contact. I think this strategy risks throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Of course I've seen it play out all sorts of ways. One large site actually went for CentOS stream. Two large sites switched to Ubuntu. One large site actually went with rhel, but then got pissed over some bad support experience and then went Ubuntu ( which surprised me, is observed pretty good rh support efforts in the past. I also know of one that sincerely and really went rhel. The catch was they talked to rh, and got free use by virtue of being a research org. They could have done it before, but preferred clone to avoid dealing with rhn. The closing up scared them off of clones, so it can actually happen.
Re: (Score:2)
The mind share of whom? To the people who are actually paying Red Hat money, I doubt this is costing any mindshare at all. It's the people who aren't that are doing all the complaining. I think Red Hat has concluded it won't hurt to just let them scream. They're probably right.
Re:It's not about whether it's "right" or not... (Score:5, Insightful)
The people paying Red Hat money rarely handle bug finding and fixing. The mind share they risk to lose is essentially the world of unpaid beta testers, the ones that are complaining, and that might just as well just move over to other distributions. Red Hat might think it's not a big loss, they might be right, but it's a bit early to see how it plays out. When the vast majority of Linux users stops being on a red Hat clone the ecosystem becomes more fragile for Red Hat enterprise users, because their tech personnel is no longer using Fedora or CentOS at home and the skills no longer overlap.
Re: It's not about whether it's "right" or not... (Score:2)
the mind share of whom
Red Hat already screwed over not-for-profit scientific institutions by classifying them as commercial rather than academic (based on who awards the degrees). Thus they are dead as an option in science because these institutions also tend to maintain the software for their fields more than the university departments who tend to write and move on. Why would they bother supporting and testing in RH? Especially if the clones are gone too.
You might say nah that doesnâ(TM)t matter as theyâ(TM)re not Red
Re: (Score:2)
The mind share of whom?
Have you ever heard of docker images? Or of linux boxes? They are things that developers use. Or so I've been told.
Re: (Score:2)
I think its likel
Re:It's not about whether it's "right" or not... (Score:5, Informative)
That is already happening. Debian based distributions have well overtaken Red Hat in many places, with the exception being offline/air-gapped government work, where RHEL + RH Satellite + Ansible Tower are still king, due to the toolset provided by Red Hat.
Even government environments are looking at Ubuntu, with its FIPS option.
If Oracle did some relatively un-Oracle things, they could easily usurp Red Hat, and even Canonical for commercial Linux distribution. For example, GPL licensing ZFS and putting that in the mainline Linux kernel, open-sourcing ksplice, and re-engineering about production support of Oracle Linux, including code changes on a relatively fast basis for bug fixes. This will take some internal reorganizing because it is a lot harder to be the organization which makes all the fixes, as opposed to one that repackages other fixes from an upstream distribution provider.
However, if Oracle did become a primary upstream distribution provider, was able to put out distributions for ARM, and RISC-V with features for those platforms, they can make a lot of money with support contracts. For example, having a commercially supported OS for Raspberry Pi or other boards which are going to be used for IoT items would be very useful
Oracle can, at any time, seize the mantle from IBM, and if they made a distribution with ZFS mainlined, they could easily get the large government and corporate contracts that IBM has right now.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
It IS about whether it's "right" or not, in a sense. In fact, it's about whether it's "correct" or not. Redhat is essentially modifying the GPL with their second license. The GPL states that you can freely redistribute the sources once you have them. Their other license states that you will be punished for doing so. This is a fundamental conflict between the two licenses. Redhat does not have the right to modify the license on the GPL-licensed sources they are redistributing, but their other license represe
The GPL says you have *zero* rights to updates (Score:3)
Two points work against your argument.
1) The GPL says that covered software is provided "AS-IS" with no warranty, etc etc. It only ensures that you have the rights to obtain the complete corresponding sources (and redistributionmidification rights) for the version you have in your hands RIGHT NOW, not some or all future versiosn of the software.
2) The GPL also says that you may charge for binaries and/or support, but you are under no obligation to support or provide future updates if someone exercises thei
Re: (Score:2)
They definitely have the legal right to do that, and I don't think anyone has seriously denied that. But it's a move rather close to bait-and-switch, so their customers are perfectly correct in being annoyed, or even more strongly upset. Some of them have considerable money invested on the basis of the prior business rules that stands to be lost.
Re: It's not about whether it's "right" or not... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
So they run the risk of canonical or perhaps Oracle or suse becoming the new steward of "the" default "Enterprise" distribution.
IMO the ones they need to worry about are the likes of Amazon. If you’re an AWS customer (and let’s face it — let’s of big orgs are these days) then using Amazon Linux 2 is a no brainer. Binary compatible with RHEL, regularly updated by Amazon, fully supported, and the Yum repos live inside the AWS infrastructure. A fully containerized image is also available.
If you’re already using AWS for your cloud infrastructure, using AL2 is a no brainer. It may not be something your a
RedHat could fix this (Score:2)
RedHat could fix this, from a profit perspective.
Want to run RedHat? It's an all-or-nothing arrangement. You license based on your organization size, the number of cores across the organization, or something to this effect.
Yes, it would be much more complicated, but it is doable - a way to license based on the actual RedHat use. I'm sure there are other ways this could be done.
Then make that as a requirement to download anything at all.
Yes, they'd probably have to significantly reduce their licensing costs
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thats bad for orgs that mostly run windows or something, if they need a limited number of linux boxes
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Want to run RedHat? It's an all-or-nothing arrangement. You license based on your organization size, the number of cores across the organization, or something to this effect.
I do not see any moderately to large sized organization agreeing to this ever. It takes away from flexibility as well as changing needs. Most organizations plan out for 1 to 2 years out and have a mix of different OS. Last 2 years have been challenging to get new servers with supply chain issues. My company replaced some older servers, and before issues, it would have taken six months from the time the check was signed to have them installed and running. It took a year just to get them physically in the cou
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They already made a similar change to the licensing of J2SE. If one employee in your 60,000-strong organization is caught downloading J2SE, or anything that uses it, that organization now owes Oracle (presuming this stands up in court, which is likely) a BUTTLOAD of money.
I would put nothing past Oracle.
Whatever (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt it takes Red Hat levels of revenue to produce a Linux distro with at least the same quality level as RHEL. Red Hat spends a lot of money on other stuff [redhat.com]. In fact, I suspect that most of Red Hat's revenue is paying workers that aren't working on Linux proper at all.
Also, Jon "maddog" Hall needs to get his mind right. Red Hat hasn't "relicensed" RHEL. Red Hat cannot "relicense" RHEL. Red Hat has changed the terms of their subscription.
You know who has a significant opportunity here? Amazon. Amazon already incurs the costs of maintaining a full Linux distro and all of the basic ecosystem that goes with it. Amazon Linux is the go-to distro for Linux instances at AWS, and it's essentially indistinguishable from RHEL in terms of software compatibility. In fact, at this point you can't actually promulgate software that is somehow not compatible with AL; the number of AL users it too large. All Amazon would need do is open that up a little to support bare metal AL and collaborate with key hardware platform vendors.
I was planning to switch from Ubuntu (Kubuntu, actually) to Fedora at some point due to their highly aggravating "snap" push. Now I'm staying with Ubuntu and paying for Ubuntu Pro to get LTS, which has a rather nominal cost for an individual. I'd rather pay them for LTS and work around some of their bad technical choices than have anything to do with the Red Hat world.
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The goal of Amazon Linux is to switch you to their cloud. They have no incentive in supporting a RHEL clone on bare metal. Moreover, they likely have an agreement with RHEL to do this, since RedHat has management tools for the AWS software stack and promotes AWS on their own websites.
As far as Ubuntu, Ubuntu has had a similar agreement to Red Hat for a long time, you can't take the packages you get from Ubuntu Pro and redistribute them. Once the standard 5 year LTS expires, Ubuntu Pro will allow you to run
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Also, Jon "maddog" Hall needs to get his mind right. Red Hat hasn't "relicensed" RHEL. Red Hat cannot "relicense" RHEL. Red Hat has changed the terms of their subscription.
Jon didn't say anything about RHEL being "re-licensed." That bit of confusion came from either the person who submitted the article, or from the Slashdot editor.
Re: Whatever (Score:1)
classic case... (Score:1)
becoming old makes you stupid and gullible
Entitlements. (Score:2)
I'm not going where some of you think I'm going. Just because you make changes to someone else's GPL software doesn't entitle you to be paid for that work. The point of GPL is suppose to be everyone benefits from changes made GPL software, not just those willing to pay for it, after that fact.
If you want to be paid for your work on GPL software, you need to be paid up front, ahead of time. If you want to be paid for some specialty project, submit a proposal to your customers and find out if they're colle
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The GPL stuff is still available in other distributions. They aren't actually violating the terms of even the AGPL. They're just trying to increase their profit at the expense of their customers without delivering an improved product. They want to be paid for packaging. This is legal. The fees they want may be unreasonable for that job, but that's what they want.
RHEL hasn't been "re-licensed" (Score:4)
The nature of recent changes is frequently overstated, as it is here. RHEL has not been "re-licensed."
At any given time, there are something like 15 actively maintained released of RHEL -- as many as 5 releases in the same major release. Red Hat has historically published the packages from just one of those 5 releases via a fragile process. (They'd take the src.rpm that results from a package build, unpack it in a git repo, remove the primary source, de-brand and commit the rest, and push the result to a public source -- basically git as a complicated FTP.)
Now that Stream is a thing, it serves the purpose of publishing RHEL source code. It's not de-branded like the old process, but it provides a means of publishing one branch of RHEL. And for the purposes of building a downstream distribution and collaboration, it's a *much* better process.
But, while Red Hat's process for publishing code has changed, the licensing and subscription terms haven't.
https://fosstodon.org/@bookwar... [fosstodon.org]
Ugh (Score:5, Insightful)
However I will point out that as "evil" as Red Hat and IBM have been portrayed in this business change there is no mention at all of all the companies that support Open Source "Permissive Licenses", which do not guarantee the sources to their end users, or offer only "Closed Source" Licenses....who do not allow and have never allowed clones to be made....these people and companies do not have any right to throw stones (and you know who you are).
Saying "this isn't bad because other people do worse things" is not a justification, it's a dodge.
Which community?
The one that developed, and continues to develop, the kernel for, and much of the core software for, the OS that Red Hat is peddling - most of whom do not get an IBM paycheck. I don't even get the question.
How long will they keep beating their breasts when they find out that they can not make any money at doing it?
Has he not noticed who the companies are that are doing this? Is he under the impression that SUSE hasn't *already* figured out how to make money at this? Does he believe Oracle can't afford to take advantage of this?
Therefore the people who receive those binaries would receive the sources so they could fix bugs and extend the operating system as they wished.....this was, and is, the essence of the GPL.
....
Red Hat and IBM are making their sources available to all those who receive their binaries under contract. That is the GPL.
The FSF would certainly seem to strongly disagree, [gnu.org] but then I am sure they just misunderstand the purpose of the license that they draft and maintain.
Another interesting bit from TFA, to drive home just how off the mark this whole thing is:
So RMS started the GNU (“GNU is not Unix”) project for the purpose of distributing a freedom operating system that would require people distributing binaries to make sure that the people receiving those binaries would receive the sources and the ability to fix bugs or make the revisions they needed.
Well, RMS sure seems to think the reason was to ensure the ability to freely distribute source code, [free-soft.org] but again, I'm sure he is just misinterpreting his own motivations.
Is this some sort of late April Fool's post? This isn't some Halloween documents-era FUD propaganda, this is straight from someone who ought to know better. I fear that someone may need a cognitive exam.
IBM is banking, likely quite rightly, that no one is going to challenge them on this. They are only distributing the source to clients, with the understanding that redistribution will end their separate service agreement. I certainly would not want to be in the position of arguing that this is not a restriction on distribution under the GPL. It's bad faith at best, and complete nonsense at worst.
To paraphrase Andrew Dice Clay, RMS is rolling over in his grave, and the friggin' guy isn't even dead yet.
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Well, RMS sure seems to think the reason was to ensure the ability to freely distribute source code, but again, I'm sure he is just misinterpreting his own motivations.
I think the entire history of the free-as-in-speech vs free-as-in-beer clarification is proof that we wanted to ensure the right to improve software if you didn't like its limitations, not the right to give away software if you didn't like its price.
Re: Ugh (Score:1)
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They're not preventing the distribution of source code.
None of RHEL's code is private. Everything in RHEL is published to CentOS Stream's git repos, or to upstream projects, or (mostly) to both.
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Leaving aside the argument about the equivalence of the source code releases, please direct me to the section of the GPL that allows a licensee to restrict source code distribution, provided they distribute it themselves elsewh
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Section 1.4 of the subscriber agreement says that "This Agreement... is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license,"
So, here's the thing: The agreement does prohibit some uses of Red Hat code, but the agreement also says that it doesn't limit rights granted by individual licenses.
I am not a Red Hat employee, and I cannot tell you what Red Hat will or will not do in any specific situation. But I have *very serious* doubts that Red Hat would do anything, even
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1.2(g):
Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement. Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes:... (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software
4. Definitions:
...
“Subscription Services” means Red Hat offerings consisting of Software Access, Software Maintenance, Support and any other services associated with and during the term of a Subscription....
I understand it doesn't explicitly say it is restricting rights under the GPL. The problem doesn't go away because they provide assurances elsewhere in the agreement that this is not a GPL violation - that is not operative language and, at best, provides a strong argument for ambiguity of the agreement.
The point is that this is a restriction, whether they want to call it one or not. Clients are given source, as required by the GPL, but if they redistrib
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> I understand it doesn't explicitly say it is restricting rights under the GPL
It actually says that it is *not* restricting rights guaranteed by the GPL.
> I understand it doesn't explicitly say it is restricting rights under the GPL
Yes, it is a restriction, but according to the agreement, it's not a restriction that applies to GPL software (as I read it.)
> Clients are given source, as required by the GPL, but if they redistribute it, as permitted by the GPL, they are penalized
Prove it. Find someo
No use defending the unenforceable (Score:5, Interesting)
Who in their right mind would continue to provide support for official RHEL with a gigantic Sword of Damocles above their heads? No-one.
This means this threat is either one giant bluff, or vendors will be pushing for SUSE, Canonical or maybe even Oracle to become the preferred Linux distributor for their products. Given that both HP and Lenovo now want to sell IaaS with preinstalled, vendor-patched operating system images directly, this case of inexplicable stupor could not have come at a worse time for Red Hat.
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The entity which distributes the binaries is responsible for GPL compliance, not the company which produces them. To be able enforce the threat, RHEL could never safely be sold as preinstalled on a HP/Dell server nor made available as an image for Amazon or Azure. Otherwise, customers of those companies could force them to provide sources, which would force Red Hat to revoke their access, which would then allow those companies to be sued by their customers for not providing sources upon request.
In general, this is true, and true by design. In specifics however your examples are not correct.
Redhat has a cloud partner program allowing those partners to redistribute the sources.
AWS, Azure, and google are among them.
Smaller cloud services that are not partners however, you are right, but that is intentional as redhat doesn't want them using such images, and hope the threat will either stop them or make them choose to pay to be a partner.
Similarly but not quite the same, Redhat has an OEM program as w
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BS (Score:5, Insightful)
"Which community?" The community that creates a huge majority of the code included in RHEL. The community that helped Linux grow and establish as a market leader, giving a business opportunity to RH/IBM. The community that created the whole Fedora/RHEL/CentOS/derivatives ecosystem. The community that helped Red Hat to kill competing FOSS projects and be themselves the leader (quick examples: AIGLX vs. Xgl, KVM vs. Xen) Without this community Red Hat would have been a small business rung from Bob Young's apartment. And I say this as a former Fedora contributor.
And why would I care about Red Hat's investments? So many of them are contrary to the general community, like anything they hired Lennart for or the whole Gnome Shell.
Lately, what services I deployed at my workplace where running on AlmaLinux and not caring about 100% compatibility, just because I am used with Fedora/CentOS, but for the next ones I can just as well go with Debian. And surely my desktop can be just as well be Mint instead of Fedora, I run MATE anyway.
Re: BS (Score:1)
maddog is a mad dog (Score:3)
Re: maddog is a mad dog (Score:1)
What about unaffiliated contributors? (Score:3)
Sure, Redhat has the moral right to make money from their own efforts. But then are they going to start paying the currently-unpaid contributors? They contribute to the overall value of Linux, which Redhat is profiting from.
Otherwise currently-unaffiliated contributors can stop their efforts from being, basically, stolen by Redhat without any recompense.
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What RHEL is selling is support, since you can get everything else free. Nobody is going to pay RH prices unless they need the support. So, what you're paying RHEL for is what they're doing with their own efforts.
It's the other way around (Score:4, Insightful)
It's fine and dandy if Red Hat wants to profit from selling un-redistributable source code ... they would just have to do it with something that isn't a derivative work of GPL-ed code.
What's that? That would be costly and difficult? It's so much nicer to use that sweet sweet free Linux? Then I guess they need to make some cost benefit calculations.
Correction (Score:2)
A (slightly- confused] excerpt:
FTFY
Idiots (Score:2)
Anyone that uses RHEL these days, deserves what they get. Debian and only Debian, go on my servers.
He has a point (Score:2)
I simply don't understand why people want to keep using RHEL distributions, when Red Hat doesn't want them as a user/customer anymore. That is simply setting yourself up for abuse.
There are 100s of distributions to choose from, why choose one that doesn't want you as a user? I simply don't understand this subbornness of people.
Stay tuned.. (Score:2)
"Maddog" provides useful and interesting context to the situation. Clearly there is a philosophical and legal aspect to the question, which is what most of us are discussi
Red Hat sucks, but not because of licensing (Score:3)
I work in a decent-sized research hospital, providing managed linux systems for the various developer / research teams within the enterprise, as well as some infrastructure support.
Since Red Hat 8 was introduced:
* Support for docker was removed. It's been added back, but the response from IBM was "Run podman or openshift"-- podman is fine for a one or two service container setup, but it doesn't scale, and openshift is too large. Yes, I'm aware of the security implications-- which is why I rigidly control access to the server.
* Support for Tomcat is removed-- "Run JBoss". Which if JBoss were truly a drop-in replacement for Tomcat, I'd consider it-- but many of my customers apps don't work with JBoss.
* Starting in RHEL 9.x, LSB is removed. Red Hat says "It's old, and unmaintained"-- except that it's a standard way of querying the OS, and Puppet in particular, relies on it heavily.
* module streams-- are useful, but when you're trying to install MySQL commercial and the system says there's no such package in your repository, or you'd like a newer version of MariaDB, it's incredibly frustrating to realize Red Hat is deliberately hiding packages in your repositories. This is more of a nuisance.
* Until you get to Perl, and try to install a perl module such as DateTime-- Now, Red Hat 8.x and higher have all kinds of DateTime DEPENDENT packages-- But the actual DateTime package is hidden in the codeready-builder repo, and that's not documented anywhere on Red Hat's site.
* They killed CentOS after saying they wouldn't.
Running RHEL 8 or 9 today is an exercise in "What did they break THIS time?". It's incredibly frustrating. The license issues around GPL are mostly immaterial-- my organization has a site license. But in a highly heterogeneous environment, Red Hat is easily the most irritating distro to support with the most exceptions.
Re: Red Hat sucks, but not because of licensing (Score:1)
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You can now install docker-ce on Red Hat successfully. When 8.x originally shipped, it would not install due to containerd being blocked at the RPM level.
So it's not officially supported, but you can wedge it in if you want to.
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I run podman at just a large scale as I used to run Docker. In fact, I can run podman on an even larger scale because the Docker daemon isn't sapping 30% of my resources. I'm genuinely interested in your experience and would love you to elaborate.
Can't really comment on the others, but personally I think the CentOS move was misunderstood. Moving CentOS to upstream of RHEL (where the CentOS community can contribute), rather than downstream (where nobody can contribute because that would diverge it away f
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The biggest issue is that docker can handle network configurations for internal networks, and use privileged ports. My puppet infrastructure, for instance, is a container running puppet, a container running postgres and a container running puppetdb. The world doesn't need to talk to postgres or puppetdb, so the three containers talk to each other over a 172.x.x.x network, and only the puppet master port is exposed at the host level.
I know podman can manage networks as well (now-- it didn't used to), but i
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Thanks for elaborating! Appreciate you taking the time. And yeah, the hack to get rootless containers listening below 1024 isn't great.
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All well and good! But! (Score:2)
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Software licensing is broken. (Score:2)
And this is just more fuel for that fire.
When motivations aren't aligned with the costs/work then someone will get screwed. Which was always a worry for Open Source, and the GPL specifically, with it's ability to taint other projects if used in something else. Even just the worry that someone MIGHT sue you is enough for some companies to avoid using or contributing to projects (my last very successful and profitable company included).
Capitalism is broken in general. It's rewarding the wrong people. Part
GPLv2 is obsolete (Score:1)
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Up to the copyright holder? (Score:1)
The issue of what "no additional restrictions" means ought to be interpreted according to the *intent* of the copyright holder for any given piece of GPL software. If Torvalds thinks it's the support contracts are fine and Stallman thinks they are a problem, the outcome ought to be that Redhat can continue to distribute Torvalds's code but would have no license to distribute Stallman's.
I don't see how this could be interpreted any other way without essentially allowing "theft" by misinterpretation.
If you le
RH "benefits from others work" angle questioned (Score:1)
Sure... (Score:2)
And those of us at home, who are not corporations? What discount are you offering, Jon? I'm on social security, so, how much per year? How much per month? And do I have to use fucking satellite?
Wasted time on RHEL. (Score:1)
You could have been using Debian instead ;)
I do love Debian, but this is just a joke. We all use the distro we use for a reason.
Sir Bitchy-Bitch Mcgee: The Mayor of Bitchville. (Score:2)