[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[Prentice Bisbal]

Beowulfers,

By now, most of you should have heard about Red Hat's latest to 
eliminate any competition to RHEL. If not, here's some links:

Red Hat's announcement:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream 
<https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream>

Alma Linux's response:
https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/

Rocky Linux's response:
https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/

Software Freedom Conservancy's anaylsis of the situation:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ 
<https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/>

I'm writing to get your thoughts on this situation, as well as see what 
plans of action you are considering moving forward.

Here are my thoughts:

This is Red Hat biting the hands that feed them. Red Hat went from a 
small company operating out of a basement to a large global company 
thanks to open-source software. My first exposure to Linux was Red Hat 
Linux 4 in December 1996. I bought a physical, shrink-wrapped version 
with the commercial Metro-X X server to start learning Linux at home in 
my spare time shortly after graduation from college. I chose RHL because 
everything I read said RPM made it super easy to install and manage 
software (perfect for noobs like me), and the Metro-X X-server was far 
superior to any open-source X-server available at the time (which was 
just Xfree86, really). I felt good about giving RH my $40 for this not 
just because it would make it easier for me to learn Linux, but because 
it seemed like Red Hat were really the company that was going to take 
this underdog operating system and make it famous.

They certainly achieved that goal, but along the way, I've seen them do 
a lot of anti-open-source things that I didn't like, leading me to 
change my image of them from champion of the underdog to the "Microsoft 
of Linux" to whatever my low opinion of them is now (Backstabber? 
Ingrate? Hypocrite?):

1. When they weren't making any money off a product they were giving 
away for free (Red Hat Linux, and "duh!"), they came out with an 
"Enterprise" version, that would still GPL-compliant, but you'd have to 
pay for subscriptions to get access to their update mechanism. To get 
people to buy into this model, they started spreading fear, uncertainty, 
and doubt (FUD), about "non-enterprise" Linux distributions, saying that 
any Linux distribution other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) wasn't 
reliable for use in any kind of enterprise that needed reliability.

2. When spreading FUD didn't work, RH killed of RHL entirely. If you 
wanted a free version of Red Hat, your only option was Rawhide, which 
was their development version for the next generation of RHEL, which was 
too unstable and unpredictable for enterprise needs (of course).

3. After RH starting contributing funding to GNOME development, the next 
major version of RHEL didn't install other desktops during the install. 
I remember RHEL saying this was a bug, but I've always suspected it was 
a deliberate act to reduce KDE market share and and give RH another area 
of the Linux ecosystem it could control. This, to me, was identical to 
Microsoft including IE with the OS to kill off Netscape. Now if you 
excuse, me, I need to go fashion a hat out of tin foil...

4. RH takes over control of CentOS, which at the time was the only 
competitor to RHEL. There used to be Scientific Linux (SL), which was 
maintained by the DOE at FermiLab, but FermiLab decided that the world 
didn't need both SL and CentOS, since they were essentially the same 
thing. Not long after, RHEL eliminates CentOS as a competitor by 
changing it to "CentOS  Stream" so it's no longer a competitor to RHEL. 
CentOS Stream is now a development version of sorts for RHEL, but I 
thought that was exactly what Fedora was for.

5. When Alma and Rocky pop-up to fill the void created by the killing of 
CentOS, RH does what it can to eliminate their access from RHEL source 
code so they can't be competitiors to RHEL, which brings us to today.

Somewhere around event #3 is when I started viewing RHEL from as the MS 
of the Linux world for obvious reasons. It seems that RH is determined 
to make RHEL a monopoly of the "Enterprise Linux" market. Yes, I know 
there's Ubuntu and SLES, but Ubuntu is viewed as a desktop more than a 
server OS (IMO), and SLES hasn't really caught on, at least not in the US.

I feel that every time the open-source community ratchets up efforts to 
preserve free alternatives to RHEL, RH ratchets up their efforts to 
eliminate any competition, so trying to stick with a free alternative to 
RHEL is ultimately going to be futile, so know is a good time to 
consider changing to a different line of Linux distro.

The price of paying for RHEL subscriptions isn't the only concern. 
Besides cost, one of the reasons Linux has become the de facto OS for 
HPC was how quickly/easily/cheaply it could be ported to new hardware. 
Don Becker wrote or modified many of the Linux Ethernet drivers that 
existed in the mid/late 90s so they could be used for Beowulf clusters, 
for example. When the Itanium processor came out, I remember reading 
that a Linux developer was able to port Linux to the Itanium and got 
Linux running on it in only a matter of hours.

With RH (and IBM?) so focused on market dominance/profits, it's not a 
stretch to think they they'll eventually "say no" to supporting anything 
other than x86 and POWER processors, since the other processors don't 
have enough market share to make it profitable, or compete with IBM's 
offerings.  I mean, right now it's extremely rare to find any commercial 
application that supports anything other than x86_64 (other than Mac 
applications that now support Apple's M processors, which is a 
relatively new development).

My colleagues here agree with my conclusions about the future of RHEL 
and, we are certainly giving the thought of moving away from RHEL some 
serious consideration, but it's certainly not going to be cheap or easy. 
What are you thinking/doing about this?

-- 
Prentice
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