What I just read: “Companies coming together to develop a new better Enterprise Linux solution with standards, etc.” which seems like a good thing.

What I also just read: “A bunch of companies that couldn’t create or maintain a Linux distribution on their own are joining forces to attempt to create a clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux offering.” which isn’t a good thing.

Serious question: Why would I get support from any of these companies? Don’t get me wrong, Oracle and Suse have very talented and valuable employees (I don’t know enough about CIQ but I’m sure they have smart people over there too!) that contribute to open source communities. But the message I just read is “Our current offerings are all inferior to RHEL”.

That is not a message to be celebrated.

Why is anyone celebrating this? If I were employed at any of these companies I would be worried about the future of my job. Am I missing something obvious?

This is exactly what Red Hat wants. They want the ‘rebuilders’ to contribute to CentOS Stream, and as far as I can tell, welcome the efforts of all contributors to Centos Stream.

Yes, that kind of makes sense, but Foo was leaving the TVs outside because they thought that was the most expedient thing to do. It takes effort to move them outside, and Foo doesn’t want to do that anymore. So now Foo, as you point out, has moved the TVs inside where only paying customers can get them.

If I understand things correctly, Fedora takes packages directly from upstream, adds ‘packaging’ (they wrap the code in rpms), testing and creates a Fedora release (sorry to anyone who has a hand in doing this work. I’ve made it seem really simple when it is extraordinarily difficult). Contributions to Fedora come directly from upstream repositories. So no, Meta isn’t the only contributor.

Meta has made contributions to Centos Stream but other companies seem to have made changes there as well.

I’m not an expert on the GPL and I’ll go out on a limb and assume you’re not either. But it certainly seems like experts have weighed in and have said what Red Hat is doing is valid under the license: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

[Edit: valid. Although I admit, like many others, I am uncomfortable from a ‘spirit’ of the license point of view.]

I’m sure Red Hat has heard loud and clear that there are a class of users (education comes to mind) that cannot pay for licenses. I’m sure they’re off thinking about that and I’m willing to bet we’ll hear something about an “Education” offering in the next month or so. Red Hat would be crazy not to get those users in their camp.

Here’s where your analogy falls apart. The TV isn’t being shipped to everyone. It’s being shipped (“rebuilt”) by Bar, and then installed by them. They’re free to do that but Foo is under no obligation to help them do it.

There is no problem with your scenario, and it’s spot on to the issue that Red Hat has raised.

However, the piece you’re missing is that the TVs come from Foo. They don’t have to give company Bar TVs to install. If company Bar doesn’t have TVs then what should they do? They have some choices: work with Foo or develop their own TV.

I don’t think there is anyone arguing that a Rebuild by itself is a problem. Given Mike’s comments in the podcast linked above, the problem is when one of those (or many of those) Rebuilders competed directly against Red Hat for a contract.

From the general feeling I get from reading many threads on this issue, the general consensus is that the community agrees that, specifically, this behavior by the Rebuilders is wrong.

I don’t think Mike McGrath called out any specific company but if you look at that ycombinator link it looks like the ‘offender’ was Rocky Linux. That is purely speculation on my part.

So joke aside, I don’t see anything in that video that is a defence of the Rebuilders against the accusations made by Red Hat. Is there something I was supposed to get out of watching it?

If I listen to that video will I, in fact, get a laptop for free? Inquiring minds wanna know.

Interesting points, but I’m not sure I agree with your last sentence. Clearly, users of the Rebuilds are going to be impacted and part of that impact is their workflow. They may have to switch distros or do some other juggling to continue forward.

One other thing I want to add: I’ve read a bunch of comments about how the Rebuilds were used in educational and scientific settings, and that there is a prohibitive cost for RHEL in those environments. After reading so many comments about it, I have to believe that Red Hat is going to make some modification to their Developer License program to allow more than 16 ‘seats’ for those use cases.