this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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I’m curious about what you think on how it will affect the Linux community and distros (especially RHEL based distros like Fedora or Rocky).

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[–] fox@lemmy.fakecake.org 36 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm going to continue running Debian as I did since 2003 or so.

[–] fugepe@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

With all the new updates happening around all the Linux peripherals, I wouldnt like to stay behind for the next 2/3 years on Debian

[–] Catsrules@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

What is happening?

Someone has no idea how Debian works.

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[–] nkey@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

RHEL hasn't gone closed source, it still complies with the GPL. If they provide you a binary, they must and will continue to provide you with the source code. I feel like this is like when they announced Centos Stream as a "rolling distro", their messaging is awful, and the optics are bad. I feel this is more to stick it to Oracle and unfortunately, Alma and Rocky are just getting caught in the crossfire.

[–] beefcat@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It has me conflicted. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, we need projects like Alma and Rocky.

[–] l3mming@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'm conflicted too. On one hand, fuck Oracle. On the other hand, fuck IBM.

[–] fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml 34 points 1 year ago

More detials found here: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream?sc_cid=701f2000000tyBjAAI

Seem more accurate that their public repos will be closed, so now only centos-stream will be public. You will still have full access to source through their developer program or as a paying customer.

[–] cstine@lemmy.uncomfortable.business 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is a fight between IBM and Oracle. There's been a lot of bad blood between them since Oracle did a s/Red Hat/Oracle/r for their own branded distribution.

IMO that's the main driver behind this change: don't feed your largest competitor free stuff and not something specific against Rocky/Alma/whoever else is using the code.

[–] ozoned 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So then Oracle just gets 1 dev account and pulls the source.

[–] nkey@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

This was my initial thought as well, but I imagine that would violate the terms of their subscription and Red Hat could just revoke their access going forward.

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[–] canpolat@programming.dev 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I wouldn't expect it to impact Fedora, but this will probably be significant for Rocky/Alma.

[–] saplyng@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Great, I've got an alma ec2 instance with like 5 different services at work, I wanted to avoid changing it for at least a while =/

[–] darkfiremp3 3 points 1 year ago
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[–] ebike_enjoyer@slrpnk.net 19 points 1 year ago (10 children)

My immediate thoughts as a fedora user: Fedora is looked at as a bleeding edge testing distro for what eventually goes into red hat. By using fedora, I am sort of a beta tester for ibm, and am in some ways contributing to the improvement of a distribution (red hat) that goes against what I believe a Linux distribution should do. Given that, should I distro hop?

Or is my brain just trying to make me distro hop again?

[–] nkey@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Edit: spelling

I would never consider Fedora bleeding edge, but that being said, after the Red Hat lawyers forced the removal of H.264 I did end up hopping after 5 very great years with Fedora. If you're up for learning something new NixOS is a lot of fun.

[–] ebike_enjoyer@slrpnk.net 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NixOS is actually what I was considering! I like the immutable aspects of it but the setup will require me to find some downtime in order to get started.

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[–] blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk 7 points 1 year ago

You have to make up your own mind. Personally the association with IBM or Oracle would put me right off a distro. But you can find evil in all these big companies, so pick your poison.

[–] reflex@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

OpenSUSE maybe?

I've been looking at it after seeing it had out-of-the-box snapper functionality.
Although counterpoint to that...someone said the devs were laid back, and I immediately pictured ol' ernest again. But, first thing I found was a strong counterexample in the form of a very vocal contributor on Reddit.
Not going to call them out, but let's just say it's probably not a good idea having some apparently jaded and argumentative dev be the face of your community interaction.

[–] knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

You could just use Fedora and not submit any bug reports as that would help them. Just quietly leech.

It's nice if you can find something that both does what you need and agrees with your philosophy...but usually some compromise is required.

[–] projectazar@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You aren't the only one. Ive been on Fedora for a few years because I liked what Gnome was doing, I liked the updated Kernel, and I was annoyed by canonical. Now I'm not really sure where to go, as both Pop and Mint do not, in their current forms, work well with my hardware.

[–] cinaed666@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not to revive any lame memes, but have a look at Arch Linux! I've been daily driving it for 10 years. It's way more "updated" than fedora is.

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[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 year ago

Do it, you coward! Hop with me!

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[–] PrivateNoob@sopuli.xyz 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolute L move from them. Atleast it makes the choice easier if future distrohopping urges will haunt my zoom zoom brain.

[–] Re4mstr@lemmy.re4mstr.com 5 points 1 year ago

My thoughts exactly; One less distro to hop to.

[–] shreddy_scientist@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Since Fedora is upstream of RHEL I'd like to think it'll be unaffected from the move. But only time will tell

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[–] daan@lemmy.vanoverloop.xyz 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Some additional information from Rocky Linux and Alma Linux, since many people (including me) are confused about the implications of this:

https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/ https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/

Interestingly, Rocky Linux claims to be largely unaffected by this, while Alma Linux is desperately looking for alternative solutions.

It seems like no one really knows what the implications are, and we will just have to wait and see.

[–] knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

Rocky's reaction seems the same as Alma, current long-term solution is they don't know. A more businessly optimism in the post doesn't really make up for a clear technical plan going forward.

[–] curtismchale@lemmy.ca 8 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm newish to Fedora and admit I don't understand the whole developer/governance structure of it vs RHEL, but the news did make me wonder about continuing to use Fedora.

Reading some comments here, maybe it's a non-issue. Guess I'll have to dig more.

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[–] knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Rocky & Alma were easy targets. Next up thumbscrews on systemd!

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Blueification of Red Hat . . . sad times

[–] drwho 7 points 1 year ago

Honestly? I think Ubuntu's userbase is about to get a lot bigger. The larger hosting companies (AWS and Digital Ocean are the two that come to mind immediately) support Ubuntu as a first-class citizen, so once the not-true blue RHEL distros take the hit migrations are going to happen.

[–] Re4mstr@lemmy.re4mstr.com 6 points 1 year ago

Well, I just hope they ARE thinking. Gotta be a good reason -I have no read anything about this- for doing this.

I guess a few people might be looking at other distros now.

[–] digdilem@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

As someone who admins around 200 Rocky 8/9 and Centos 7 servers, this is a little concerning.

But I have a lot of faith in Rocky and Alma, who are reportedly working together, in coming up with a solution to ensure they continue getting security fixes and updates.

Redhat are steadily turning into every bit as anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be. It's a shame as they used to do a lot for the FOSS world. Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

[–] carlwgeorge 8 points 1 year ago

Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.

To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn't undo everything else Red Hat does.

[–] beefcat@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

anti-competitive and, well, evil, as Oracle used to be.

Used to be?

[–] vanderbilt@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

The enshittification brought to you by IBM.

[–] saplingtree@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People use rocky/centos because they don't want to deal with the hassles of licensing while also keeping the door open to an upgrade to RHEL if needed. I think this will be a net positive for Debian and Debian-based distros thanks to enterprise infra switching to Ubuntu which offers this (free use and an upgrade path to full compliance/commercial support.

Them closing up completely undermines their UVP.

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[–] underisk@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Aren’t there poison pill clauses in a lot of OSS licenses that prevent moves like this? Could they face legal repercussions?

[–] Meshuggah333@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

I knew it would happened the moment IBM bought them. Those corporate idiots can't comprehend OSS.

[–] crystalcorvid@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They aren't going closed source though? Just not providing source to everyone. But everyone who gets binaries from them still gets access to the source code. Unless I'm missing something?

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[–] thatonedude1210@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Big Blue asserting their dominance. Unfortunately at the cost of some very fantastic community projects.

[–] fbievan@lemmy.fbievan.live 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Ehh, well it's something interesting. I've never really ever used RHEL myself on any of my servers. I do know some people that might be impacted.

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[–] MDKAOD@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
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