Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream

phoronix.com

47 pointsnatebc30 comments

Company That Owes Its Existence To The Free Work Product Of Thousands Of People Not On Its Payroll Tired Of People Who Don't Pay For Its Product Having Access To Any Part Of It

Or, access every part of it for free with no strings attached here: https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream

"The enshittification of Red Hat"?

Like this wasn't always the case.

I know that HN hates on Oracle, but they freely provide source and iso's on their Oracle linux page. No signups or anything else. And it is just repackaged RHEL with Oracle branding.

https://yum.oracle.com/oracle-linux-isos.html

But Oracle, like Rocky Linux, won't get the source packages from Redhat anymore.

Fuck IBM, and fuck the spineless leaders at Red Hat betraying their founding principles

> Paying Red Hat customers will still have access to the proper RHEL sources via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

wonder does this include customers in the Dev Program. I got access to RHEL though https://developers.redhat.com/... Cant figure out where to download the code... might not be available though this...

Well given that the GPL is in play they have to have some way to get source to any user.

Try https://access.redhat.com/downloads/content/package-browser

You should also be able to use yum/dnf to download the srpms from your dev program system.

So you only need one person to pay for access to RHEL and mirror it. It's slightly more inconvenient but doesn't seem like a major hassle.

I bet someone at IBM was mad that they spent a ton of money in bandwidth costs to aid their competitors.

A few years ago RedHat limited access to the detailed (broken out) kernel patch set they use, to RHEL customers, and only publish the combined blob for anyone else. It was discussed if a RHEL entitlement holder would then be able to share that out, however that would cause the RHEL subscription to then be invalidated as that was against the subscription contract.

> It was discussed if a RHEL entitlement holder would then be able to share that out, however that would cause the RHEL subscription to then be invalidated as that was against the subscription contract.

Isn't IBM violating the GPL with such a contract, in particular this sentence of it? "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."

The way I recall it explained, is no they aren't -- they aren't preventing you from redistributing (or doing whatever you want with the source), but if you exercise that right, they cancel your RHEL entitlement. Nothing in the GPL forces a company to continue providing services to you because you followed your GPL rights. Kind of a loophole I guess. (Edit: I had read through GPL 2 quite a bit back in the day, I don't know if this loophole was plugged in GLP 3, as I've only read through it a couple of times and there were some things in it that I wasn't able to draw a conclusion from. And I could also be completely wrong about the RHEL contract, that I haven't read through for quite a while).

close, but it is more akin to a poison pill in the contract. You still have a license to the code, they just aren't going to distribute the product in any capacity to you any longer.

I'd like to point out that if customers of IBM like the Department of Defense or Department of State wanted to flex on IBM a bit, they could just start publishing all of this. Then dare IBM to cancel all the federal support contracts.

It's not that you can't redistribute it, it's just that you can never continue because you are no longer receiving binary releases or subject to the GPL.

If the contract doesn't outright prohibit people from exercising their GPL rights, then someone might be able to publish the source code anonymously to prevent their subscription from being terminated.

And continue to publish it. And then Red Hat might start watermarking downloads.

It would be tough to sustain such a plan.

Is it possible to watermark GPLed source code without violating the license? I was under the impression that GPL requires publishing the exact source code used to build the binary, which means no watermarking.

RHEL is dead, long live rocky

It sounds like this change is going to kill Rocky too, by limiting it to the buggy beta that is CentOS Stream.

I thought CentOS Stream is for testing QA'd updates to already-released RHEL versions.

(Fedora is for testing stuff to go into future RHEL versions.)

So CentOS Stream shouldn't be that buggy, no?

I'm going to assume that Red Hat is the expert on relative bugginess of different versions. If RH believed that the betas were actually bug free, then they would just release them as RHEL. Therefore, I conclude that RH considers RHEL beta- sorry, "CentOS Stream", to be buggier than RHEL. The only open question is how much buggier, and I don't know how to tell that.

CentOS Stream is Upstream of RHEL.

What is being restricted are the downstream packages of RHEL.

Roughly it flows: Fedora -> Centos Stream -> RHEL -> Clones

> For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Unless there are restrictions, Rocky Linux could sign up to be a Red Hat customer, and get the sources that way.

And then their account gets banned

Ubuntu LTS all the way... Dumped CentOS/RHEL long ago and never regretted it.

note that ubuntu has lots of phone home things (forced upgrades, motd-news, ubuntu-report, ubuntu-advantage-tools) that are (almost¹) impossible to remove.

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/1434512/how-to-get-rid-of-ub...

Debian all the way(when available, many providers only have Ubuntu)

However Ubuntu pro is very enticing

Classic Reddhat move

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