voir CentOS 8, résumé de l'affaire, tour d'horizon des alternatives : https://thehackernews.com/2021/10/winter-is-coming-for-centos-8.html
tags : #area/watch #redhat
source :arstechnica.com
date : 2023-07-03
In 2020, CentOS announced that it wad shutting down its "rebuild" of RHEL to focus on Stream (its development build)
In 2023, Red HAT (owned by IBM) announced that "CentOS Stream would be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases, with RHEL's core code otherwise restricted to a customer portal."
RHEL access remains free for individual developers and up to 16 servers, but that's largely not the issue here
Rocky Linux a replacement RHEL-compatible distro replied that it "violates the spirit and purpose of open source." Using a few different methods (Universal Base Image containers, pay-per-use public cloud instances), Rocky Linux intends to maintain what it considers legitimate access to RHEL code under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and make the code public as soon as it exists.
Alma is also working to keep providing RHEL-compatible updates and downstream rebuilds. "The process is more labor intensive as we require gathering data and patches from several sources, comparing them, testing them, and then building them for release," wrote Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux, in a blog post. "But rest assured, updates will continue flowing just as they have been."
The Software Freedom Conservancy's Bradley M. Kuhn weighed in last week with a comprehensive overview of RHEL's business model and its tricky relationship with GPL compliance. Red Hat's business model "skirts" GPL violation but had only twice previously violated the GPL in newsworthy ways, Kuhn wrote. Withholding Complete Corresponding Source (CCS) from the open web doesn't violate the GPL itself, but by doing so, Red Hat makes it more difficult for anyone to verify the company's GPL compliance.
Ansible and other software projects from Jeff Geerling are dropping RHEL support
Mike McGrath, vice president of core platforms engineering at Red Hat, :"Red Hat contributes code upstream, doesn't "simply take upstream packages and rebuild them," and maintains and supports operating systems for 10 years, McGrath wrote.""
"I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort, and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit," he wrote. "This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous."
While Red Hat previously "found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS," the idea that they are "churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn't reality." McGrath points to SUSE, Canonical (Ubuntu), AWS, and Microsoft as competitors using Linux code, but "none claim to be 'fully compatible' with the others."
"Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make," he wrote. "Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."
Richi Jennings at DevOps has compiled many more community reactions to Red Hat's most recent source moves.