I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It’s only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that’s what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it’s time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn’t go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal… is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about “hey we are considering this, what do y’all think?”. Well, they’re certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it’s a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like “does anyone even use this” or “how reliable is this feature” can help them prioritize their efforts.
I’ll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there’s problems. I’m sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points… or you think I’m on Red Hat’s payroll (I’m not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I’m a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I’m not planning to change that anytime soon.
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Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I’m honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I’ve used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
I think it will be fine, but I’d personally rather not support their behavior. Arch and Debian are fine for me.
This is the way
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
You might not be worried for the code, but the project is a different thing. Red Hat has done some serious damage to its image (centos stream, lay off with record profits, lay off of fedora program manager, nasty circumvention of common open source practices). This will affect fedora. I am a long time debian user, but I often suggest fedora as distro for newcomers. I am not doing it again, and I believe many won’t do as well.
At this point it is difficult to trust red hat on their long term commitments. At work we still use rhel, because all our sys admins are used to it, we have licenses, have been using it for ages. So there will not be a big impact for rhel on existing contracts. But on the future, I will actively try to persuade my whole department at least to move out. It is not easy for us, it will require work, but on long term I do not trust red hat/ibm.
Open source market is a difficult market for IBM’s MBAs. Because trust is more important than money. This ibm problem to understand open source world has always existed. And the recent actions proves they haven’t learned yet. It is a pity that rhel and fedora are the only victims here
just
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free,
…for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Many people gave up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It’s always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
It’s amazing how a 130-odd year-old company watched how apple put its ][ in front of school kids to great success, and then intentionally stops making it easy to run EL when faced with the same opportunity. But, if you’ve read cringely, you’ll get the impression that IBM has been sucking for decades, grabbing anything that floats and standing on its head to remain afloat until that thing suffocates.
As a long-time RH customer, it’s hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it’s been hobbled and impaired so much. Really, the only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don’t see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
Not remotely.
Maybe certain people should think twice about setting up an entire business model of support based on having the current company do all the engineering work, cloning it, and then taking the support contracts for it.
Both Fedora and CentOS Stream are still very much upstream. Just certain CentOS alternatives are throwing a hissy-fit/tantrum that their nice neat little “cloned distro + support” business model fell apart overnight because they built their entire business off of what’s basically (not entirely) a loophole.
The Red Hat controversy has popped up a lot lately but this is the first time I’ve seen this perspective. It’s the the actual reason behind the change? Was there a distro particularly guilty of doing this?
Oracle for ages, and Red Hat had made changes in the last to make it more difficult for Oracle (something about the kernel patches).
Rocky more recently, CIQ had been selling support contracts, including a well publicized contract at NASA very recently for a few workstations.
If it was just AlmaLinux making a free clone I’m not sure if they would have made the change or not. Obviously they got rid of the original CentOS so it might have still been on their minds. Also, they were doing a lot of packaging and debranding work to enable this that was no benefit to Red Hat, so it may have been a matter of deciding the cost and resources was more than they could justify, especially when it is essentially putting the code in yet another, third place (Stream, customer SRPMs, the git site).
Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux for example.
I think we haven’t seen this perspective is because it’s not a good take on things. After IBM bought RH they killed CentOS which was bug compatible with RHEL. A lot of devs used CentOS to be able to easily ensure compatability with RHEL. RH replaced CentOS with CentOS stream which is not bug compatible with RHEL. The community was able to move past this blunder thanks to Rocky and ALMA “rebuilding” RHEL in the spirit of the old CentOS.
Now RH has killed off the ability for the community to build a free bug compatible distro and instead want devs to register for 16 (free) RHEL testing licenses. No other major distro that I know of does this.
I’m not a dev but it seems like a good way to lose support for your platform. If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
If you want to make money and kill clones make your distro free but charge for official support.
That model just does not work. For the engineering that goes into RedHat (and all the contributions back to the community they send), they just don’t make enough for that to happen. Everyone just wants to shrug this off as “Oh IBM has lots of money so that’s not a problem”. This “make it free and charge for support” model almost never works for FOSS yet so many people want to believe it does. On an enterprise level, it just doesn’t. People who want to use an enterprise distro of Linux for free also likely don’t want to pay for support either, instead wanting to support it themselves. Which is all well and good but that doesn’t account for the fact RHEL does all the engineering, all the building, all the testing, everything, and then puts that release up for use. All of that has to be covered somehow.
There was never any promise that you’d always be able to create a “bug compatible distro”. Ever. The GPL does not cover future releases or updates and never has, and even implying that it should sets a dangerous precedent of people being entitled to what you haven’t even created yet.
Rather than hearing the emotional takes from people that want to turn this into “RedHat vs the Linux Community”, I strongly suggest you listen to LinuxUnplugged: https://linuxunplugged.com/517?t=506.
RedHat is still contributing everything upstream, and CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. You have full access to the source of whatever you buy.
The only thing that has changed here is that the loophole that Alma and Rocky were using to create a RHEL clone and then offer support for it (Which is literally RedHat’s own business model) is gone. Those two are throwing a tantrum because they got to set up a nice easy business model where they literally did nothing more than clone RHEL and then offer support for it and that free lunch is over. That’s it. They don’t contribute back to RHEL, they don’t do anything to help development. They sold themselves as the “free” or “cheaper” alternative and now they’re getting burned for building their entire business of the work done by RHEL.
Everything else in this story is noise, drama, and unnecessary emotion.
Red Hat controls Fedora, anyone saying Fedora is independent is just spouting nonsense.
I’ve been on Fedora all this time because I loved Red Hat. Oh, how wrong I was.
Fedora is community owned, it’s just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don’t really think there’s a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don’t know much about KDE at all.
If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.
Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.
I don’t doubt that relying on Red Hat’s code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Nobody’s “relying” on Red Hat. You guys are being insanely dramatic. It’s FOSS software. If Red Hat loses their minds, systemd will just be forked, or there will be a discussion on where to move to next.
Good god.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn’t give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat’s recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn’t help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn’t be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
Yes, and? If those things went closed source tomorrow, the previously open source would not disappear. People could continue to build on it.
Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
There was a strong community discussion because a lot of people didn’t like systemd. After a public democratic decision making process, a decision was made. If something significant happens, another discussion will happen. I don’t understand why you’re talking about disagreements as if they’re the end of the world. “Publically painful”? What does that mean? Debian isn’t a politican. Lennart issuing ‘wake-up calls’ to people is just him being a dipshit. It means nothing for Linux and it’s usability.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
Cool, the system is working as intended. Debian can swap Red Hat’s technologies for the other ones. Do you think that it’s not possible to run systemd free Debian, or use KDE instead of GNOME?
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Yes. The decades of work on the kernel will not magically disappear, and people can continue that work. A new one wouldn’t be necessary. Linus barely writes the majority of the kernel code any more. The kernel has shit loads of developers working on it regularly.
This is just FUD bullshit written by someone who doesn’t understand how Linux has been working for the past decade.
I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It’s well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I’m not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you’re a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you’re making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.
stableis not the only debian release.
Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I’ll stop now. So /rant
Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs.
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open. So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
Single users really don’t need to worry much. If you really want to use Fedora, keep using it. But even if you get burned somehow in the future, it’s not hard to switch to some other distro. Just make sure your data is relatively portable. You do that normally, right?
If you’re a sysadmin, though, you should think carefully with anything Red Hat based.
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Same here, of course. But now it is comforting to know that even if it breaks, we won’t be down for long. :-)
To be honest, very worried. I used Fedora as my main for about a decade but these days, I just don’t care for it anymore, and every piece of news that comes out about IBM and Red Hat makes me even more worried about the future. Sure, it’s ostensibly community-driven, but Red Hat has historically been very involved with it.
Hopefully I’m wrong, and I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong, but Arch and Debian seem to have the best chances at a good future these days.
I don’t give a shit about fedora but I’m very worried about the future of Linux as a whole, red hat has an undisputable importance in the Linux ecossistem and these movements maybe are a signal that IBM don’t give a fuck about that
Not even a little bit.
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My guess is if they want free, they’ll choose Debian.
I’ve seen a lot of “actually debian 12 is the best distro now” stuff lately.
While I agree that Debian 12 is great right now, I’m curious how those opinions will hold in 12 months, when Debian isn’t even half way through it’s update cycle, and people realize they are now a ways behind other distros with regards to package updates.
I love Debian as a rock-solid system. But you have to know what you’re getting into with it too.
Ubuntu LTS has the exact same problem. And unlike Ubuntu, with Debian you have the choice to use sid which is as up to date as Arch usually
If the time comes, that Fedora doesn’t fit me, I will go back to good old Debian.
@shapis
I’m gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don’t want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I’m at least paying enough attention to what’s going on that if they do something I see as to far I’ll switchStill not sure what too though
