RedHat becomes more and more "sympathetic"

One of the best article read so far

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Suse announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions.
Suse will build, support and contribute a hard fork of the RHEL codebase to the community.

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And Oracle wants to be upstream :smiley:

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Surely they make a point on IBM takeover.

We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstream distributions of every kind, community and commercial. We are happy to work with distributors to ease that process, work together on the content of Oracle Linux, and ensure Oracle software products are certified on your distribution.

Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.

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Just stepping back a bit and trying to look at this from IBM / RedHat’s perspective and if I may refer to the following text from https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-open-and-free-2023-07-10/:

Interesting. IBM doesn’t want to continue publicly releasing RHEL source code because it has to pay its engineers? That seems odd, given that Red Hat as a successful independent open source company chose to publicly release RHEL source and pay its engineers for many years before IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion.

I don’t believe it’s a case that they don’t want to pay the engineers, I believe its actually the opposite.

IBM bought RedHat, $34 billion is not exactly chump change, its a huge sizeable investment. Once cannot ignore that.

The engineers and the equipment they use and the resources they use do add up to a significant amount of money as well.

I believe that all of this is down to the money. How do IBM and RedHat monetise what they are doing and the software they provide in order to continue providing it long term.
There is a fine balance of providing the software for free versus providing paid services and products and I do think that IBM/RedHat are trying to work through finding that balance in order to justify the investment and expenditure associated with the software and servies they provide.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not comfortable with what they have done, nor how they have done it and I am not condoning it either; but from a business perspective and a financial perspective, I can understand some of the why behind the decision they made.

I do think we (I’m not just thinking of the NS community, I’m thinking of a more wider audience as well) need to take a step back and think about how to ensure that the engineers who provide the free software are properly compensated from a financial perspective so they they are able to cover the costs of making the software and maintaining. Ultimately they do have bills to pay and need food to eat and have to support their families as well and we cannot ignore that fact.

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There is not but also not at all give a business model to say. that guarantees the developers wage and bread and the companies profit.
No one has to save the world as a poor Samaritan.

But to bait the community first and then to push it over the head is definitely not a serious business model.

Yep, probably the business model adopted so far by RH is crackling, or IBM doesn’t believe in that business model anymore (why even buy them?)
RH paid the bills using this model since 2000 what’s changed?
(BTW many community people were fired during the last payoff)

Life is fun I know someone who has worked his life at IBM and now retired but with still a lot of good friend working at IBM

He asked a friend still working at IBM about rhel, the question was about why to close the sources of rhel

I did not meet this guy and the answer was by sms but enough clear

Yes we bought this box at a gold price.
About three years ago.
They make Open Source.
openshift software to make hybrid cloud by encapsulating apps in containers that can be moved from one machine to another
Bought 34 billion dollars
That’s more than thirty times the profit at the time. . very expensive. But since we had money, we didn’t know what to do and especially not to increase employees. …
I remain skeptical about the interest of this purchase…

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They can buy NethServer8 as well :smiley: maybe with less

news from alma

I hope this does not really happen

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Do I understand this correctly: they didn’t have a business case, are now surprised at the loss, and are trying to use the crowbar to minimize the damage?

You really want to be dependent on people like that.

Once upon a time there was free money and people did not know what to do with it

This is the disaster of capitalism

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Competing products try to gain some former RHEL/CentOS adopters?

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Some might say… game on.

And only time will tell if a supported lifespan of 7 will/can be extended by new repos beyond the current known EOL.

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The if seems big. Like, non existant possibility.
RHEL 7 is almost 8 years old, and expected to have the shortest extended support time. Partially is for the behaviour shift of RedHat/IBM, also part because it’s almost the longest version which had to expect the newer one (5 years).
OpenELA is looking for customers, so an alternative upgrade path rather than RHEL current model. And keep updating a so old distro is… resource-consuming, like a lot. A 4.18 kernel (or 5.14) support so much newer hardware, for bare metal install, and have much more support from the kernel upstream for bugfix.

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