shapisGive it to me straight. How worried are you for Fedora's future after Red Hats recent anti user decisions?
Molecular0079I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don’t see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
As someone who hasn’t really been following, what anti-user decisions are those?
NaNSource code distribution change is the big one now, on top of getting rid of traditional centos: news.itsfoss.com/red-hat-restricts-source-code/
I don’t really see them as anti-user, in the sense that if you are a subscriber your position has never changed and they are happy to provide support in exchange for money.
Fedora is also looking at adding telemetry. They are calling it opt-in but also defaulting the checkbox to “on”.
southsamuraiYou know what’s funny? Most of the time, when something asks me to opt in for telemetry, I strongly consider doing so, then look into what’s collected and end up deciding I’m okay with it.
But when I have to opt out, or the default is selected to opt in, I just lose trust entirely.
And I’ll jump through hoops to block anything I can’t replace that doesn’t even ask.
Like, I totally understand why some telemetry is necessary for continued development. I’m down with that. But the shadier it is, the less willing I am to allow it.
Yote.zipI think it will be fine, but I’d personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.
CocoLopezThis is the way
I use Arch btw
danieltonTo be honest, very worried. I used Fedora as my main for about a decade but these days, I just don’t care for it anymore, and every piece of news that comes out about IBM and Red Hat makes me even more worried about the future. Sure, it’s ostensibly community-driven, but Red Hat has historically been very involved with it.
Hopefully I’m wrong, and I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong, but Arch and Debian seem to have the best chances at a good future these days.
Rassilonian Legate@shapis
I'm gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don't want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I'm at least paying enough attention to what's going on that if they do something I see as to far I'll switch
Still not sure what too though
Granixo
RaphaelRed Hat going full IBM mode, Fedora implementing telemetry.
I don’t give a shit about fedora but I’m very worried about the future of Linux as a whole, red hat has an undisputable importance in the Linux ecossistem and these movements maybe are a signal that IBM don’t give a fuck about that
I don’t care about it at all. If you want freedom from corporations, use community owned distros.
I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It’s only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that’s what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it’s time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn’t go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal… is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about “hey we are considering this, what do y’all think?”. Well, they’re certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it’s a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like “does anyone even use this” or “how reliable is this feature” can help them prioritize their efforts.
I’ll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there’s problems. I’m sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points… or you think I’m on Red Hat’s payroll (I’m not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I’m a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I’m not planning to change that anytime soon.
I absolutely agree with everything you pointed out here. Fedora has been my go-to distro for awhile now and I’m gonna ride the Fedora wagon till the very end.
Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
the16bitgamerNot op, but if I’m honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I’ve used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
Not remotely.
Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.
Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little “cloned distro + support” business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what’s basically (not entirely) a loophole.
The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I’ve seen this perspective. It’s the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?
Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).
Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.
If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).
There’s no way this change stops Oracle, though. Oracle will continue doing whatever they want and the consumers can abandon hope, all ye who enter into contracts with Oracle. (The fact that this is all Rocky and Alma and nobody was talking about going to Oracle after Red Hat killed CentOS should be a sign.)
Anyway point is, Red Hat can cry about Rocky and Alma all they like but if those two had the same institutional backing as Oracle they’d shut up quick. They just think they can get away with preventing small fries from exercising their rights under the GPL.
CamilleMellomRocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux for example.
I think we haven’t seen this perspective is because it’s not a good take on things. After IBM bought RH they killed CentOS which was bug compatible with RHEL. A lot of devs used CentOS to be able to easily ensure compatability with RHEL. RH replaced CentOS with CentOS stream which is not bug compatible with RHEL. The community was able to move past this blunder thanks to Rocky and ALMA “rebuilding” RHEL in the spirit of the old CentOS.
Now RH has killed off the ability for the community to build a free bug compatible distro and instead want devs to register for 16 (free) RHEL testing licenses. No other major distro that I know of does this.
I’m not a dev but it seems like a good way to lose support for your platform. If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
That model just does not work. For the engineering that goes into RedHat (and all the contributions back to the community they send), they just don’t make enough for that to happen. Everyone just wants to shrug this off as “Oh IBM has lots of money so that’s not a problem”. This “make it free and charge for support” model almost never works for FOSS yet so many people want to believe it does. On an enterprise level, it just doesn’t. People who want to use an enterprise distro of Linux for free also likely don’t want to pay for support either, instead wanting to support it themselves. Which is all well and good but that doesn’t account for the fact RHEL does all the engineering, all the building, all the testing, everything, and then puts that release up for use. All of that has to be covered somehow.
There was never any promise that you’d always be able to create a “bug compatible distro”. Ever. The GPL does not cover future releases or updates and never has, and even implying that it should sets a dangerous precedent of people being entitled to what you haven’t even created yet.
Rather than hearing the emotional takes from people that want to turn this into “RedHat vs the Linux Community”, I strongly suggest you listen to LinuxUnplugged: linuxunplugged.com/517?t=506.
RedHat is still contributing everything upstream, and CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. You have full access to the source of whatever you buy.
The only thing that has changed here is that the loophole that Alma and Rocky were using to create a RHEL clone and then offer support for it (Which is literally RedHat’s own business model) is gone. Those two are throwing a tantrum because they got to set up a nice easy business model where they literally did nothing more than clone RHEL and then offer support for it and that free lunch is over. That’s it. They don’t contribute back to RHEL, they don’t do anything to help development. They sold themselves as the “free” or “cheaper” alternative and now they’re getting burned for building their entire business of the work done by RHEL.
Everything else in this story is noise, drama, and unnecessary emotion.
Caught Red-Hatted
Just about every take on the Red Hat news seems to have missed the mark.
SnailMagnitudeListening to the podcast at the moment, it’s grim. They have a Red Hat employee as the special guest and just agree 100% with the company line. I think I’m meant to feel sorry for poor little Red Hat & IBM being taken advantage of but it just all feels very silly. I’m gonna have to turn it off shortly but so far it feels like a paid advert for Red Hat. Nothing but positivity for Red Hat and being pretty nasty about anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with IBM’s business tactics.
Wow, that’s a weird take. The host brings up several points on the other side too, and the Red Hat employee even acknowledges some shortcomings, but all you really heard was “RedHat good everyone else bad” when you listened to that?
I mean, you want multiple perspectives, you need to include someone who has a stake in both. The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side, does it not make sense to bring in someone from RedHat? Why are they automatically just “company yes men”?
How can you ever have any kind of nuance or understanding of the other side if you just view it black and white like that? I’ve read and understood the claims from people that are upset with Red Hat, and I kind of get it, but I also think these people don’t really understand the value of what it is they’re using. Under-appreciating what you get for “free” is a very, very common sentiment among FOSS users (and I’m no exception, I’m sure I’m guilty of it too). But the facts here are simple; no one is really “losing” anything here except Rocky and Alma, and they should not have built their business model on basically taking de-branded RHEL and selling support for it directly.
Like I said, Fedora is not going anywhere, CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. If you are a Red Hat customer, the source code of whatever you run is always fully available. There is literally nothing being lost by anyone except those who wanted to use Rocky/Alma as a perfect 1:1 clone of RHEL without contributing a single penny back to RedHat.
Whether or not RedHat is going to suddenly claw back a bunch of business from all these people that were using “free” RHEL, that I highly doubt. As far as a move to try to regain perceived losses, I doubt RedHat is going to have any success with that, if that’s their intention. But see, I can have the opinion that they’re removing loopholes for competitors who add absolutely nothing (whether monetary or code contributions) but take and “resell”, and I can also have the opinion that it’s probably not going to change the bottom line much because people who were used to getting “RHEL” for “free” aren’t going to start paying for RHEL, they’re just going to go elsewhere.
TBF someone did say stream ‘wasn’t a great name’ which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.
If: “The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side” as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat’s payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don’t want employees debating this stuff.
If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn’t seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating “freeloaders”.
I’ve been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I’m happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past…but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn’t want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.
Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn’t often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8
In light of the community response to the Red Hat situation that podcast really did feel like a marketing piece from Red Hat.
Things are getting entertaining though as Oracle have indeed, as hoped, stepped up to question Red Hat’s moral ethics 😂 www.theregister.com/2023/…/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/
Huge Open Source Drama
Hm, then respectfully, if it’s not possible for a RedHat employee to be anything more than an advertisement and we’re judging the number of people on either side to be the indicator of truth, then I guess there’s nothing productive for you and I to discuss. I didn’t hear anything that sounded like rationalization or excuses from the RedHat guy.
Something people were getting for free is no longer free. Those people will always outnumber anyone who has a different perspective on the situation. Which is why I said that FOSS enthusiasts have a tendency not to understand or appreciate what they’re getting for “free” and everyone wants to treat open source like it’s entirely powered by community and spirit and “money” or “compensation” or “economics” don’t really mean anything because we shrug it aside.
Everyone wants to demonize the big bad corporate IBM but somehow we’re totally happy looking the other way while Rocky Linux happily clones the product and sells support contracts to NASA that should rightfully go to RedHat, no matter how much money RedHat makes.
I think RedHat has provided tons of alternatives and compromises that don’t involve buying RHEL. Again, I don’t think this decision is going to convert anyone to a paid customer.
It’s entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn’t agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what ‘the entire linux community’ thinks about this.
For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don’t know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the ‘entire linux community’ are not happy it’s not great journalism.
“Now we’ve heard Red Hat’s version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on”
I’ve not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing…but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I’m conformable dismissing them.
If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I’d want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.
I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.
If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.
One of the best comments on it that I’ve seen. Kudos to you.
Redhat develops a ton and probably wouldn’t care about a free downstream done by the community but taking their hard work and doing nothing except “support” is just cannibalizing RHEL. Don’t blame them honestly.
Not at all. There are many many projects out there which should be killed anyway. Just stop using them.
Fedora is community owned, it’s just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don’t really think there’s a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
PekkaNot worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
You might not be worried for the code, but the project is a different thing. Red Hat has done some serious damage to its image (centos stream, lay off with record profits, lay off of fedora program manager, nasty circumvention of common open source practices). This will affect fedora. I am a long time debian user, but I often suggest fedora as distro for newcomers. I am not doing it again, and I believe many won’t do as well.
At this point it is difficult to trust red hat on their long term commitments. At work we still use rhel, because all our sys admins are used to it, we have licenses, have been using it for ages. So there will not be a big impact for rhel on existing contracts. But on the future, I will actively try to persuade my whole department at least to move out. It is not easy, but on long term I do not trust red hat/ibm.
Open source market is a difficult market for IBM’s MBAs. Because trust is more important than money. This ibm problem to understand open source world has always existed. And the recent actions proves they haven’t learned yet. It is a pity that rhel and fedora are the only victims here
just
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free,
…for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Any people give up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It’s always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
As a long-time RH customer, it’s hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it’s been hobbled and impaired so much. Really. The only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
Lolors17If the time comes, that Fedora doesn’t fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.
Red Hat controls Fedora, anyone saying Fedora is independent is just spouting nonsense.
Not at all.
I don’t care about fedora.
I am not conceded but keeping an eye in things.
My needs for a work station and my needs for a server are different. For a work station it needs to work without getting in my way, and my metric to compare it to is Windows.
Does it crash?
Does it force me to use a (Microsoft) account?
Can I use it and install it offline?
Does my software work?
So far their decisions do not impact these questions for me, nor change the answers to them.
Their decisions have impacted my servers though, and I am waiting on Alma to see how they move forward. Sticking with them so long as its binary compatible with another distro. But if they can’t do that I’ll migrate over to Debain for the stability.
Desktop, I feel I would need to go into the weeds more than want to, to get arch configure like Fedora, or to move back to a Debain base OS and get my usability back.
It inspired me to move on. I’m running OpenSUSE now. I don’t really want to be involved in RedHat-related products in any way. Between redhat and the talk of telemetry, I’m out.
Read this post by /u/[email protected] before recommending OpenSUSE during these trying times. - LemmyWorld
Red Hat is going full evil mode and Fedora, which is largely controlled by Red Hat, is also pushing forward with questionable decisions. At this time, as some Fedora users look for a new $HOME there are many recommending OpenSUSE but before doing this, please read the post below. Permalink to post: https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected] [/u/[email protected]] [https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]] > About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them. > As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.” > So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move. > This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents. > In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier.
chri_hoI switched after getting into a boot stuck after an update. Don’t regret it until now.
By default you can always roll back to the last working version from boot menu.
FizzI don’t see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That’s on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn’t I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it’s not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn’t I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I’ve almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it’s just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that’s just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say “opt out” it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.
Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.
I don’t doubt that relying on Red Hat’s code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Nobody’s “relying” on Red Hat. You guys are being insanely dramatic. It’s FOSS software. If Red Hat loses their minds, systemd will just be forked, or there will be a discussion on where to move to next.
Good god.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn’t give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat’s recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn’t help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn’t be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wake call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
Yes, and? If those things went closed source tomorrow, the previously open source would not disappear. People could continue to build on it.
Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
There was a strong community discussion because a lot of people didn’t like systemd. If something significant happens, another discussion will happen. I don’t understand why you’re talking about disagreements as if they’re the end of the world. “Publically painful”? What does that mean? Debian isn’t a politican. Lennart issuing ‘wake-up calls’ to people is just him being a dipshit. It means nothing for Linux and it’s usability.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
Cool, the system is working as intended. Debian can swap Red Hat’s technologies for the other ones. Do you think that it’s not possible to run systemd free Debian, or use KDE instead of GNOME?
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend. Yes. The decades of work on the kernel will not magically disappear, and people can continue that work. A new one wouldn’t be necessary. Linus barely writes the majority of the kernel code any more. The kernel has shit loads of developers working on it regularly.
This is just FUD bullshit written by someone who doesn’t understand how Linux has been working for the past decade.
I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It’s well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I’m not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you’re a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you’re making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.
stable is not the only debian release.