This is a masterfully Orwellian post. So, Redhat is threatening their customers with withdrawal of support that they depend on quite deeply, if the customers exercise their rights under the GPL. In response, the community got upset. Redhat’s response is:
I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular —especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. The details — including open source licenses and rights — matter, and these are things Red Hat has helped to not only form but also preserve and evolve.
So, as of 15 years ago, the total value of what Redhat is selling was estimated at around 10 trillion dollars. The fraction of that that was created by Redhat is, fair play, higher than most companies that distribute FOSS software. They are, in terms of code, a significant contributor (especially in the kernel). But what they’re building on in the first place is this multi-trillion dollar thing that they got for free. The only caveat was that they need to maintain the same freedom for others that they made use of.
So, when people ask them to do that, they say:
I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.
I see. It’s yours, and we’re not allowed to repackage it for our own “profit.” Because:
Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable.
Got it.
Orwellian?
Nah, that’s just corporate speak.
Anyway, back to my Debian servers…
Prediction: RHEL dies in the next 5-10 years anyway while everyone moves to free options. Considering the amount of containerization being run on production systems, whatever VM is running docker or k8s doesn’t need to really be managed to the same level that VM/bare metal webservers required in the past.
Sure, some big orgs will still foot the license fees, but considering CentOS/RHEL was the standard previously, I don’t really see a benefit for corps to pay those fees any longer. Most will probably move to some random free stable distro for their VMs, and run any production resources via lightweight containers based on something like Alpine.
I think you’re underestimating the value organizations and enterprises put on having high quality support available at a moments notice. Particularly first party support.
For now. Like I said, the amount of work being done on the host level is going to decrease as organizations move away from traditional monoliths and into purpose built microservices.
Yes, some companies will still run their environments like it’s 2014 in 2025, but that percentage is going to decrease considerably when the productivity, cost, and maintainability gains of orchestration tools like kubernetes are realized.
I went from being a traditional bare metal sysadmin surrounded by a team of 30+ to a cloud admin that could do the work of 25 datacenter techs to a DevOps Engineer who can do what would have taken dozens of sysadmins to do 10 years ago.
Businesses can tolerate their tech debt for awhile, but eventually economics takes over and those businesses either adapt or fail.
I just don’t see something like RHEL existing in its current form without being the de facto enterprise standard, and moves like this make companies more likely to look for alternatives.
I know the vendors I work closely with are all moving away from that model.
I completely agree, but I don’t agree that RHEL can’t pivot to this new model. And their first mover advantage as the “enterprise operating system” won’t go away.
I guess your point is that their mismanagement of this situation is evidence of their eventual downfall, but I just don’t know if I buy that
I think their position in the market allows them to make these types of bad decisions without much fallout. If anything this just buys them more time
Not to mention how long it takes a big org to migrate, even between versions of rhel. I’ve seen 6 -> 7 migrations happen inside the last month.
Agreed. It’s all about support. Anything less will more than likely not be entertained.
Time won’t solve how people are. Most people will treat free as free of charge instead of freedom.
What I would really like to see are the current numbers for RHEL: Does RHEL ‘lose’ money (= it is not sustainable) or does RHEL ‘not make enough profit for the investors’? In the later case, saying it is not sustainable is technically true but IMHO still misleading.
IMHO it is also more complicated than everyone involved tries to make it seem: Of course I value having an enterprise Linux w/o juggling licenses. OTOH RHEL does real, hard work that is not fun and somebody has to be payed to take care of it. A lot of companies who profited and could have supported RHEL probably just freeloaded it (which is their ‘right’ given the GPL but still shitty behavior). Do I like RHELs behavior? Again, not really.
tl;dr RHEL should show some numbers, that they are indeed unsustainable vs. not getting out enough money for their investors.
