The Red Hat RHEL Situation Looks Really Bad 

I recently started noticing that in almost every video you upload, there is a small section in the middle that repeats...

IBM bought them. IBM have history of buying things and then driving them into the ground. This would not be the first time.

"When the CentOS project shifted to center on CentOS Stream" Love how Red Hat says that as though they didn't acquire Cent OS in 2014. The "CentOS project" didn't shift focus - Red Hat shifted the focus of CentOS. "maintaining separate redundant repositories" What? They already maintain repositories of source code for RHEL and won't stop doing that (because they can't without violating licenses). The only thing being changed is moving those servers behind a paywall.

Pretty sure throwing an extra license on top of the GPL is a violation of the GPL

I get that it's not exactly a coincidence but it's still shocking to see all these companies suddenly competing to be the absolute worst. Suddenly, the Ubuntu Pro motd ads are looking a lot more palatable... 🤢

"Having a license would not help. Part of the license agreement restricts you from building your own rebuild with the source." That's sublicensing, which is expressly forbidden by the GPL.

It's good to see the spotlight off of Canonical and Ubuntu for once.

I'm not a lawyer either but the way I understand it is that RH cannot legally stop you from rebuilding RHEL from source but they can terminate your RHEL license if you do.

every video i feel like im going crazy when the clips repeat lmao

This is dangerous for Red Hat. IBM/Red Hat could be risking their access to GPL code. They must think they have a legal argument for whatever fine line they are walking, but I've seen other companies that had lawyers with a legal argument find that the courts did not agree.

We use Alma Linux everywhere (thousands of installations) at work. We don't actually need to be binary compatible with RHEL, but find dnf and RPM to be vastly superior to apt and deb in terms of dependency management and conflict resolution. Especially CVE tracking is superb, but I can see how their security backports and CVE reporting makes sense to keep for subscribers only. It's just that Fedora and CentOS stream have way too short support cycles to be practical for large deployments. Though I can say that we are prepared to start shipping Debian VMs to our customers in a heartbeat, since RHs previous stunt where they prematurely ended support for CentOS 8 and killed off CentOS 9 (non-stream).

The Software Freedom Conservancy published an interesting take on the issue you might find interesting @Brodie .

you should prooobably check for errors in editing, some parts of the video are repeated (again)

Since IBM's acquisition of Redhat, such a move on IBM's part was to be expected. IBM has a similar business policy to ORACLE.

I wanted to switch to CentOS when they decided to kill it as a RHEL clone. And even though Rocky and Alma came around, I no longer felt confident that RH/IBM won't mess things up even more. So I upgraded to Debian instead, just to be safe. And now I am safe. I'm not sure this is a good step for RH/IBM. Short term yes, they'll get an income boost for sure. But over time, more people will be using Debian, Ubuntu server or even SLES. And they won't look back. Just like I don't.

What about Fedora? I run Fedora workstations with Almalinux servers. I switched away from all Ubuntu systems due to Cannonicals shady decisions and direction they have gone, and now Red hat are playing silly buggars ?!

This situation looks like when OpenSolaris randomly shut down

Actually, Red Hat cannot add license restrictions to GPLv3 code. Guess what code is under GPLv3? The GNU coreutils. Unless they want to remove EVERYTHING under GPLv3 and switch to Busybox (which is GPLv2), then Red Hat cannot add these restrictions to RHEL in its current state. According to the GPLv3 section 10: "You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that any patent claim is infringed by making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the Program or any portion of it." Red Hat's licensing terms violate the GNU GPLv3 section 10.

As a former RH employee.. I am not even slightly surprised about RH trying to pull this kind of shady trick. I saw similar things happening first hand (at a smaller scale) even before IBM was involved.

Generally the way to deal with open source projects that restrict access like this is for the users to fork the project and continue with their open version. Rocky and Alma can't really do that the same way as they want to reproduce the Red Hat upstream distribution bug-for-bug identical. Because of the special circumstances of RHEL clones, just forking the project will not work.

I had already been taking steps to move my homelab over to RHEL. What people may not realize either is that after the release of CentOS stream, Red Hat changed the developer licensing agreement to be used on up to 16 machines: regardless of whether they were used in production or not.

When I saw DT's video I was like "RHEL was still open source!?"

10:20 no, RH can't add restrictions to the code they write and publish because RH never required contributor licence agreements. If RH wants to change the licence of their projects, they will need the permission of absolutely everyone who has ever contributed. If even one person says no - or doesn't even respond - the licence cannot be changed.

You can redistribute the source code you have obtained, RedHat cannot stop you from doing that. But RedHat does not have to continue to sell you more software (Higher versions of RedHat). The moment they learn that you are redistributing the source code, they would stop their relationship with you.

it sucks that they're doing this, but, the solution seems to be pretty straightforward, unless uv built ur business off of redhate(RHEL) clones, just go with Debian, or some immutable distro like Vanilla OS or NiX OS.

I'm a little hyped to see Red Hat cancel Oracle's subscription and then see a legal battle between those two

Thanks for going over the details. Now I can confidently say, IBM just crashed themselves into a GPL violation minefield. Yes, they will be providing the sources to their paying customers. But, their license agreement cannot restrict anyone from sharing these (GPLed) source further. This is because of section 7 (in v3), which contains: "If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term." If they try to enforce their restrictions, they will be violating the GPL. Furthermore, they need to make all their build files available too so that their customers are able to replicate the binaries. This is thanks to section 1, which states: "The “Corresponding Source” for a work in object code form means all the source code needed to generate, install, and […] run […] and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities. However, it does not include the work's System Libraries, or general-purpose tools or generally available free programs […] which are not part of the work." This applies only to the GPLed programs, so they still unfortunately have the possibility to kill off the binary-compatible distributions by simply making all the non-copyleft packages proprietary. IANAL, but I'm starting to appreciate the GPL more and more

It wouldn't be impossible to be an independent distribution that copies the behavior of RHEL 1:1... The way ReactOS copies Windows, but in this case the workflow is more like other independent distributions, like Debian, Slackware, or Arch.

FOSS Projects (including my own) should start looking at altering the license to prevent such abuse by RedHat. As a FOSS developer releasing code under GPLv2, the idea that RedHat can take a project I created, and put it behind a restrictive wall is NOT acceptable IMO.

I installed gentoo, solved all my distrohopping problems.

Oracle would be proud of this. Legal issues aside, I know Redhat has a large enterprise base, but it seems like they are burning the ships. Companies that do well in the long-run love their products and use the business to allow them to keep doing the product and helping customers. Companies who love business consume their products and customers, to support the business.

I'm a sysadmin at a hosting company. Among our supported distributions are RHEL (a few dozens installed I'd say) as well as its clones: CentOS in the past (we still have thousands of CentOS 6 and 7 running) and Rocky/Oracle Linux now (hundreds of 8 and 9). CentOS 8 installs were mostly converted to Rocky 8. So you may think offering those clones "steals" money from Red Hat, at first glance. But: 1. Clients choose their distribution depending on their wished support policy from the vendor, and if they choose RHEL it's better for us as we can add a margin on top of that. But they don't. If the choice we're offering changes to "pricey RHEL with support or free Debian/Ubuntu (if RHEL clones die as IBM seems to wish)", most would choose Debian/Ubuntu. 2. Our company pays for quite a lot of Red Hat courses and certifications so that we can manage those CentOS/Rocky "the right way", and if clients run away from RHEL clones then it would make less sense for us to pay for those things to Red Hat. To summarize, free RHEL clones are why we give a bunch of money to Red Hat (to illustrate this argument, you can imagine the "surprised Pikachu face" with the Red Hat logo on its head). 3. The developer licence is a pain in the ass: you have to renew it annually in a very convoluted way that screams "you're not supposed to use it, it's just there for PR", and taking its expiry into account in your testing workflow is an additional load most people would like to avoid. 4. This change makes supporting RHEL more difficult for software developers. Jeff Geerling just announced he'd remove RHEL support from all his Ansible playbooks (he maintains a hundred of them, which is not a small task, and we use some of his as a basis for ours). Before, you could just fire up a Rocky 8.1 box from Vagrant (or container from the public Docker Hub) and, with the 1:1 compatibility, validate that your software (or Ansible playbook) is good for RHEL 8.1 as well. Now we can't be as sure any more (where are official RHEL boxes and containers available for free and without hassle?), so RHEL support WILL be dropped left and right. If less FOSS employees support the RHEL product line directly, then it will just make more work for Red Hat employees to ensure compatibility on their own (=it would cost them more to ship the same quality to paying clients). I'm not under the impression developers want to test against the moving target that is CentOS Stream and there's no freely available official Vagrant box or Docker image for it either, and as you said there are additional patches applied to RHEL downstream and they could change various expected behaviours. 5. They're "cutting off the stream" in the middle of a LTS cycle, which is a very bad look from a corporate standpoint. They already did this once in the previous cycle when standard CentOS got killed off, so how are we (direct or indirect) customers supposed to trust them now? Red Hat's revenue keeps going up, so they're not desperate for cash. IBM on the other hand may be willing to screw everyone, as the Red Hat layoffs this year seem to prove despite record earnings that kept increasing under the previous, friendlier, approach. On top of the "free as in speech" and "free as in beer" approaches should be "free as in no bullshit", and at least two of those should be checked: now RHEL only checks 1, under a licencing agreement. Yes, the Linux world is a world of mutual parasitism where a balance is hard to find, but it can work when done right, and changes like this one can shake the whole equilibrium in a way that won't benefit anyone.

I'm fed up with RHEL and IBM sagas. Migrating to NixOS on my production servers. Funny thing is that I used to work for IBM for some time in my life ... Now I am ashamed of it.

So Red Hat has *embraced* the open source code base and they have *extended* it with their own patches and now they want to *extinguish* source code and free binary compatibility access from others? Where I have seen this playbook before? 🤔

Long time REHL user. Allready moving full environments off the REHL track. The trust is fully broken attempting this nonsense and it will cost them dearly just from the units I've already terminated licensing on and have new contracts to move off of REHL in the coming months. Truly amazing how fast we can move servers when the OS is proving so "reliable".

Sounds like redhat is fixing to fuck around and find out.

This would seem to be an issue for any packages included in RHEL which is published under the AGPL. While the default GPL is no-binary->no-source, the AGPL is no-access->no-source. That is, if you run an AGPL webserver, anyone that can access the AGPL server must be given equal access to the source code. The external extra license requirements _might_ be acceptable on (l)gpl code, but are almost certainly not on AGPL code. Wouldn't be the first $b+ company to serious whiff on understanding licensing this year.

Early access, cuz that's what ppl who are choosing a server OS really want...

IBM pulled a standard IBM move to make it harder for 3rd parties to do things with one of their products. Now that Redhat isn't a separate legal entity anymore and is now just a business unit of IBM, this move was inevitable. IBM will likely make some money by doing this as some companies will just "bite the bullet" and pay for it, but long term this will just be the end of RHEL as a commonly used enterprise Linux distro. IBM has underestimated RHEL's importance. Many enterprises have already been seeing the writing on the wall, and more and more enterprise products are being built to run on SLES, Ubuntu Server, and other competing enterprise Linux distros where companies can have paid support. Sure, there is still a LOT of RHEL being used out there, and IBM will probably make some money by doing this, but it won't last. Companies don't mind paying for Linux (especially when they can have support for it), but they do like certainty around the products they buy even more. This move casts some doubt on the future of RHEL. If some products they use that only officially support running on RHEL jump ship completely and/or start offering packages that now run on SLES, Ubuntu Server or others as a result of this move, they may want to look at jumping ship to something less expensive if they no longer need RHEL. As an IT worker, I'm not worried about this. We already standardized on Ubuntu Server and Debian at the office with some Fedora machines out there. For me, it's get out the popcorn and watch it burn. For others, there will be some hard decisions made. I sense many enterprise products switching to Ubuntu Server, SLES and others as a result of this.

we discuss server distros like rocky, centOS, etc., but what about Fedora? how does this effect fedora? I think we forgot to add that into the conversation.

Damn, I use to see Red Hat as the peak of the enterprise but that's out the window

May have bothered me if I wanted to use RHEL, but I never will. I have tried RHEL, Suse, OpenSuse, Mandriva (First when it was Mandrake) and more on and off for the past two decades, but I cannot ever become friends with RPM's. Not sure why, I have used several other package systems in various distro's without much thought, but RPM's is simply the worst with nothing but dependency issue on top of dependency issues and 20 years has not made this go away. Also the last 3 times I tried Fedora on my system, it broke boot after a few days. Can't say that I will never try something like Fedora ever again, I am kind of stupid that way, but I am not expecting a better result and before a week has gone by I will most likely be back on something else like always.

I'm using Rocky Linux on my server. I naively assumed that IBM would respect the open source nature of Red Hat. I'm guessing the reality is that I am wrong. IBM is..... IBM.

Fedora should do the same and create a license agreement that allows everyone to access their code except RHEL lol

As far as I can tell, the licensing restriction doesn't violate the GPL because it isn't a restriction on the code itself, but on your use of Red Hat's services. I.e. they couldn't sue you for using the code, but they could terminate your license to use their services, which would only effect your ability to receive _new_ code (which you aren't entitled to unless you've received the corresponding binary, which you would only get as part of their services), however any code already received would be unaffected as required by the GPL. Red Hat already restricts unlicensed distribution of RHEL itself via trademark (hence why Fedora and formerly CentOS exist), so this really isn't that different. It is certainly bad news for RHEL clones, if Alma's interpretation is correct. That being said, whenever I've critiqued aspects of the GPL in the past people are quick to remind me that the GPL doesn't require you to distribute your software for free, only that the source must be made available to anyone you distribute that software to. So either Red Hat did nothing wrong, or those folks were bein disingenuous AF.

Incorrect 6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License. The recipients must be granted fill, unrestricted rights solely under the terms of the GPL **without and further additions** or the distributor of the GPL code loses their license under the GPL and must cease immediately from further infringement. Notice "you may not impose any further restrictions"!!! RHEL, and by extension their clients (for as long as RHEL has had additional restrictions (can find discussion going back to at least 2003 just doing a quick look), since RHEL didn't have the licensed right to distribute to them!) no longer have license to the GPL code where the GPL has been violated in this way. Going forward, mode certainly: anyone not wanting major copyright fines/litigation needs to distinguish RHEL from non-RHEL code and if RHEL either isn't the author or the original author before they derive-made/replaced something, remove the RHEL code: already under discussion in engineering firms about how to do this!

We used RHEL, as it was mandatory for a government program. Ran into some problems that we tried to use the RHEL Support and it was an absolute nightmare. Ported everything over to another flavor and things worked just fine. The only 'support' Red Hat was providing didn't cost anything, as it came from the forums. 9 months of getting pushed to 'upgrade' to the newest version, even though telling them it was not approved for government use, and they just don't listen or were ignoring all the requests for support. I've since left that job and will never consider RHEL again.

1:53 Why are you repeating the part from 1:21?

Do you think We Should switch to Debain for Servers and Desktop uses

10:19 it really isn't allowed to prevent further distribution by GPLv2, when you have the source, you are allowed to do whatever you want with it, extra restrictions aren't allowed.

I am an Alma Linux user and this looks like the end to me.

Personally, what are everyone's thoughts on whether or not this will effect Fedora Workstation? I ask because one of my computers runs Fedora and this sounds like something that may effect it indirectly down the road?

The gpl license agreement states any changes to the gpl code need to be made available. Do they need to provide a git repository? No but they cant NOT share those changes. If they want to make some proprietary software and use GPL libraries that is fine but they cant steal gpl code.

An honest question: is there community code directly in RHEL or only from the developers that Red Hat pays to develop?

Well, Red Hat becoming Excommunicate Traitoris wasn't on my 2023 Bingo Card, but here we are.

yeah, no problem, everyone should join Debian and build a strong distro... Testing for those who like the rolling release idea, and stable for production and server... Stable + flatpack is really a good combination too...

I am torn on this. On the one hand, I've always favoured Debian over Red Hat precisely because it's free. On the other hand, I've always liked that Red Hat was a thing because it proved the viability of free software as a commercial enterprise. Yet for that, it feels a bit mean to go and distribute a complete bug-for-bug clone of RHEL out of the RHEL source. In my mind it amounts to setting up automation for the sole purpose of deleting a portion of their lunch. Yet still, I'm quite convinced the GPL is built for that to be possible. That's why Red Hat's core business is support, and the guys who built it will be the best at it, so their core value proposition isn't really damaged by Alma or Rocky's existence.

As a private user I'd never use a "corporate Linux", no matter of a derivate of it or the distribution itself. I'd always feel limited and forced into using this-or-that.

Welp... We just migrated all of our Linux machines to Rocky because our network engineer has a background with RHEL compatible distros. We were using mostly Debian up to that point... Although I absolutely don't mind rolling release distros I don't think CentOS Stream would be it. I would much rather give Clear Linux a shot or even Arch with LTS kernel. Rolling distros are stable if you keep the amount of packages nice and small. I've been getting great results from them using them as a KVM / Docker host.

It this Red Hat reactions after NASA announce partnership with Rocky Linux this week?

Forgive a stupid question, but, why not get all together, and pay for the one binary of RHEL? Technically the one legal copy of binary has access to RHEL and all the source code including CentOS Stream soo... all beneficiaries of alma linux should just pay RHEL guys for one copy and use the access to source for the updated Alma?

I don’t think they can add any restrictions to GPL license

As an Android dev, I've used Fedora Hyperland, but Arch's rolling updates aren't for me. With Red Hat's recent decision, I'd love your recommendation for a stable distro for Hyperland. Thanks! #LinuxCommunity

So I don't understand how the source code for RHEL updates/bugfixes gets managed and distributed in the future - are the changes for these updated packages still extractable from the stream repo, and just checking out a particular label gets you the bugfix source? Or do they plan to maintain an entirely different repo of those fixes?

Who couldve imagine IBM would try to ruin rhel.. weird it took em so long

I'm now curious as to what's happening on the SLES front

Gawdammit red hat... 😔 Hopefully it works out w/rocky and alma but it looks like I'll be switching lots of servers over to Debian soon if these shinanegans continue

I wouldn't touch RHEL with a 10 foot pole. The whole charging for security updates thing is enough of a thing to stiff arm them. Clearly the end of CentOS was a warning shot and Alma and Rocky probably worried about this day for every day of their existence.

I never spent much time on RHEL. Now I won’t even bother with Fedora. I’m sticking with Debian and other flavors of Linux. I have a Fedora image on one of my raspberry pi but I will be reformatting it. Either the red hat will follow GPL 3 or they are violating the terms.

I agree with other comments here, RHEL cannot legally prevent you from rebuilding RHEL from source.

How can you stop people from redistributing your software yet license it under the GPL??? Isn't that missing the whole point of free software?????

Not sure if mageia linux will survive or not. Thats what i was going to build my servers with going forward. I guess im ok for now?

I really want to know Richard Stallman's opinion on this

Here is what everyone who uses, redistributes, or writes GPL software needs to understand: Back in the 1970s, personal computers were a brand new thing. They were mainly used by hobbyists and coders who would often get together at computer clubs to examine and share code in a communal spirit. Likewise students at universities would often write, share, and improve the code that ran on their larger Unix systems. This was the impetus of the concept of Copyleft, a word coined by Li-Chen Wang for his Tiny BASIC interpreter in 1976. Copyleft is the freedom to use the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. It embodies this communal spirit of sharing. The GNU General Public License (GPL) was created by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) in 1989 to implement this concept of Copyleft in Copyright. The GPL has been called "viral" by those meaning to discourage its use among corporate users. And it actually is viral in the sense that everyone who accepts GPL software is bound by those same conditions. You should definitely NOT use GPL source code in software that you intend to distribute outside of your company - UNLESS you intend to stay true to those terms. This is the world you have agreed to play in when you use GPL software or when you redistribute it, which is exactly what Red Hat does. It is the world you have agreed to place your work into when you write your own software and distribute it under the GPL. This is precisely what RMS did with GNU emacs, what the GNU Foundation did with all of its software, and what Linus Torvalds did with Linux. Anyone can take their GPL code and copy it, modify it and share it PROVIDED THAT they distribute it under the GPL license and do not put any further restrictions on it. The GPL version 2 license specifically bars you from adding any further restrictions. Putting a punitive restriction on sharing the GPL source code in your user subscription's Terms of Service is NOT in the spirit of Copyleft and, moreover, it clearly violates the GPL v2 license's prohibition on adding further restrictions.

double clips are arg?

I gave up on Red Hat based distros when Ubuntu came out. Have not looked back.

Thank you, Brodie, for explaining this without a bias.

Average Linux company experience just after less people start to hate them upon their contributions:

"Canonical, no!!" "What did I do?" "Sorry, force of habit"

That was the last straw. Switched both my personal computer and server from fedora/alma to debian which is incredible. I have confidence alma/rocky will win this battle I'm just no longer in favor in being indirect IBM customer until I notice their shift for open-source.

Developers should change their license now to GPLv3 and should add a disclaimer against RHEL re-distribution.

I just switched my home server from Ubuntu 20.04 to Rocky Linux 9. To be honest the base OS only acts as a hypervisor since everything I run usually in virtual machines. The whole reason why switched to Rocky was for minimal updates and that Enterprise grade stability. My website VM runs Debian. I used to think Red Hat was really cool and now they are kind of pissing me off.

I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems to me that Debian is the answer. Lucky for me I've used it since Debian 1.1 :-) RHEL and Oracle can eff off to the nine planes of hell.

I'm making use of my RHEL Dev license

There were many people who played around with their home servers by installing CentOS. When those people got jobs at organizations, which server OS do you think they recommended? That's right, RHEL. I guarantee you there were many organizations that got into the Red Hat ecosystem this way. By attacking the free RHEL 1:1 clones, they've alienated all of these would-be future RHEL clients.

As a few others have already said I think the comparison to Debian Sid further spreads misconceptions on what CentOS Stream actually is. I get that it's hard since there's not really a true comparable to its function, but there's a huge difference between effectively rolling release distro and "the next minor version of RHEL." If there is a comparable it would be Debian stable with the proposed-updates repo enabled. RHEL does occasionally rebase a couple things in minor releases, so it's not a perfect analogy, but for the most part versions are kept constant for the entirely of a major release just like LTS so CentOS Stream is far closer to Debian LTS than Sid. There are certainly reasons why switching to Stream is not good enough (testing software for RHEL customers, wanting the full 10 years of support instead of the shorter period Stream is good for, etc), but there's probably less of a functional difference between Stream and the rebuilds than many people understand.

Totally unrelated to the video topic but I just wanted to tell you that you can also middle click links to open them in a new tab 🙂

Short term chaos aside, the long term seems to indicate that terms will become even more restrictive or IBM is trying to kill off RHEL and substitute some proprietary, closed OS of its own. It is inconceivable (almost) that IBM is so out of touch that they do not see the community fleeing.

I wonder if FSF will finally do something useful after years of not being in the public. This sounds like the kind of thing that they should get involved in and clear things up as according to the actual licenses and enforcement of said licenses. Though I won't expect much from them regardless.

as my company is a redhat partner I'm pretty sure this isn't really that bad for me

As a desktop user (Debian based distros), I don't care about RHEL (although RHL 5.2 and Mandrake 6.0 were my first experiences with Linux)... but... this is the best thing that could happen for the Debian ecosystem...

1:19 1:52 missed something while editing? :)

I suspected when IBM bought Red Hat that they would go the SAAS route. What a company is paying for with RHEL is the ability to sue and settle with Red Hat if a catastrophic OS failure leads to profit losses.

Switching to Debian. Though what I would like to see is Alma Linux start doing their own bug fixes and security updates if they're not able to get the source code from RHEL. And grow their own separate business that way while still pulling in from CentOS a stream . Customers are ultimately interested in being supported for bugs and security fixes for the packages and binaries that they receive. Whether it's updated by Red Hat or another source, it doesn't matter all that much to me as long as the bugs and security fixes work as originally intended. Maybe even better is if Alma, Linux and Rocky Linux merged together their foundations and still be sponsored by Cloud Linux and create a fork of Enterprise Linux. I would move all my customers over to that and away from Red Hat because of their bad faith.

Still searching for a reason why I should give a shit about this.

@6:00 Aren't you just begging the question here? You basically have to grant someone else the same rights to the source code that were granted to you under the GPL. Most FOSS projects are AFAIK in the public domain with obvious is more in the spirit of the FOSS people than a greedy corporation trying to disincentivizing the distribution of the source code . @11:22 Common sense is enough. You don't need to read someone's mind. It is all in the open. They are a corporation doing what corporations do and AlmaLinux doesn't want to put itself into legal "hot water".

Waiting to see is the apparent course, although there will be those who attempt to predict outcomes in practice rather than solely theory on paper. Generally speaking, different licences have been useful over the years and _(almost irrespective of what Red Hat might be doing nowadays)_ Apache licence is a good example and something multiple people _(myself included)_ have felt kindly towards, especially for CGI _(or even CGI-perl)_ which has long history in server technologies and scripting over the years. Many a time, a person _(such as on a MSWindows PC but other operating systems too)_ would connect to the server _(by internet, a lot of the time)_ and the server would often be Linux _(perhaps unsurprisingly, Red Hat often enough)_ and the CGI on the server woudl deliver the thing they wanted. CGI _(or even CGI-Perl )_ had frequently been difficult to read code compared to some other server-side includes, and CGI usually relied upon Apache Server being there as a mechanism by which to run it upon. The Apache _(be that perhaps LAMP or XAMPP)_ server made it so much easier to do, and it took the edge of the already difficult to read code when a person wanted to replicate or make their own version of such a server. Open Office going through the _"Apache license"_ is another example of a benefit. Of course GPL has strengths, and so do other licenses. There are different ways at looking at thing for different use case scenarios. Consider OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt _(who has provided great works, such as OpenBSD's usage of OpenSSH)_ has his angle on a licence and Berne Convention have a different angle on ISC license and there is a lot to be learned from the body of knowledge that tries to predict would would actually happen in practice with licencing compared to the principle or theory on paper. My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love. Also, I'd say Matthew6.

I already have a foot in the door with a couple of Ubuntu vms, this make the decision so much easier.

This is just an IBM thing. There is a KPI on how much evil you need to do each year.

if I could find a distro I like, I'd switch my desktop and all my servers immediately. debian seems like the best option, but I still prefer rpm based distros.