open source

...about Red Hat's EULA and its enforceability according to the license terms of the GPLv2. (Specifically in reference to my blog post last Wednesday).

And for that, I apologize.

Basically, the GPLv2 says there can be "no restrictions" placed on any use of the source code provided to any user of the software with its license.

Red Hat's EULA says that Red Hat reserves the right to terminate your business relationship (the Red Hat Subscription) if you redistribute the source code.

This doesn't restrict your right to share the source code that has been previously provided, since you are still free to do so.

It doesn't make sense logically, and certainly not ethically (I don't think anyone could argue this is in the spirit of the GPLv2 license), but legally, logic and ethics sometimes take a back seat to interpretation.

Update: I still think a court case could go either way given enough money and good lawyers, but apparently IBM's lawyers don't, otherwise they wouldn't have written the EULA.

(See update at the bottom of this post)

One of the interesting outcomes of the Red Hat situation:

Distribution of GPLv2-licensed code requires no restrictions be placed on downstream users rights to use and redistribute the code (whether they obtained it freely or paid for access):

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.

Does threatening retaliation (account suspension) for sharing code count as a 'restriction' on exercising a user's rights?

So far I've heard from three corporate open source licensing experts the answer is no.

According to them, the EULA only deals with an account-holder's ability to acquire services from Red Hat (a contract).

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.

For all of my open source projects, effective immediately, I am no longer going to maintain 'official' support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I will still support users of CentOS Stream, Rocky Linux, and Alma Linux, as I am able to test against those targets.

Support will be 'best effort', and if you mention you are using my work on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I will close your bug/feature/support request as 'not reproducible', since doing so would require I jump through artificial barriers Red Hat has erected to prevent the use of their Linux distribution by the wider community.

For more of my reasoning, see my previous blog post: Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?.

This decision will not change until and unless I see evidence Red Hat cares about giving free and open access to the sources required to build and test against their Linux distribution.

Process

The timeline for this transition to not supporting RHEL is as follows:

I've had a busy week, so I didn't have time until today to read this news about Red Hat locking down RHEL sources behind a Red Hat subscription.

I repeat the title: Red Hat, are you dumb?

When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but free", users like me were justifiably angered.

I don't contribute to CentOS or Red Hat development much, if at all. But I have, for over a decade, provided software and tools that were compatible with RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and sometimes other more exotic distros.

I could test my stuff against CentOS Stream... or UBI... or Fedora. Those are mostly like RHEL. Or I could try linking a Red Hat Developer subscription to my test runners and build tools so I could use a licensed copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because that would be required for... actually ensuring compatibility.

But that's dumb.

I've been involved in open source communities for over a decade. I helped organize events and initiatives, I've donated photography services, and in general I like to give back. For me, a lot of this stems from my faith background—the motto of my Jesuit high school was 'Men for Others'.

But I would consider myself a 'moderately active' volunteer, compared to some. I might give a few hours here and there, or help at a major event for part of the time, but there are people who have a drive and passion for helping others that's far beyond my capacity.

A few years ago, I had a major, life-changing surgery. In researching the surgery and it's life-long impact, I discovered a local support group affiliated with the UOAA organization. I attended a local meetup before the surgery, and met vibrant, healthy people who had gone through the trauma I was about to experience. I kept attending, and now try to ease their anxiety of people who come after.

I partnered up with Mirek (of Mirkotronics / @Mirko_DIY on Twitter) to build the Pi4GPU (or 'PiG' for short):

This journey started almost three years ago: almost immediately after the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was launched, I started testing graphics cards on it.

It's risky business fighting Intel, AMD, and Arm, and that's exactly what Star Five is trying to do with this:

The chip on this new single board computer could be the start of a computing revolution—at least that's what some people think!

The VisionFive 2 has a JH7110 SoC on it, sporting a new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) called RISC-V.

For the past few years, my workflow for editing videos for my YouTube channel was the following:

1. Write and record narration / 'A-roll' using a teleprompter
2. Import recording into timeline, and chop out silent portions manually using the blade and/or range tools
3. Work on the rest of the edit (adding 'B-roll' and inserts).

Step 3 is where the vast majority of editing time is spent, especially when I need to add in charts, motion graphics, etc.

After battling IBD complications through the summer and fall, I've come to a point where surgery is necessary. You can learn more about my health issues in my lighthearted book about Crohn's Disease, You Only Have Crohn's Once!.

The surgery (an ostomy revision) will take place tomorrow, December 2, and it'll be a pretty rough recovery, so I'm not planning on doing any substantial work until at least 2023.

It's ironic I had just given a presentation titled Just Say No: Staying sane while you maintain weeks before learning the surgery was necessary. I was planning a video on the topic (burnout, protecting your time, and open source maintainership) this year, but I guess the blog post will have to do.

I have plenty of fun tech and software I want to highlight here and on YouTube (some of it detailed in my video embedded below), but for now it's all on the shelf waiting until my strength returns: