Scott Williams 🐧One of the hard things about the #RedHat thing is that #CentOS's existence as a community rebuild was so often touted by people at Red Hat as a testiment to Red Hat's commitment to #opensource. It wasn't whether or not they could shut it down, but that they knew about it and intentionally didn't. Of course, there were those at Red Hat who disagreed with that back then, but it was very much a pitch point for what Red Hat was about in the #Linux space.
There were also a lot of assurances that "CentOS Linux isn't going away" when Red Hat acquired them. Stream was a tough sell, but many of us accepted and embraced and defended it. The move last week removes some of the basis for the good faith that those arguments depended upon. So, on one hand, it is about last week, but on the other is the incredible damage to the brand among people who have been Red Hat customers, contributors, and loyalists for so long.
It fundamentally feels like a redefinition of what Red Hat is about. Now, I know there have always been people in Red Hat who wanted to cut off downstreams and bring stuff in under more control. There has always been that tension. The times when Red Hat gave up that control to the community were often the highlights of good decisions, like merging Core and Extras in Fedora and giving the community governance of the entire project. That move also benefited #RHEL greatly.
It's also not lost on me that many prominent community facing leaders who championed Red Hat's cause in #opensource circles, such as Karsten Wade and Ben Cotton, were among those abruptly laid off recently in a choice made by #RedHat, and not IBM. This is another telling of what Red Hat now values and what it believes are expendable. That now "expendable" part was the very flagship of the brand that won so many of us to it.
Naturally, this is causing some "soul-searching" about my own alignment with the brand, personally and professionally, and to what extent that matters. I do not believe these changes and rhetoric reflect the community or values of Fedora and don't see that changing. I am sad to see some leave the project over it. I am not planning to do so. But I am frankly concerned over what's next for Ansible and Openshift and how far Red Hat will take this new mindset.
There has always been an area of trust in between the line of what Red Hat could and wouldn't do and those lines have moved a number of times in recent years so it's not unfair to ask if Red Hat will cut off their non-commercial versions of AWX, OKD, Quay, etc. It's completely within their rights to do so.
Oracle is proof that you can convince shops to give you money through fear of a shakedown or anti-competitive move. It is a way to "extract value from a product", but not one that will win the hearts of your customers and community.
"When someone shows you who they are, believe them."
-Maya Angelou
Robert Thau@vwbusguy The viability of this strategy, long-term, depends on switching costs. Converting an Oracle shop to (say) Postgres is a major project for any company, even if they have good test coverage on most of their code and make relatively little use of Oracle-specific PL/SQL, etc. -- no DB's SQL is fully standard, and Oracle's less so than most. (Ask me how I know.) RedHat to SuSE or some Debian derivative may be less of a leap.
@rst First, please tell me that the "Leap" pun was intentional, cause if so that's brilliant.
Second, the past week, I've been testing out workloads on #SLES and #OpenSUSE and for *most* things, s/dnf/zypper is likely all you need to know, but there are some significant differences in shipped defaults, such as SELinux.
lalalala sombra@vwbusguy I think all problems started when Red Hat couldn't communicate well enough what the purpose of CentOS Stream was and from there it was all down hill.
Now Red Hat is finally saying "RHEL is a snapshot of CentOS Stream with extra testing." but the rebuilders were having none of it and went for "1:1 bug-for-bug compatibility" instead of using CentOS Stream and I think that's when Red Hat flipped the lid about the rebuilders.
My 2¢ based on conversations with Red Hat folks.
Sheogorath@vwbusguy additionally, there was also this strange brand takeover of CoreOS. Where the "more successful" CoreOS was bought and mostly replaced by project atomic.
I didn't think much of it, but it somehow came back to my mind with the recent events.
@sheogorath You might check out Sidero Metal/Talos Linux, which is more of a spiritual successor to the old CoreOS, if that's more your thing.
@vwbusguy I'm well aware of Talos, they just lack proper disk encryption. If that's no requirement it's a great kubernetes distro.
LisPi@vwbusguy Well. That's an issue I hadn't considered.
I hope I won't have to port all my configuration management stuff, that'd be so deeply obnoxious and tedious.
Nelson@vwbusguy Isn't it interesting that they are spinning the laying off of community members as caused by Red Hat being excessively open? It has a "look what you made me do" vibe. https://fosstodon.org/@fossrob/110642829252749236
Robin Edser :silverblue: (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image To anyone upset because they think RH are calling them freeloaders. Genuinely if this example from Mike's LinkedIn post doesn't ring somewhat true to you then it's really not about you. "A freeloader is when a large enterprise business has 20 RHEL licenses, 150,000 community rebuild systems, and sometimes hundreds of user accounts and hundreds of kbase searches per month." FULL screenshot and ALT text attached for: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mrmikemcgrath_just-some-further-thoughts-on-this-week-activity-7080644263968997376-vrGA #redhat
canusfeminacanisRed Hat showed its true colours the minute (lol, these many years ago) they broke into Fedora and RHE . There are no surprises.
Besides, .rpm package management was pathetic.
Matt Jordan@vwbusguy Apropos of probably not much here, many years ago RedHat wanted to take over packaging of an open source project that we were nominally responsible for. Now, our packaging wasn’t great, and it’s quite possible that they would have done a far better job. But the engagement was so imperious - and smacked so much of a need to control - that I never signed on with it.
I never really trusted handing over that process to RedHat. I still can’t really explain why I didn’t.
@vwbusguy I know people over there and I have a huge amount of respect for them. I know they care deeply about software freedom and community. But that particular engagement was just weird and felt arrogant.
The recent stuff - layoffs of great open source champions in particular- make me wonder if there was a cultural shift brewing for years and it’s just now coming to fruition.
@mattcjordan The rhetoric from the past week is going to make it harder for FOSS projects to trust their intentions moving forward, for sure. It's a great example of how their punch at downstream will impact their ability to do "upstream first", making RHEL even more expensive by having to maintain more in house customizations for things that don't make it upstream and won't get tested there.