| Any business has a legal right to defend its models and products. Leaving aside the large number of people who don't really understand how open source licenses work, our impression is that there are a lot of people who feel that just because it's Linux , they have some kind of right to get it for free. But in fact, they don't. That's not what "free" means in free software, and it never was. |
Finishing 丨 Noah 
A few days ago, Red Hat issued an announcement to stop publicly providing the source code of Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Just as we have set up a "paywall" in "blatantly erected" before, does RedHat violate open source? As reported in the article, the chain reaction of this decision came together. The person in charge of Oracle Linux development pointed at IBM, SUSE also announced the fork of RHEL, and relevant downstream organizations also thought of "self-help" strategies...
"Injury the enemy 1000, self-damage 300." Some users in the community also commented. It has been more than 20 days, and the domino effect triggered by this incident has fully emerged.
1. Oracle: Get it from us!
Oracle launched what is now known as Oracle Linux back in 2006 with the plan to provide a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution in order not to divide the Linux community and provide customers and ISVs with a common platform. Oracle Linux also weighed in after Red Hat restricted access to RHEL source code .
In the article "Keeping Linux Open and Free—We Have to," published Monday, Edward Screven, chief enterprise architect at Big Red, and Wim Coekaerts, head of Linux development at Oracle, argue that IBM is trying to kill the gap between Linux distributions. Open source competition in order to improve their profit margins, at the same time, they made a commitment to:
"As long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will openly and freely provide the binaries and source code of that distribution. In addition, Oracle welcomes various downstream distributions, including community and commercial distributions."
The Oracle duo also mentioned CentOS , claiming that IBM "effectively killed its position as a free alternative to RHEL." And for the two new RHEL alternatives, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, that have emerged in the CentOS location, "by withholding the RHEL source code, IBM is directly attacking them."
"Maybe that's the real answer to why it's doing this: eliminating competitors. Fewer competitors means more revenue opportunities for IBM."
Additionally, Screven and Coekaerts took a stab at Red Hat's response. They cite Mike McGrath, Red Hat's vice president of core platforms, as stating that the free RHEL distribution cannot continue because "at Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fix bugs, integrate different packages, and then supporting those jobs long-term ... we have to pay the people who do them."
In their view, this reason is untenable. So at the end of the article, they came with a wave of mocking output:
"Are you saying you don't want to pay those RHEL developers? The way you can save money is simple: get it from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We'll gladly take on that responsibility."
The onlookers must have their own opinions about the merits of this verbal battle between Oracle and Red Hat. Still, the fact that Oracle made fun of Red Hat alone makes things food for thought. Because in the public impression, Red Hat is a veritable open source pioneer, while Oracle has always been not very friendly to open source. Regardless of Oracle's squandering of Sun's legacy, and the protracted Java API copyright lawsuit between Oracle and Google, even the fact that Red Hat took over Oracle's maintenance of OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 a few years ago is still impressive. The memory is still fresh.
In response to the incidents caused by RHEL, Bradley Kuhn, a policy researcher of the Software Freedom Conservation Association, made sharp comments, and his words vaguely revealed the exclamation that "a boy who slays a dragon will eventually become a dragon".
"Red Hat has long prided itself on being on the moral high ground over Oracle. Oracle's entire business model revolves around using aggressive proprietary licensing to intimidate their customers. Seeing RHEL's business model leaning more and more towards In this direction, I regret."
2. SUSE expresses its position: fork RHEL, plans to invest 10 million US dollars
Shortly after Oracle Linux's announcement, SUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector and SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition (SLE), followed suit.
SUSE has announced that it will fork publicly available RHEL and develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution freely available to all users. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million in this project.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said: "Collaboration and shared success have been the cornerstones of our open source community for decades. We have a responsibility to uphold these values. This investment will keep innovation flowing for years to come and will Ensuring that neither customers nor communities are affected by vendor lock-in and have real choices tomorrow and today."
According to the announcement, SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, durable compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute the project to an open source foundation that will provide ongoing free access to the alternative source code. In addition, SUSE will continue to invest in Linux solutions such as SLE and openSUSE.
Generally speaking, it is very rare for a major open source company to fork another major open source company's project. But there's a reason SUSE is doing it now, and it's likely to have the support of many in the open source community.
Ever since the open source movement became commercialized, there has always been some tension between commercial interests and the more community-driven, radical side of open source. For the most part, the two sides have maintained a balance over the years and have found ways to coexist. But debate is inevitable, as has been the case over the past few weeks between Red Hat, the various Linux distributions, and the vendors offering RHEL-compatible distributions.
According to Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE got into this space because it believed that "becoming more proprietary should not be the basis of competition between open source companies. We all contribute to the open source community — just as we We all benefit from it alike. This is greater than the sum of our parts.
It can be seen that the involvement of SUSE as a larger Linux supplier is not surprising. Apart from Oracle, the smaller vendors don't have the resources to maintain the fork and create a community around the fork. SUSE has experienced more than 30 years of development, and despite its ups and downs, it is still a well-known and trusted entity.
"This collaborative effort demonstrates SUSE's deep-rooted commitment to fostering innovation and fostering community-driven development, and reinforces the fundamental values of open source software. We invite the community to actively participate and collaborate in shaping the future of this fundamental software," said SUSE Chief said Thomas Di Giacomo, Technical Officer and Chief Operating Officer. "We firmly believe that this new RHEL-compatible Linux distribution, together with SUSE's product portfolio, will help the community and customers make unprecedented advances in enterprise Linux, cloud computing, containerization, edge, AI/ML and other emerging technologies."
3. Rocky Linux Self-Help: These methods allow us to obtain RHEL binaries legally
For Red Hat's decision-making, large companies have their own ways to deal with it, and small groups also have their own ways to survive. Although it seems to the outside world that in this chain reaction, Red Hat's approach is a devastating blow to AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, but both have now stated that they will overcome difficulties and continue to launch RHEL clones.
In a blog post titled "Keeping Open Source Open," Rocky Linux details two alternative methods that can be used to obtain source code.
One, is to use the RHEL-based UBI container image, available from several online sources, including Docker Hub. UBI images provide easy, reliable and unhindered access to Red Hat sources. We've verified this with an OCI (Open Container Initiative) container and it works exactly as expected.
The second is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can boot a RHEL image in the cloud and thus get the source code for all packages and errata. This is the easiest for us to scale, since we can do all of this through our CI pipeline, spin up cloud images to fetch source via DNF, and automatically publish to our Git repository.
Rocky Linux emphasizes in the article that these methods are possible due to the power of the GPL. No one can prevent redistribution of GPL software. "Both methods allow us to obtain RHEL binaries and SRP legally without compromising our commitment to open source software or agreeing to TOS or EULA restrictions that hinder our rights. Our legal counsel assured us that we have the right to Obtaining the source code for any binaries we receive ensures that we can continue to advance Rocky Linux as we intended."
Of course, they also pointed out that the above methods may change, so they continue to explore other possibilities. "If, unfortunately, Red Hat decides to step up its efforts to negatively impact the community, Rocky Linux will continue to serve the best interests of the entire open source community."
4. Red Hat's response: In a healthy open source ecosystem, competition and innovation go hand in hand
Rewind the clock to June 21st. When Red Hat announced that it would stop providing RHEL source code to third parties, and CentOS Stream became the only repository for public RHEL-related source code releases, the first domino in this incident fell.
In fact, the cause of this series of events can be traced back farther. For a long time, CentOS was essentially a free version of RHEL, but at the end of 2020, Red Hat changed everything. Instead of the usual point releases that coincide with RHEL releases, it launched CentOS Stream, "a 'rolling preview' of the next step in RHEL," Red Hat's Chris Wright explained at the time. This makes CentOS 7 the last long-term supported CentOS version (to end in 2024).
The idea, Red Hat said at the time, was to shorten the feedback loop between developers in the RHEL ecosystem. "Remember, we are an upstream-first company, and everything we do goes upstream first, and then flows through the system. This means that the changes we made downstream on CentOS now have to go into the upstream community, into Fedora, and then into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then flowed into CentOS. So it actually slowed us down a lot, we couldn't move as fast as we wanted to."
But this also means that CentOS and RHEL will no longer be 100% compatible. This move caused quite a stir in the community, with many CentOS contributors parting ways and launching new distributions: Rocky Linux and Alma Linux.
Then one day, Red Hat discovered that companies like Rocky and Alma were building their downstream Linux distributions and claiming bug-for-bug compatibility. Of course what Rocky and Alma did was legal and within their rights. But Red Hat apparently sees it differently.
According to Gunnar Hellekson, Red Hat vice president and general manager of RHEL, it's the equivalent of "I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and someone else comes along, takes my open source project, claims bug-to-bug compatibility, and thus promises not to do it at all." Innovate anything, don't improve it in any way. Put their own logo on it and actively recruit my users to use their version instead of mine. That's bad behavior in the open source community. It's legal , but it’s unwelcome. It’s counterproductive and bad for the ecosystem.”
On June 26, Mike McGrath, vice president of Red Hat's core platform, also expressed similar views in response to related controversies:
In a healthy open source ecosystem, competition and innovation go hand in hand. Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, AWS, and Microsoft have all created Linux distributions with associated brands and ecosystem development efforts. These variants all utilize and contribute to the Linux source code, but none claim to be "fully compatible" with the other variants.
McGrath said bluntly: "In the end, we didn't find the value in rebuilding RHEL, and we have no obligation to make the job of the rebuilder easier." Regarding the criticism of Red Hat's "violation" of the GPL agreement, his rebuttal is: CentOS Stream is located in The GitLab source code repository is where we build the RHEL distribution and is publicly available to everyone. Calling RHEL "closed source" is absolutely untrue and inaccurate. The update speed of CentOS Stream is faster than that of RHEL. Although RHEL does not necessarily point to the latest code, the code is there.
5. The Epilogue: A Key Point Most Critics Miss
In this case, the key point that most critics miss is that the GPL only requires Red Hat to provide source code to parties that provide binaries to it, not to the world. Red Hat customers still have access to the source code, so Red Hat is not violating the GPL. The GPL doesn't free them from the Red Hat contract: they can redistribute the source code if they want, but again, Red Hat can respond to them doing so by terminating their customer contracts, which is 100% compliant GPL's.
Any business has a legal right to defend its models and products. Leaving aside the large number of people who don't really understand how open source licenses work, our impression is that there are a lot of people who feel that just because it's Linux, they have some kind of right to get it for free. But in fact, they don't. That's not what "free" means in free software, and it never was.