I'm done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

Two years ago, Red Hat killed CentOS, a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution.

The community of CentOS users—myself included—were labeled as 'freeloaders', using the work of the almighty Red Hat corporation, without contributing anything back. Don't mind all the open source developers, Linux kernel contributors, and software devs who used CentOS for testing and building their software. Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own.

Update: I had forgotten about this, but Red Hat had, in fact, promised to keep the git sources open following the CentOS move in 2020. See LearnLinuxTV's post for more on that. This change is also causing considerable grief downstream for distros like SDL/PUIAS (a RHEL downstream that's been maintained since before even CentOS existed)—but they are collateral damage at this point.

I almost wrote off Red Hat back then. It felt like someone stuck a knife in my back.

This past week, Red Hat took that knife and twisted it hard, when they published this blog post. Let there be no mistake: this was meant to destroy the distributions the community built to replace what Red Hat took away.

There were only two things that kept me around after Red Hat betrayed us the first time: First, instead of attacking the community of open source users, many Red Hatters reached out and asked, "How can we do better?" It didn't heal the wound, but it meant something, knowing someone at Red Hat would at least listen.

Second—and more importantly—Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux stepped in. They prevented a mass-exodus from the Red Hat ecosystem, giving developers like me a stable target for my open source work. But Rocky and Alma relied on Red Hat sharing their source code.

Here's how it used to work:

  1. Red Hat would grab a copy of Linux
  2. They would add magic sauce that makes it Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  3. They would release a new version
  4. They would update a source code repository with all the data required to build it from scratch

That's kinda the status quo because in open source, the source... is open! And it doesn't matter if someone who uses your source benefits from it too... that's kind of what it's all about! We all benefit from sharing our work, and in this case, the GPL license Linux uses legally requires us to share it!

Without that sharing, there would be no Debian, Arch, Mint, Ubuntu, PopOS, Fedora... or any of the other hundreds of Linux distros that build on each other and prop up the community.

But Red Hat decided to put the source code behind a paywall. Now, this is legal. Technically, the GPL allows it. But it's generally rude and annoying to do that when the code you're locking down is largely based on other people's open source code.

But... it's within their rights, so I won't argue that point. What I will argue is the current subscription agreement, which might not be legal. Red Hat currently says they can cancel any user's account if they download the source code and redistribute it.

Let's say someone downloads the source through a Red Hat subscription, and uses that to build a new version of Rocky Linux. If Red Hat retailiated by cancelling that subscription, I'd definitely tune into that court case.

I don't know if the community could front the money to take on IBM's powerful laywers—maybe that's what Red Hat's banking on. But there's another player in this game who might, and that's Oracle. Wouldn't it be ironic if Oracle were the ones who knocked Red Hat down a peg for being so uppity with their abuse of their community!

But let me be clear: everything I've seen points to Red Hat trying to choke out downstream distros like Rocky, Alma, and Oracle Linux. I think their hope is users of those distros would get scared and sign up for a Red Hat subscription. They need this to happen to lock in some short-term profits to please their IBM overlords. That's my cynical take on it.

What Red Hat's doing is skirting right on the edge of legality the terms of Linux's GPL License. If you wanna dig into that, read this post from the Software Freedom Conservancy.

RHEL Gandhi Quote

Red Hat used to be the company of rebels. They used to have edgy ads quoting Gandhi and positioning Red Hat as the plucky underdog, using open source to upend the old proprietary software companies.

It's funny they used to be so devoted to that Gandhi quote in particular. In one sense, Red Hat kinda won, they're the default choice for running Linux in big companies.

The irony is that Cory Doctorow recently wrote this about a different company, but I think it applies here:

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

What a juxtoposition!

They built up so much goodwill in the open source community through the years and used to be known as the 'open source company.'

But they're throwing away that goodwill—at least as far as Linux is concerned—all in the name of profit.

Developers like me, maintainers of the EPEL repository, Fedora maintainers who are rightfully worried about the long-term impacts...

We're all being told to go sign up for a Red Hat Developer Account so we can snag our 16 licenses[^1] of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for testing.

Oh boy!

Thanks, I guess I'll drop doing something actually productive and spend a week retooling my test infrastructure and automation to work with Red Hat licensing.

You know who doesn't require me to do that?

Debian. Ubuntu. FreeBSD. Not even Rocky Linux!

And please tell your employees to stop patronizing me, saying I should just use CentOS Stream. There's a reason Rocky and Alma linux have been downloaded millions of times. Stream is not a substitute for CentOS.

So I've dropped support for Enterprise Linux on all my work, effective last Friday.

And people are asking me about Ansible. That's the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (by IBM), by the way.

I don't think Ansible's gonna try locking down access, but the fact I have to spend even a second considering that possibility is insane!

Who wants to build around an ecosystem where the open source users are called freeloaders and where massive disruptions are implemented in the middle of a release cycle, two times in a row, with no warning?

I don't see this helping Red Hat in any way in the long term.

In the end, this is just sad:

  • It's sad for users like me who used CentOS and developed tools on it that on-ramped folks into Red Hat's ecosystem.
  • It's sad for Red Hat, which used to fight for open source, but now puts up barriers around their own source code.
  • It's sad for everyone still in their ecosystem, because they're now forced to deal with Red Hat's licensing shenanigans and the loss of so many in the open source community.

Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux both announced they'll find a way forward. I hope they can, if nothing else so people who stuck with Red Hat don't get burned again.

But as for me? I'm done with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I'll keep up support for Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux on a best-effort basis, but I have no confidence I'll be able to support Enterprise Linux moving forward.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

[^1] Red Hat seemed to be upping the limit to 240 sockets per developer, but now it seems that was just a bug.

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Comments

Solution could be as simple as drawing up a new GPL that would exclude RedHat practices and campaign to have package maintainers adopt it. Let RedHat fork everything they include and try and maintain it themselves

The SFC says that the new Red Hat practice violates the current GPL, no changes needed.

I can see how a judge might agree or disagree, but I can't see a path to anyone who likes the GPL ever cooperating with IBM again.

Please post your alternative recommendations more clearly. We're also CentOS users, so what's the best way forward? We just need a LAMP stack really.

Since Debian is controlled by a not-for-profit foundation, it's much more robust against this sort of corporate shenanigan. Not *immune*, but more robust.

I'm not a fan of systemd myself, it's just overly complicated for my needs. With that said, for the work Jeff does as well as anyone else doing "real work" with a Linux distro as a base, you can't get much better than Debian. It's stable, it's widely used and distributed, it's the base for several major distros, and it is run by a foundation rather than a corporation. I would love to say that my daily driver distro, Void, would be a great choice for Jeff to test on, but it's honestly just a niche distro despite how awesome it is, and there would be no point.

Regarding Ansible, I agree with the other person here who said NixOS is worth looking into if Jeff does have to drop Ansible down the road. Nix is available for other distros too, so there's plenty of opportunity to learn it without having to fully convert to the actual distro.

I think they are even better with the systemd. I used to fight against systemd, but after using it for years, I've come to believe it was a great leap for Linux. Its not perfect, but its good enough.

So to answer the OP's question - Switch to Debian. As another commenter mentioned, its run by a non-profit, and is highly unlikely to have any sort of issue like this.

I'm curious what people are using for central package management on Debian. The main reason I've been loyal to RHEL-style distributions is losing the top-level visibility I get from Spacewalk Server is painful.

If you're looking for a distribution with long term support options your choices are probably either Ubuntu LTS or Suse Enterprise Linux. Particularly if you're looking for distributions that are supported by commercial packages you might need to run in a business.

Thanks to all, lots of good input. Our servers are to support our own businesses, and a few partners, and just use webmin/virtualmin, wp/php stuff, MySQL, python stuff, etc. I want to get this migration done now/soon and to a target that isn't going to change for awhile, and remain non-commercial OSS. Thanks again.

Well only the CentOS Stream will give you the longest updates of all of them: 10 years from the initial major release date. I hate upgrading so I will stick with that.

Well, nope. Unless RH changes their mind/policy, support for CentOS Stream X ends when final X.Y release of RHEL is released and that RHEL version goes from "Full" to "Maintenance Support" mode, which happens about 5 years after initial X.0 release. Look at centos.org, they already announced EOL for CentOS Stream 8 in May next year. That also means C9S will probably live only till mid-2027. Bummer.

Just a correction in your first sentence

"Two years ago, IBM (which acquired Red Hat) killed CentOS (which It was expected), a widely-used free version of their Enterprise Linux distribution."

This is not unusual. Remember that Oracle has aquired MySQL (free database) and now MySQL is no longer free (really free) !!!!!

That's the flow of things - unfortunately !!!

We've moved to Ubuntu over two years ago. We are looking closely at Clear Linux as an alternative to Ubuntu, just in case.

Clear Linux is an Intel project. I don't trust them, either.

Personally, I'm looking into SUSE's SLES. They've been around longer than RH, have the same business model and customer base, but they exist in an (arguably) better business environment for an open source company: Germany/EU.

OpenSUSE is free and maintained for 5 years, but to get the full 10+ years cycle you need to pay subscription. SUSE doesn't have other clones giving you the 10+ years maintenance for free as RHEL allowed before. So you are willing to pay the SUSE fee but not willing to pay the RHEL fee, even though, SUSE does the same thing?
Do you have another reason to choose SUSE?

What exactly is the problem with paying? Is it about Freedom here, or just about not paying? Because I have absolutely 0 sympathy for people who just don't want to pay others for their work, but I do care about freedom a ton.

From my POV, all RH has to do is point to the Github repo the source came from. The rest of the sauce of building the distro - that is the work they do, they are free to charge for that. And you can choose to pay, or not. The source is open at that point, I would say the GPL satisfied - the fact that you can't create a copy of the distro at near zero cost and effort and then turn around and sell that near-zero-work to others, well, my hard bleeds for you.

what if Linux and all OSS changed their license to prevent Redhat/IBM from using it?

You can't change the license of existing code without the approval of everyone who contributed to it. This was also a sticking point when people talked about relicensing the Linux kernel as GPLv3.

"Red Hat currently says they can cancel any user's account if they download the source code and redistribute it." - lets see a link please and where it says that. Would also love to see a link to previous versions of the same document to highlight what changed therein.

This sounds a bit like it'll revert to something like the ancient White Box Linux days to me.....

See Product Appendix 1, which currently reads:

Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agreement.

Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: (a) only purchasing or renewing Subscription Services based on some of the total number of Units, (b) splitting or applying one Software Subscription to two or more Units, (c) providing Subscription Services (in whole or in part) to third parties, (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software or (e) using Subscription Services to support or maintain any non-Red Hat Software products without purchasing Subscription Services for each such instance (collectively, “Unauthorized Subscription Services Uses”).

Redistribution would run afoul of point 1.2 (g) (d), and providing the source from one account to someone else would run afoul of point 1.2 (g) (c), according to my "IANAL" understanding of the contract.

I am also not a lawyer, but there has been verbiage for a long time about subscription usage. This does not say that it cannot be redistributed. It does not say that you cannot make copies. It doesn't say that there can be multiple deployments.

Red Hat has to pay for its development, testing, integration, support, etc. This says that if one system has an active subscription, all must have an active subscription.

Kinda like I cannot buy a single copy of proprietary software and install and use it on 1000 servers.

> This does not say that it cannot be redistributed. It does not say that you cannot make copies

It says it very explicitly.

> Unauthorized use of the Subscription Services includes: ... (d) using Subscription Services in connection with any redistribution of Software...

You are 100% wrong.

> [IBM] has to pay for its development, testing, integration, support, etc.

IBM didn't have to pay for all the development. There's some things that require active development, sure, but the overwhelmingly majourity of the software they sell is just repackaged open source projects.

> I cannot buy a single copy of proprietary software and install and use it on 1000 servers.

None of the GPL protected code in the RHEL SRPMs is proprietary to Red Hat.

It doesn’t say ‘software’ it says ‘Software’ and that term has a special meaning in the agreement, To quote: “Software means Red Hat branded software that is made available in a Red Hat branded product.”

Therefore, software which is not Red Hat branded is fair game to take, which is the majority of RHEL. This can be observed by looking at old CentOS packages, which included package tags in the names of RPMs for those which had to have branding removed for legal reasons.

Also, Red Hat Universal Base Images are available without a subscription, are freely available on public web servers, and claim to include the whole RHEL base OS minus the kernel. People are entitled to source for that without any risk of access ever being revoked due to Red Hat’s prior commitments, while the kernel itself (last I checked) from RHEL has no Red Hat branding in the first place.

Here’s the freely redistributed corresponding source code as SRPMs: https://cdn-ubi.redhat.com/content/public/ubi/dist/ubi9/9/x86_64/baseos…

They even encourage binary redistribution of their packages, see here: https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/ubi

Look further up the tree and you’ll find original RPMs, regularly updated with security patches, which you can use as you please.

In conclusion, this whole thing feels like a psyop designed to trick businesses into paying for things they still don’t need to on the basis of FUD. The truth is that one can amass most, if not all of the components for a rebuild without violating these agreements, if people would only remember that ‘Software’ is not the same thing as ‘software’

Maybe it time For IBM Hat to pay Fedora users, for the alpha testin of the packages, that will land in rhel'?
Would be awesome to see achange in Linux kernel license that excludes IBM/RH from using Linux kernel. xD

My recollection of that clause means you can't download and redistribute the binaries. Obviously lawyers and courts would need to clarify how broad that clause is in real life.

The creates a legal paradox. Since any GPL licensed upstream packages gives the end use rights to freely redistribute. Not sure how redhat can take that right away.

Unless that only applies to redhat code.

The only OS I can imagine to be viable without Ansible is nixOS. I use it for my homelab and can't recommend it enough, for a number of other reasons too.

Not the first time IBM are short sighted. They are the same folks who once said OS market would never be profitable (or something along those lines), making room for one of the most profitable businesses ever.
Maybe I am reading too much in this but attempting to monetize on CentOS is basically saying they are desperate for cash, even small change. Maybe they are beyond healing

I think it's time to change the brand to Big Blue Hat 😔

Elsewhere has cleverly been referred to as Big Purple.
red + blue ~ purple.
And doubtless as is some of the prose resulting from this fiasco.
Perhaps red hat --> bad hat ;)

The way forward is likely to get sources from Oracle instead....

I'll say it again. Switch to FreeBSD and you'll never have any of these issues.

Looks like all good things really must come to an end...

Any privately owned and autocratically governed GNU/Linux distribution will eventually behave in a manner similar to Red Hat. There is already a precedent on similar behaviors by Ubuntu (using snaps to create a monopoly package distribution mechanism, servers for which are not open source).

Debian may be the best bet for a high quality distribution with a large package base.

I have a feeling that all the Red Hat-descendants are in trouble. IBM has been a greedy bunch for a long time.

I'm very glad my daily driver is not bad on them.

Sounds like the industry needs to look at other distros, and Ubuntu and SUSE in particular if SLAs are needed.

Pretty bad when Ansibles biggest role contributor is calling them out on their BS.

But to be fair, we all know it's IBM pulling their strings. Redhat wouldn't have done this unless forced to do so.

100% correct. Retired IBMer here. I guarantee this was an IBM decision RedHat wanted no part of. RedHat was doomed the minute IBM bought it. I'm only surprised it has taken this long.

From the Red Hat blog,

"The CentOS Stream gitlab source is where we build RHEL releases, in the open for all to see. To call RHEL “closed source” is categorically untrue and inaccurate. CentOS Stream moves faster than RHEL, so it might not be on HEAD, but the code is there. If you can’t find it, it’s a bug – please let us know."

I know it's not the point, but folks are focusing on the traditional developer/paid account route to getting source rpms. There are other ways that don't require an account. Most notably, an AWS instance with official images - an extra hourly charge is added to the normal AWS rate which includes access to binary and source RPMS. When going that route, you don't have a persistent relationship with RH.

I don't see what would stop you from launching an instance, run an incremental reposync to a persistent EBS volume, then shut it down. Sure, it'll cost an extra ~6 cents an hour while its running but an incremental update doesn't take long.

I heard about it even before IBM acquired Red Hat, that Red Hat is looking for a way to get rid of paid distributions, such as EuroLinux, which is based on RHEL, is cheaper and competitive, but doesn't add much to the OpenSource community. I do not know if such distributions did not exaggerate and finally the cup was overflowing, because as long as there was CentOS and other free ones, not rebranding Red Hat and selling much cheaper on big scale without paying other OpenSource projects, it was still moving forward somehow..

Please, take into account that the words about freeloaders could be towards freeloaders, not all of CentOS/Alma/Rocky users. I doubt that Red Hat would stick "freeloaders" on everyone. In particular, they made the RHEL system available to developers (16 instances) and Open Source projects free of charge. So this can't be true..

In my opinion, it is the effect of not thinking two steps ahead.. like EuroLinux. After all, as soon as they take RHEL, just rebrand and sell it cheaper, without such contribution as Red Hat do to the community, the Open Source will die. Many certainly thought about it, but also took into account the effect of such conduct. That's why it didn't - it's not logical.

Somewhere I heard that EuroLinux even got some certificates that they are 100% compatible with Red Hat from independent institutions to hook up to RHEL certifications and compliance with other things, as well as to match tender procedures.

So as such things began to happen.. I don't know what others expect. In this way, projects such as Red Hat will die and EuroLinux will have no source anyway. Such things must be addressed somehow. What can be said is that while Red Hat was only wondering how to make it more difficult, under the wings of IBM it finally began to act boldly.

I very much doubt that such things would happen, if the things mentioned here hadn't started to happen. They are not definitely noticeable by everyone.. but.. it is good to look also from other sides.

I guess this is the key looking at what's going on in sales:

"We have to pay the people to do that work — those passionate contributors grinding through those long hours and nights who believe in open source values. Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable. That includes critical backporting work and future features and technologies under development upstream. If that work becomes unsustainable, it will stop, and that's not good for anyone." - source: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-source-response…

I agree. It seems to me that not many people from the Open Source community have any idea what is going on in the market and how other "brilliant" organizations are using RHEL code against Red Hat and Open Source - knowingly and intentionally. It's easy money for them. It had to end like this eventually. I don't know what they expected... (organizations that do that... not all Open Source users).

What I've not seen mentioned is 3rd party software and tgeir certification strategies.
Many companies won't allow software that isn't certified against the OS it's running on. So if users need xyz, and it's only certified for RHEL, you get RHEL.

I dropped rehat since RedHat 7.2 and moved to Debian. Now you can do the same: drop Redhat, embrace Debian! we are a lot, uou can be one more.

Yeah. We tried that (with Debian stable). Debian kept changing things (within the same version), which broke our configurations and caused downtime. Also, the release lifetime was much too short. In general, it was a major pain. Red Hat has always been extremely stable.

Apparently, release lifetime has since been extended. Not sure I trust Debian to be stable enough though.

I suspect that AWS has taken a big chunk mof business away from Redhat with their Amazon Linux and IBM is trying to maximize/increase sales/profits. Additionally, other software and platforms are siphoning away business at a steady clip. Redhat has been in a slump the past few years and all these recent developments prove that they will be in bad shape for the foreseeable future with IBM at the helm. It's unfortunate and I feel for all of the good employees they have left.

I'm a sysadmin. I installed Alma 9 one one of my home servers a few months ago (I run a mixed environment for testing and general tinkering). Its current use is mainly running container images based on other distributions. I'm certainly not going to pay $800/year for a RHEL licence for this box, I don't need enterprise-level support and that's more than the hardware cost!

As many others have pointed out, CentOS Stream is often falling behind on security updates so not really fit for any purpose other than development of Stream itself.

So they consider me a freeloader and don't want me to run RHEL. Fine, it will be some hours of work but I'll switch this box to something else, no biggie. But will I ever even suggest installing RHEL at work after this?

There are currently tons of RHEL 7 installations that will reach EOL in less than a year and will have to be replaced with _something_. Not a great time to piss the people who will plan and do that off IMHO.

If it just for home use, why you will not consider the RHEL developer subscription that gets you free subscription upto 16 machines or a free RHELsubscription for open source projects ?

First of all, "just' for home use? Like the OS on your computer is not important if you're not using it for business?

An OS that requires a subscription and an EULA that I will need to hire lawyer to understand, and comes with a license manager that reports home is not for me. I used Alma in this instance because RH have always signalled that they were OK with rebuilds and I wanted something with a slightly less frantic churn rate than Fedora's. I don't _need_ to run a RHEL-like system, there's nothing special about that if you're not a bank that needs to run 15-year old binaries on a system frozen at that time. Debian will be just fine.

(I also don't trust that the terms of the no-cost subscription will remain the same and some RH VP won't wake up tomorrow and decide to block updates or require weekly renewal or whatever.)

So weird to say that! Opensuse and Ubuntu are doing the same. U need subscription for Ubuntu Pro and Suse Enterprise.
You are just making FUD!

... What to be f'ed arround by clueless sales staff for weeks on end to achieve simple validation, just because it's a developer account, for a nobody, that if used, all of 16 hosts, that once up'ed can not be used for production?? go pipe your garbage to

/dev/null . . .

plenty of 'Not for Profits' have been burned by the RH/IBM bs, that have no budget to speak of, but rely on supporting the community with a down stream RH distro. Tell me are they free loaders, taking free software and benfitting those communities in need, who can't do IT at scale? The same that report they've been cold shouldered because of no $ for liscensing... by that argument, why did RH burn Fermi Labs, or CERN ??? they sure as hell don't generate profits for governments. "We help the community" .. erm, by emptying thier wallets, after building on code that was not wholly thiers in the first place, bu tsprinkling thier bs trademark on everything they could just to spawn some sueability ...

I'm so glad that I went with openSUSE instead of the RHEL downstreams. I'm very happy with the gecko and with ALP being built in OBS I don't see SUSE pulling something like this anytime soon. I really recommend it for those who want to get away from RHEL but still want a RPM bases distro

I have no idea what they're thinking. I've been a red hat advocate in my company for years, introducing rhel and tower to my team and enterprise. I have to think this is IBMs doing, the same IBM that forced us to install licensing software across every system in our company.

This bell was first rung when that primordial behemoth, IBM, purchased Red Hat. To say that was an overt harbinger of what has just happened is the understatement of all under... The next Bell that must ring is a warning bell to other distros that even ponder the fatal (to distros) idea of selling out. This must be a due bill for Red Hat, I mean IBM.

Look up what “Software” (with a capital S) means in that agreement. You can freely redistribute most of the contents of the RHEL SRPMs as its all software which doesn’t meet their very clear definition of Software.

Also, public source code (and binaries) for most of the RHEL base OS (minus the kernel) can be nabbed from the RHEL UBI repos without needing to agree to a subscription of any kind, as that is available as freeware. UBI repos are on Red Hat public web servers and mirroring is encouraged.

This feels like a psyop to trick businesses into paying and people are falling for it. Billion dollar companies like Oracle won’t fall for this and I can guarantee you we’ll see Alma and Rocky rebuilds using copies of Oracle Unbreakable Linux packages instead (just to limit perceived liability) if Red Hat doesn’t attempt to clarify the FUD immediately!

Of course, I will still be using this FUD as an excuse to move my customers away from RHEL but that’s because the innovations which made it great a long time ago (e.g. SELinux support, better runtime hardening etc.) have long since been integrated into community ran distros like Debian, which now have their own LTS programmes and are better at supporting traditional (i.e. non-cloud, non-container, non-cluster) workloads, facilitating proper in-place upgrades and providing fewer unwanted surprises between major releases.

so debian / freebsd / maybe some ubuntu as stable replacements for OSes.

Any ideas for Ansible replacements? I'd hate to have this pulled out from under us in a few years and not have a clue or practice.

Ubuntu is corporate controlled too. If RedHat has gone to the dark side after 25 years, Canonical will follow.

Our only chance is community driven, non-corpo controlled distributions like Debian.

That's definitely a concern, but I think we are in a better place with Ansible than RHEL clones. All of Ansible is public, even their Tower/AAP platform. Sure they could close it, but it would be forked pretty easy.

The freeloaders here is redhat. You know how many volunteer contributions come from upstream packages. Then into fedora then CentOS? Why more man hours then redhat provides.

Pure hypocrisy IMHO.

Everyone should be running away from Redhat at this point. That's the only way they'll learn.

I personally use Ubuntu LTS for this reason.

Thank you for this. I work for a large government agency in a capacity to make decisions about the OS's we use to deploy. (On-prem cloud, container orchestration, change/config management, etc) We have large Ansible and OpenShift services that I'm going to migrate away from. RedHat will be the last solution on my list for new projects now. I'll frame it as a way to save massive amounts of money on subscription costs. Noone will scoff at that. RIP RedHat.

A comment by Mike McGrath on Reddit

https://old.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/14jsb52/red_hats_commitment…

“The problem of rebuilders has been around forever. Things heated up a couple of months ago when we detected what we think was a continued bad-faith action from one of the rebuilders, not on the code/engineering side but on the commercial/money making side of their house. That's as far as I'll go publicly. After that it was just a matter of discussion on what to do about it, so we landed on the announcements I made last week.”

Honestly, RedHat has acted in bad faith for the last few years. I don't believe what Mike McGrath has to say because he works for RedHat and this information, at best, is to help ease over their betrayal to the community yet again. At worst, it's a bad faith statement that only follows a pattern of bad behavior by a once great company.

Redhat sold out long ago. I stopped using it years ago. I saw were it was going. We just use ubuntu…the support is good enough and they actually like us. 😂

I wonder if this will end up hurting IBM, much like the AB-Inbev fiasco?

I spent a lot of time picking apart the change from CentOS to CentOS Stream, and decided I was OK with it. I understood the reasoning behind it, and it made sense to me. Rocky and Alma also make sense to me, and I fully support those projects.

However, this move is a 100% pure, unadulterated money grab. And in the end, no one is going to be better for it. Given a choice, I'll be moving away from RHEL-based distros in the future.

If the FOSS community doesn't challenge any of Red Hat's perceived GPL violations in court, it will be seen as a pushover (more than it already is). More companies will begin to make moves like this. That said, if it is challenged and the GPL loses, it could be SO MUCH WORSE.

IBM has laid down the gauntlet. It has both the money and the lawyers to engage in the largest game of chicken we've seen since the SCO lawsuits. The only difference is, this time IBM is on the other side.

It's funny people seem to completely missing the mark on this. The main issue stems from the rebuilders contributing absolutely nothing to the wider ecosystem and then having the audacity to start charging for support for a product they have no input in making. But yeah... Red Hat bad yadda yadda open source give me my enterprise distro for free yadadada