Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) announces Paywall on its source-code.

[Rysters Tech]

Summary

 In a blog post made on redhat.com, they announced that they will be locking Red Hat's source code behind a paywall, except for CentOS Stream's source code (which is widely considered to not be a real alternative to RHEL by the Red Hat community"

 

Quote

Source: Red hats official Blog. "We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal."

Quote

Source: ServeTheHome.com "Moving the code its developers worked on to behind a subscription paywall makes sense if the company does not want others to profit from its developers’ work. At the same time, one could argue that its development was furthered by other developers believing that their contributions would go towards the status quo and therefore worked on CentOS/ RHEL components instead of other distributions."

My thoughts

The reason this is significant is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux in in fact, Linux, which is its own licensing agreement states that you must share your source code for software built on top of it. Putting RHEL's source code behind a paywall rides the line of what is and isn't legal per Linux's own GPL licensing agreement. CentOS Stream's source code wont be a workaround as Red Hat themselves states that it is only RHEL-related, meaning it is not RHEL, it just has bits and pieces from it.  Its also worth noting that previously, Red Hat prided itself on its open source nature which it seems to be moving away from and has been for some time. Locking this source code makes it much more difficult for developers to write programs for RHEL, which will likely leave some developers, such as Jeff Geerling to stop supporting RHEL entirely. Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux claim that they will continue in development despite these changes, but the future of these distro's is a mystery at best.

 

Sources

 Red Hat's own blog post announcing this change. Jeff Geerling's Youtube Video discussing this change. Wiki on the GNU General Public License ServeTheHome article regarding this paywall

Edited June 28, 2023 by Rysters Tech
To comply with forum guidelines.

[OhioYJ]

Putting aside all the legal issues with GPL, this already makes RHEL suspect in my eyes. The whole reason open source works and is more secure in my opinion is you have an entire world of eyes on the code and able to contribute. The moment this isn't true, this raises red flags.

 

RHEL used to make money from support and customization / configuration right? Either they are in trouble or they have something to hide. 

[Dutch_Master]

Someone needs to remind IBM (who owns RH) about their legal battle with SCO and it's legal stuff with Novell

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._International_Business_Machines_Corp.

 

Or did IBM hire former SCO CEO Darl McBride, maybe?

[leadeater]

Honestly I already thought RHEL source was not freely open, just based on how annoying the licensing is to use their products though. Never really looked in to that side of it before.

[Sauron]

17 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Honestly I already thought RHEL source was not freely open, just based on how annoying the licensing is to use their products though. Never really looked in to that side of it before.

the source has always been available, it's just the customer support which was paywalled (which is fair enough). this move really sucks because there are a lot of non profits that use and rely upon derivatives of rhel like rocky linux which was already a substitute for old school centos, which has been discontinued by rh in its "stable" form and is now only available as a rolling release system, possibly because it was used instead of the paid red hat release.

 

Aside from sucking it may well be illegal due to the amount of code they use which is covered by the gpl v2, which forces you to republish all code you modify for free. Microsoft was not joking when they said the gpl is viral, except it's actually a good thing.

[r00tb33r]

Not just paywall, but the terms of the subscription prohibit redistribution.  Meaning if you get it in the portal...  I don't know if that supercedes the license in the source.  I suspect not, but that's where the opinion between Alma and Rocky seems to be split.

[HarryNyquist]

30 minutes ago, r00tb33r said:

Not just paywall, but the terms of the subscription prohibit redistribution.  Meaning if you get it in the portal...  I don't know if that supercedes the license in the source.  I suspect not, but that's where the opinion between Alma and Rocky seems to be split.

You are only forbidden from redistributing the source code if you leave all the Red Hat trademarks in (EULA Section 2 https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Red_Hat_GPLv2-Based_EULA_20191118.pdf). If you extract the trademarks as Alma/Rocky have already done, then you should be in the clear. I'm not sure why Alma says it would be a violation, considering Rocky has already stated they're going to pay for a RHEL subscription, remove the Red Hat trademarks, and re-publish it for themselves.

 

2 hours ago, Rysters Tech said:

Putting RHEL's source code behind a paywall rides the line of what is and isn't legal per Linux's own GPL licensing agreement.

No it doesn't. Every version of the GPL says you may charge people a fee for access to the source code. Copyleft also applies meaning if you derive new work from GPL-licensed work, you must license that derivation under the GPL.

[williamcll]

Why do you even need paid Linux you get the same bugs anyay.

[AlTech]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

Aside from sucking it may well be illegal due to the amount of code they use which is covered by the gpl v2, which forces you to republish all code you modify for free.

100% Not illegal.The FSF says you can sell GPL code and just not publish it by default BUT they say if you charge money for it you have to give paying customers the source code under the terms of the GPL.

 

In theory they can then give that GPL code away themselves to others if they want to. In practice the GPL rights holder may be able to do an end run around this by forbidding it in their TOS required to be a paying customer. I'm not sure anybody knows how that would turn out in court since I don't think that's ever been tested.

 

This is not legal advice.

[AlTech]

2 hours ago, williamcll said:

Why do you even need paid Linux you get the same bugs anyay.

Support contracts and/or a dedicated phone number to call if something goes wrong.

[leadeater]

19 minutes ago, AlTech said:

Support contracts and/or a dedicated phone number to call if something goes wrong.

RHEL support is damn good, I've used it once only but it was exceptionally quick and root cause identified at first contact.

[GeoStellar]

In my mind, this is IBM slapping the community in the face again.  Saying that the independent contributors who publish commits to the RHEL code base don't matter.  The claims I have seen from other articles about how distros such as alma and rocky are just freeloaders is absolutely unfair and unfounded given that they don't take into account the amounts of commits that the community has made to the RHEL Base over the years.

 

This also puts other RHEL Based non free distros at risk.  For example, The core of Nutanix's AHV runs on top of a heavily modified version of CentOS 7.  Having been part of a current cluster installation, I was able to ask our advisor about what Nutanix's plan was for the end of support for CentOS7 in 2024.  Their plan was looking like Rocky 8 or 9 but now this may throw everything into question.  The additional financial implications this has for businesses running large Dev and QA environments is also insulting.  People don't want to have to pay twice for their licenses.  Running RHEL in prod and having a RHEL Clone for dev and QA should be more than acceptable.

 

To paraphrase Louis Rossman when he talked about apple being anti consumer "I don't think anyone here is fully asking IBM to actively and fully improve upon the linux community, it would be nice if they stopped attacking it with daggers though"

[LogicalDrm]

@Rysters Tech, this thread does not fully comply with Tech News guidelines. Please add quote box to your main quote and maybe add another quote from blog or your other sources. If you can find one, this thread could also use additional, more neutral/mainstream source.

[thevictor390]

14 hours ago, AlTech said:

Support contracts and/or a dedicated phone number to call if something goes wrong.

Yup, we've got a customer with a CentOS server that is absolutely refusing to play nice with Active Directory and being able to call up RedHat (or maybe even access their KB) would have saved so much time for everyone involved as we are not really a Linux shop.

[GeoStellar]

1 hour ago, LogicalDrm said:

@Rysters Tech, this thread does not fully comply with Tech News guidelines. Please add quote box to your main quote and maybe add another quote from blog or your other sources. If you can find one, this thread could also use additional, more neutral/mainstream source.

Et Tu, Red Hat? | Hackaday

 

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams • The Register

Red Hat ends the RHEL clones’ free lunch - Red Hat - ARN (arnnet.com.au)

iTWire - Red Hat 'clarifies' bid to restrict RHEL source code access

What Red Hat's source code restrictions mean for businesses - TechCentral.ie

 

Thats just a quick search for sources.

[Rysters Tech]

23 hours ago, LogicalDrm said:

@Rysters Tech, this thread does not fully comply with Tech News guidelines. Please add quote box to your main quote and maybe add another quote from blog or your other sources. If you can find one, this thread could also use additional, more neutral/mainstream source.

Ive changed it to comply with the guidelines. Thanks for giving me a chance to edit it to comply

[Kisai]

On 6/26/2023 at 1:46 PM, leadeater said:

Honestly I already thought RHEL source was not freely open, just based on how annoying the licensing is to use their products though. Never really looked in to that side of it before.

It's never been "freely open", I remember original Redhat discs. There was a commercial XServer and some other stuff on it. It's been 20+ years, so I don't know how much that changed since, but I imagine those older pre-IBM redhat distos's were always intended to be a "Linux Kernel+ Our Userland", and not the present generalization of Linux distros that have a "If it's not GPL3, GTFO" political attitude

 

It was nothing special, but it was basically the first "Commercial" release of a Linux OS, and thus people built stuff based on RHEL being the OS.

 

CentOS for the longest time was basically "Redhat (RHEL)" for "Redhat compatible setups"

 

You know what required CentOS? CPanel/WHM. Ever since it was acquired by that vulture private equity firm in 2018, it's quality has nose-dived. When Redhat pulled the Cpanel rug out from under it, Cpanel started encouraging people to switch to AlmaLinux 

 

https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/

Quote

Can you just use CentOS Stream sources?

No, we are committed to remaining a downstream RHEL clone, and using CentOS Stream sources would make us upstream of RHEL. CentOS Stream sources, while being upstream of RHEL, do not always include all patches and updates that are included in RHEL packages. 

Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones?

We cannot speak to Red Hat’s intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue.

 

So since so many internet "services" out there rely on Cpanel, which rely on CentOS being RHEL compatible, this is literately "breaking the internet" level of petty from Redhat. I have no problem, personally, setting up websites manually as Linux+Apache+Mysql+PHP or FreeBSD+Nginx+Mysql+PHP, but that does not scale, and Linux does not gracefully, EVER, survive major OS updates, where as FreeBSD always* does. 

 

*except from 32-bit to 64-bit, which you can't do with any OS without breaking the bootloader.

 

Transmigration from one Linux Distro to another is the biggest pain in the ass there is when using Linux, and most people are like "f*** that, I'll just install fresh" which is a habit learned from Windows users. 

 

Like you have to realize that you can pretty much recompile the kernel yourself, at any time. Both Linux and FreeBSD. It just takes you out of having a "distro" that updates come from. You're on your own. But if you're okay with that, and you're okay with basically being Gentoo / FreeBSD style source ports, you can compile absolutely everything and have immunity from "distro-targeted" malware, at the expense of wasting mountains of time compiling programs for every needless refactoring and feature creep.

 

Just nobody really has to time for that unless they are pedantically obsessed with being on the bleeding edge.

 

[leadeater]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

It's never been "freely open", I remember original Redhat discs

I think you're misunderstanding. What you are talking about or at least started talking about is compiled software. The change this topic is about is that RHEL source code was open source aka free and now it will not be. The status of the source code being free seems to be true, just something I did not expect.

 

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

So since so many internet "services" out there rely on Cpanel, which rely on CentOS being RHEL compatible

Cpanel works perfectly fine on other distros like Ubuntu

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

I think you're misunderstanding. What you are talking about or at least started talking about is compiled software. The change this topic is about is that RHEL source code was open source aka free and now it will not be. The status

of the source code being free seems to be true, just something I did not expect.

And why would you use RHEL and not use RHEL's packages and package manager (YUM)? 

 

Ubuntu's package manager is APT.

 

6 hours ago, leadeater said:

Cpanel works perfectly fine on other distros like Ubuntu

No, not really.  That is a specific side-deal.

 

https://docs.cpanel.net/installation-guide/system-requirements/

Quote

• System Requirements for AlmaLinux OS (AlmaLinux version 8 or 9)
• System Requirements for CloudLinux™ (CloudLinux versions 6, 7, and 8)
• System Requirements for Rocky Linux™ (Rocky Linux version 8)
• System Requirements for Ubuntu® (Ubuntu version 20.04 LTS.)

AlmaLinux and CloudLinux are the same OS. They are Binary compatible with RHEL.

Rocky Linux is not promising that

and Ubuntu doesn't pretend to be (based on Debian).

 

You're in for a maintenance headache if you install Cpanel on anything that isn't RHEL because it's binary packages are pulled thru YUM. Installing it on anything else, requires source to compile cpanel's version of things. So you defeat the purpose of using cpanel if you don't use it on a RHEL OS. And considering how obnoxious Cpanel is about not supporting OS's the second a new one drops, you'd probably ask yourself if it's worth the effort of doing so.

 

As I said in my previous message. You can compile everything if you really want to, but if you're going to go through the effort of compiling things, then you may as well discard cpanel itself. Setting up a single server for a single site is not that hard, and can be done faster than installing cpanel. But when your server has to deal with 100 sites, then it becomes a pain, and you'll be spending far too much time and bringing too much down-time to the server to keep compiling things for every needless feature creep.

 

[jagdtigger]

On 6/26/2023 at 10:11 PM, HarryNyquist said:

Every version of the GPL says you may charge people a fee for access to the source code.

But it also codified that it most a physical transaction so i dont think what RH does is covered by that.....

 

12 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Cpanel

You cling to that SW like its not possible to run sites without it.....

[leadeater]

30 minutes ago, Kisai said:

And why would you use RHEL and not use RHEL's packages and package manager (YUM)? 

 

Ubuntu's package manager is APT.

What does this have to do with anything?

 

30 minutes ago, Kisai said:

No, not really.  That is a specific side-deal.

And what does this actually change? Nothing. You can as I said install Cpanel on Ubuntu just as painlessly as RHEL and support isn't going away for it either.

 

Also I have installed Cpanel on Ubuntu before it was officially supported, I don't even like Cpanel too. It's just that this isn't the death of anything so grand like you said since there are alternatives to Cpanel and it also happens to work just fine on Ubuntu, no caveats, it just works.

 

30 minutes ago, Kisai said:

You're in for a maintenance headache if you install Cpanel on anything that isn't RHEL because it's binary packages are pulled thru YUM. Installing it on anything else, requires source to compile cpanel's version of things.

Yet it's as difficult as

 

cd /home && curl -o latest -L https://securedownloads.cpanel.net/latest && sh latest

Yes that is literally it, after that it's installed. Anything before that is standard system setup you'd do for anything like setting proper hostnames etc. Doesn't seem all that difficult to me 

 

You don't have to do any compiling yourself.

[leadeater]

10 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

You cling to that SW like its not possible to run sites without it.....

Plesk, DirectAdmin, Webmin etc... none which we use.

 

We have hundreds of sites and we manage them via our own management web interfaces and backend scripting, that's also been in place more than twice as long as I've worked here. We also want to stop hosting websites and push that out to web hosting platforms, it's actually not worth the hassle with such good and cheap options out there, nor worth the risk. I'd rather expose someone else's service to the big bad internet than our own. We are not and will never be web hosting experts.

[Kabraxis]

As a noob to Linux, all this means is not to use RH, one distro to try off the list

[GeoStellar]

1 hour ago, Kabraxis said:

As a noob to Linux, all this means is not to use RH, one distro to try off the list

PERSONAL OPINION WARNING

 

Any linux noob should not start with any RH derrived distro, even before this.  Rh derrivitives are not friendly.  They do not hold your hand in the same way a distro like ubuntu does.

 

Start with ubuntu or a derivative of it (pop os is fantastic, actually have a laptop dedicated to it).

 

The other thing is this latest news is only going to drive more companies streight into the hands of Canonical (the makers/maintainers of Ubuntu).  If I was a betting man, I would say that in the next 10 years, you will see ubuntu outpace rhel in production installations.

[GeoStellar]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

But it also codified that it most a physical transaction so i dont think what RH does is covered by that.....

 

You cling to that SW like its not possible to run sites without it.....

as leadeater stated there are several alternatives to cpanel, Its not a monopoply by any means.  Additonally, cpanel really at its core is a wrapper for a bunch of different command line commands.  Webhosts use cpanel because its friendly.  If i host my own website, its not on cpanel, it may not even be on one of the pieces of software that leadeater mentioned because i dont nessisarally need a gui to do it.