Comment by emidln | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emidln | Hacker News Reader

I've used Red Hat Linux (first Caldera Linux, a 90s era clone), then Fedora, as well as RHEL and its clones (Scientific, Centos, Rocky) since the late 90s. I've used it personally, pedagogically, and professionally. I recommendeded it to others for their desktops and servers. If you wanted to use Linux, I'd tell you there are two options that are stable and well-supported: Red Hat and Debian. Red Hat has died recently. RIP.

I'm no longer confident that Fedora will continue to be a thriving open-source project. If IBM is killing RHEL clones now, why risk Fedora being next?

I hear you saying "RHEL is derived from Fedora" and "Fedora is a separate open-source project". The thing is, RHEL is derived from Centos Stream *now*. Why does Fedora need to exist? Or rather, why does Red Hat need to provide engineering and infra to Fedora? It's true that Fedora is a separate project, but its mostly contributed by Red Hat employees. If IBM decides tomorrow to stop paying for Fedora because Centos Stream is enough, can Fedora stand alone?

Maybe this is just FUD, but I no longer have confidence in an IBM owned Linux distro. I've already moved to Debian for personal machines, and I've been advocating it professionally as well. It's just irresponsible for an org that spends significant engineering time customizing their Linux installations to base on an uncertain Red Hat/IBM backed distro over a fully open-source project with no strings attached. Fool me once shame on you but fool me twice and, well, IBM isn't going to get me again.

>RHEL is derived from Centos Stream now. Why does Fedora need to exist?

But with your extensive history in he Red Hat sphere you should know that each release of CentOS Stream is a frozen Fedora release.

Fedora will still act as the testing ground for all things CentOS, and therefore all things RHEL.

What are the arguments against this model of development where they have a "future distro" like Fedora to model their future RHEL releases after?

> each release of CentOS Stream is a frozen Fedora release

This is the current state. Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora ("rawhide"), then cut a Fedora release, then bless a Fedora release as Centos Stream, then backport from rawhide to Centos Stream as needed until they decide to cut a RHEL branch? If I were an exec at IBM, that would seem like a lot of extra releng salary that could be better spent directly on core product (which is RHEL which comes from Centos Stream) or billable hours. Someone's bonus can go up a few bills by eliminating a line item while improving efficiency.

Why should IBM continue paying for rawhide -> fedora release -> centos stream -> rhel ? How long until the fedora release step is put out to pasture then eventually culled?

You're basically suggesting that to do a complete step change every 3 years might be considered "more efficient" but literally nobody would consider that more efficient, it would just add massively more risk into the whole process and be recouped later by delays. That is agile v. waterfall 101, and even IBM is perfectly capable of understanding that.

That is to say nothing of the fact that Fedora is used very extensively internally, and that there are hardware partners like Lenovo that sell it preinstalled, and Fedora Asahi which is the new home of Apple hardware enablement (and thus the best Aarch64 development platform). The Fedora ecosystem is extremely valuable to Red Hat.

Because that work still has to occur somewhere?

And they can do that work internally, privately, in the dark, where they cannot benefit from any community engagement, or they can do that work in the open, engaging with the community.

I suspect the difference in cost between the two is not significant enough to be relevant, and the open variant has more benefits.

Note that this was RH's stated intent when the whole CentOS non-Stream EoL shenanigans went down - they said that Fedora & CentOS Stream benefits RHEL, CentOS non-Stream does not.

[After writing this, I was curious about Fedora project costs, they are lower than I thought: https://budget.fedoraproject.org/budget/FY20/overall.html - Red Hat's contribution was ~$196k for FY2020 (in cash, there's probably more 'soft' costs in terms of staff and hardware time/resources)).

They're getting free community testing of early software in Fedora.

I don't think you realize just how much RH focuses on releasing stable software. They have SLAs with government agencies, healthcare providers and they need to live up to them. This is why CentOS Stream is in fact more secure than RHEL because they spend so much time testing the patches that go into RHEL that CentOS Stream now gets them before RHEL. A reversal to the state of affairs with old CentOS.

It is also why they were so keen on killing any project that claims to be a RHEL clone, because they want their customers to know what they're downloading, and know what they're running. RHEL comes with guarantees.

Of course I'm the first to admit that most of their motivations to kill the CentOS source repo were financial. That doesn't change the fact that Red Hat is a very enterprise-minded company, and their perspective isn't always obvious to the rest of us.

IBM can't "kill" Fedora. All the specs files, the assembly mechanisms for the distribution is available online. The community can (and has) forked fedora and keep it going under a new name, if they wanted to.

But this is all backwards.

> Why should IBM maintain rolling updates into Fedora

The better question is why is IBM maintaining rolling updates into Fedora? Because they have a business incentive to do so. As other comments have opined, they get free testing, free feedback of upcoming changes. The community gets a lot in return. RedHat funds so much open source/free(dom) software development it's ludicrous. There's reciprocity here. There's a lot of other distributions also benefiting from RedHat's work, like Debian (and vice versa).

It seems like the community here on HN has gone complete bonkers over this RedHat business decision. We've reached a next level of open source entitlement syndrome.

We are not entitled to use RHEL for free. We are not entitled to repackage RHEL and sell it for free either. We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses. Are we entitled to the SRPM for those programs? We don't know. The patches applied, sure. How about the spec files to assemble the RPMs? Who knows. But it seems like everybody are demanding that RedHat should keep doing this work and ensure that third parties can keep their business model of reselling said work.

This is probably not a popular opinion, but the community seem to have a deranged take on this situation.

We are only entitled to those part of the source code which is covered by copyleft licenses.

No, we're not. Even for code covered by copyleft licenses, we are only entitled to the source for which we have received a binary. However, once we have received those sources, we should be free to do with them whatever the license allows.

But that last part is what Red Hat is violating, and that's why some people have a deranged take, thank you very much: they use their sales contracts to specifically deny freedoms granted by copyleft licenses.

No, this is conflation everybody is having. You are free to do with the received source as you like, maintaining your rights granted by the GPL.

But the GPL does not compel RedHat to keep you as a customer. There are two separate legal instruments, the license for the source and the terms for RHEL. RedHat are free to chose their customers. We can't force a company to take us on as a customer.

You try to lawyer your way out of it as much as you want, it's still going to be a blatant violation of the spirit of the GPL if not the letter.

Think about it this way.

If you as a Red Hat customer redistribute the source code, Red Hat won't sue you. You didn't do anything illegal, you are doing what you are allowed to do.

Nothing in the GPL entitles you to future support from Red Hat, source code of future versions or anything of the sorts.

You're free to do whatever you want with the sources. Red Hat is free to stop business with you at any time. There's nothing contradictory here.

I share this sentiment, even though I joined the Linux club much later, and began the journey with Ubuntu. I have arrived on Debian for similar reasons though. It just seems the purest distro while also being very popular and well supported.

Fedora is used for the WSL 2 VM that enables Podman on Windows. I think it'll stick around at least in this format for a while.

> Maybe this is just FUD

It is.

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