Red Hat announced yesterday that the sources for RHEL will no longer be accessible from git.centos.org. This effectively locks their source changes behind a subscription to RHEL, that costs money.
Opensource licenses typically doesn’t require the software to be free, just that the source and modification be made available to users.
Making user pay to access both binaries and source is fair, as long as RedHat keep contributing code to upstream projects.
The more questionable issue though is their suggestion that they will cancel support agreements and dev accounts that redistribute their code. That seems like it’s skirting very close to violation of the letter of the GPL. It shits all over the spirit of it.
What is it lately with companies and shooting themselves in the foot? Have all the CEOs gotten together and mutually decided that this was the year they were going to piss off their communities?
Red Hat are burning through a lot of the good will they’ve made over the years with this.
Here’s the statement the Rocky Linux folks put out:
https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/
Good luck, brothers. I wish you well.
We’re (US) is in a growth cycle. This is a common thing – the companies need to try to keep up with growth/markets, so squeeze people for more money. Reddit is doing it – trying to IPO. Red Hat is doing it with this, though for me they’ve never been compelling or useful – I’m shocked they’ve hung on this long. Their products in my (very limited) experience are mediocre.
On the plus side it’s not as if Red Hat are in charge of the all of the core system plumbing for all the major distros…oh, shit wait a minute.
A while ago someone shared this on !programming@beehaw.org, and it feels relevant to bring it up again.
well that’s a bit of a dick move
