The Red Hat Red Hat Situation

Just about every take on the Red Hat news seems to have missed the mark.

Special Guest: Carl George.

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Links:

• Berlin with Brent Meetup — Sat, Jul 22, 2023, 7:00 PM
• Berlin Buds Matrix Room
• Our Essential Apps | Self-Hosted 100 — We cover our must-have self-hosted apps, reflect on the state of Self-Hosting now, and discuss what's new in Proxmox 8.
• Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder.
• Linux Action News 298 — Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.
• Ask Noah 343 Interview w/Mike McGrath — Mike McGrath joins the Ask Noah Show to discuss the changes Red Hat is making in how they make their source code available.
• A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience.
• Rocky Linux Shares How They May Continue To Obtain The RHEL Source Code — One option is through the usage of UBI container images which are based on RHEL and available from multiple online sources (including Docker Hub). Another method that we will leverage is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata.
• Springdale Linux Discussions — While RedHat's action itself is not particularly surprising given somewhat-recent developments with regards to the likes of CentOS Stream, the timing has taken many in the RHEL-compatible-clone world by surprise.
• Red Hat & Fedora – largely stepping out of this ecosystem - Fedora Mailing-Lists — What Red Hat has done recently is depressing, but not a huge surprise to me. Red Hat struggled repeatedly with how to deal with "the clones".The core idea I always came back to in those discussions was that the value isn't in the bits, but in the stability, services and ecosystem Red Hat enables around the bits.
• How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business — To move from small player to big-time enterprise software competitor, Cormier argued that Red Hat had to ditch the freely downloadable Red Hat Linux. Instead, it should replace Red Hat Linux with a more robust enterprise software package that maintained the principles of free (as in freedom) software without actually being free (as in price) to customers.
• Carl George on Fosstodon — “You should have already been using #CentOS Stream. There, I said it.”
• NASA secures contract with Rocky Enterprise Linux — NASA/NSSC has a requirement for FY23 CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Purchase. Item: CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription. Quantity: 3
• NASA secures contract with Rocky Enterprise Linux (HN Discussion)
• catercloud.me — Originally, the project consisted of a web framework that glued together several other, more mature open-source projoects, but as scope creep and my own tendency toward re-inventing the wheel rose to the surface, the project’s development became more and more complex, slowly incorporating a lot of components that go way beyond a simple word cloud and into things like natural language processing.