Red Hat lashes out against Red Hat clones: https://redhat.com/en/blog/...
Alma Linux caught off guard: https://almalinux.org/blog/...

Aren't they shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun?

@iiii The idea seems to be moving people over to subscriptions plans.

I mean, they killed off CentOS already, CentOS 8 while even shortening the support span, to get people moving - which is when Alma and Rocky Linux jumped in, and now they're on the menu as well.

"Unfortunately the way we understand it today, Red Hat’s user interface agreements indicate that re-publishing sources acquired through the customer portal would be a violation of those agreements."

Is it just me or does that smell like a GPL violation?

@Oktokolo I think so as well, that's an additional restriction which the GPL prohibits. They have lawsuits coming in unless they re-word that to what specifically must not be redistributed, like tools where RH has the copyright themselves.

However, that would mean that this would no longer fall under the OSI definition of OSS so that RH would formally stop counting as OSS. I don't think the IBM suits understand the implications.

@Fast-Nop The writing is on the wall but the ones doing the writing can't seem to read.

@saucyatom you wish, we are still going to see Red hat as the main enterprise platform for years to come. I have been trying to have people change it on different platforms. It requires an ACTUAL engineer to understand the plausible downsides of RHEL, not gonna happen for most orgs and RHEL will continue to (sadly) dominate. I play ball because I LOVE money, but RHEL sucks balls

If companies are using Red Hat clones to power their services (and earn revenue from it), they should just subscribe and get the full benefits.

@fruitfcker The business model is the support, not the code, and if you don't need support, you don't need the subscription. With your stance, we wouldn't have any Linux distro, given how much OSS SW goes into that.

@Fast-Nop There are other distros out there. And in my previous job, I was 100% Red Hat (Bluecurve era) until they changed their business model. I switched and never ran anything prod under Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora since then. If a Red Hat clone is vital to your operations, why not just use Red Hat and focus on whatever your business goals are? With Red Hat being fickle minded, I would rather use a distro that won't give me these kinds of headache. And I'm glad I switched.

@AleCx04 It might take a while, but pissing off engineers & hobbyist in a (relative) niche can hurt a lot when those later get to make technical decisions. If they push engineering-driven folks away they can still get around with their clout, but there's a serious risk of becoming old quickly.

now that's just my biased 2c and maybe some wishful thinking

@fruitfcker Just for perspective: it's absolutely normal that distros use other distros as basis. Ubuntu uses Debian. Mint uses Ubuntu and Debian (LMDE, in case Canonical goes rogue). Manjaro uses Arch. And so on.

Red Hat is the odd one here, not Alma or Rocky Linux. You don't pay for distros, you pay for support - and if you want RHEL, but don't need support, then Alma or Rocky, and previously CentOS, are the valid options.

It's not like any mimimi from Red Hat would be justified here. They do make a lot of well-deserved money from their paid tiers - but IBM can't get enough and rather destroys their ecosystem.

@saucyatom you should write epigraphs for tombstones.

"here lay corporate hubris -- something witty here."

@saucyatom oh I am with you bud. Forced to use red hat at work and I hate it

@Fast-Nop I see what you mean. Their market share is like < 1% now. They could've been big.