Arrangement丨Noah
A few days ago, Red Hat issued an announcement to stop publicly providing the source code of Enterprise Edition Linux (RHEL). As we previously stated in "Blatantly erecting a "paywall", does RedHat violate open source? "As reported in the article, the chain reactions caused by this decision came together. The head of Oracle Linux development is targeting IBM, SUSE has also announced the fork of RHEL, and relevant downstream organizations are also thinking of "self-rescue" strategies...
"Injury 1,000 to the enemy, damage 300 to yourself.", some communities Users commented as well. More than 20 days have passed since then, and the domino effect triggered by this incident has fully emerged.
Oracle launched what is now known as Oracle Linux back in 2006, and its plan was to provide a RHEL-compatible Linux distribution so as not to divide the Linux community and provide customers and ISVs with a common platform. Oracle Linux also weighed in after Red Hat restricted access to RHEL source code.
In the article "Keep Linux Open and Free - We Have to" published on Monday, Big Red Chief Enterprise Architect Edward Screven and Oracle Linux Development Lead Wim Coekaerts pointed out that IBM is trying to Stifling open source competition among Linux distributions and thereby increasing their profit margins, at the same time, they made a promise:
"As long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the distribution's binaries and sources publicly and free of charge code. In addition, Oracle welcomes a variety of downstream distributions, including community and commercial distributions."
The Oracle duo also mentioned CentOS, claiming that IBM "effectively killed it as a free alternative to RHEL" . Regarding the two new RHEL alternatives that have emerged on CentOS - AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, "by withholding the RHEL source code, IBM directly attacked them."
"Perhaps that's the real answer to why you're doing this: to eliminate competitors. Fewer competitors means more revenue opportunities for IBM."
In addition, Screven and Coekaerts also targeted red Hat's response was criticized. They cited a statement by Red Hat VP of Core Platforms Mike McGrath that the reason the free RHEL distribution cannot continue is because "at Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fix bugs, integrate Different packages, and then supporting the work over the long term...we have to pay the people who do the work."
In their view, this rationale is untenable. So at the end of the article they came out with a wave of taunting output:
"You said you don't want to pay for those RHEL developers? The way you can save money is simple: get it from us. Become a downstream distribution of Oracle Linux We will be happy to assume this responsibility."
The onlookers will definitely have their own opinions on whether this war of words between Oracle and Red Hat is right or wrong. However, the mere fact that Oracle is mocking Red Hat makes the situation worth pondering. Because in the public mind, Red Hat is a veritable open source pioneer, while Oracle has never been very friendly to open source. Regardless of Oracle's squandering of Sun's legacy, or the protracted Java API copyright litigation battle between Oracle and Google, even the fact that Red Hat took over from Oracle to maintain OpenJDK 8 and OpenJDK 11 a few years ago still makes people wonder. The memory is still fresh.
In response to the incident caused by RHEL, Bradley Kuhn, a policy researcher at the Software Freedom Defense Association, made sharp comments, and his words vaguely revealed the lament that "the boy who slays the dragon will eventually become the evil dragon."
"Red Hat has long prided itself on taking the moral high ground over Oracle. Oracle's entire business model revolves around using aggressive proprietary licensing to scare the crap out of their customers. See RHEL's I feel very sorry that the business model is becoming more and more inclined in this direction."
Shortly after Oracle Linux issued a statement, SUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector and SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition (SLE), has also taken action.
SUSE announced that it will fork the publicly available RHEL and develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution that can be freely used by all users. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million in this project.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said: “Collaboration and shared success have been the cornerstones of our open source community for decades. We have a responsibility to uphold these values. This investment will ensure success for years to come. Keep innovation flowing and ensure that customers and communities are not affected by vendor lock-in and have real choices tomorrow and today."
According to the announcement, SUSE is committed to working with the open source community, Develop a long-term, durable compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation that will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code. Additionally, SUSE remains committed to investing in Linux solutions such as SLE and openSUSE.
Generally speaking, it is very rare for a major open source company to fork a project of another major open source company. But there's a reason why SUSE is doing this now, and it's likely to be supported by many in the open source community.
Since the commercialization of the open source movement, there has been some tension between commercial interests and the more community-driven, radical side of open source. For the most part, both sides have maintained a balance over the years and found ways to coexist. But debate is inevitable, as it has been over the past few weeks between players such as Red Hat, numerous Linux distributions, and vendors offering RHEL-compatible distributions.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen believes that SUSE is involved in this area because it believes that “becoming more proprietary should not be the basis for competition between open source companies. We all contribute to the open source community” Contribution - like we all benefit from it. It's greater than the sum of our parts.
It's obvious that SUSE's involvement as a larger Linux vendor is not surprising. In addition to Oracle, Smaller vendors do not have the resources to maintain forks and create a community around them. SUSE has been in development for more than 30 years, and although it has had its ups and downs, it is still a well-known and trustworthy entity.
" This collaborative effort demonstrates SUSE's deep-rooted commitment to promoting innovation and nurturing community-driven development, and reinforces the fundamental value of open source software. We invite the community to actively engage and collaborate to shape the future of this essential software," said Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO and COO of SUSE. "We strongly believe that this new RHEL-compatible Linux distribution, along with SUSE's product portfolio, will Helping the community and customers achieve unprecedented advancements in enterprise Linux, cloud computing, containerization, edge, AI/ML and other emerging technologies. ”
Regarding Red Hat’s decision, large companies have their own solutions, and small groups have their own solutions. The group's way of survival. Although in the eyes of the outside world, Red Hat's approach is a devastating blow to AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux in this chain reaction, both have now stated that they will overcome difficulties and continue to launch RHEL Clone version.
In a blog post titled "Keeping Open Source Open", Rocky Linux details two alternative methods that can be used to obtain the source code.
One is to use RHEL-based UBI container images, available from multiple online sources, including Docker Hub. Using UBI images, you can get Red Hat sources easily, reliably and without hindrance. We have verified this with OCI (Open Container Initiative) containers , it works exactly as expected.
The second, is a pay-per-use public cloud instance. With this, anyone can launch a RHEL image in the cloud and thus get the source of all packages and errata Code. This is the easiest for us to scale because we can do it all through the CI pipeline, spin up the cloud image to get the source code via DNF, and automatically publish to our Git repository.
Rocky Linux emphasizes in the article that these methods are possible due to the power of the GPL. No one can prevent the redistribution of GPL software. "Both methods allow us to legally obtain RHEL binaries and SRPs without harming us." Commitment to open source software or agreement to TOS or EULA restrictions that impede our rights. Our legal counsel has assured us that we have the right to obtain the source code of any binaries we receive, ensuring that we can continue to advance Rocky Linux in accordance with our original intentions. "
Of course, they also pointed out that the above methods may change, so they continue to explore other possibilities. "If unfortunately, Red Hat decides to increase its efforts to have a negative impact on the community, Rocky Linux will continue to provide support for the entire community. Serving the best interests of the open source community. ”
Turn the time back to June 21. Red Hat announced that it would stop selling to third parties When RHEL source code was provided and CentOS Stream became the only repository for public RHEL-related source code release, the first domino in this incident fell to the ground.
In fact, the cause of this series of events can be traced back to For a long time, CentOS was essentially a free version of RHEL, but at the end of 2020, Red Hat changed everything. Instead of the usual point release that coincides with the RHEL version, it launched CentOS Stream, which is " A 'rolling preview' of what's next for RHEL," Red Hat's Chris Wright explained at the time. This makes CentOS 7 the last long-term supported version of CentOS (which will end in 2024).
Red Hat said at the time, The idea is to shorten the feedback loop between developers in the RHEL ecosystem. “Remember, we are an upstream-first company, everything we do goes upstream first and then flows through the system. This means that the changes we make downstream on CentOS now have to make their way into the upstream community, into Fedora, then into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then into CentOS. So it actually slowed us down a lot and we couldn't move as fast as we wanted to. ”
But this also means that CentOS and RHEL will no longer be 100% compatible. This move caused quite a stir in the community, and many CentOS contributors parted ways and launched new distributions : Rocky Linux and Alma Linux.
Then one day, Red Hat discovered that companies like Rocky and Alma were building their downstream Linux distributions and claiming bug-for-bug compatibility. Of course what Rocky and Alma did was legal and within their rights. But Red Hat obviously has a different view on this.
Gunnar Hellekson, vice president of Red Hat and general manager of RHEL, believes this is equivalent to "I'm running Red Hat Enterprise Linux and someone else comes and takes my open source project and claims bug-for-bug compatibility." , thereby committing to not innovating anything at all, not improving it in any way. Putting their own logo on it, and then actively recruiting my users to use their version instead of mine. In an open source community, this is bad behavior. It’s legal, but it’s unpopular. It’s counterproductive and bad for the ecosystem.”
On June 26, Mike McGrath, Vice President of Red Hat Core Platform, also expressed a similar view in response to the relevant controversy:
In a healthy open source ecosystem, competition and innovation go hand in hand. of. Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, AWS, and Microsoft have all created Linux distributions with associated branding and ecosystem development efforts. These variants all utilize and contribute Linux source code, but none claim to be "fully compatible" with the others.
McGrath said bluntly: "Ultimately, we did not find the value in rebuilding RHEL, and we have no obligation to make the rebuilder's job easier." His rebuttal to criticism that Red Hat "violated" the GPL agreement Yes: CentOS Stream's source code repository in GitLab is where we build RHEL releases and is open to everyone. Calling RHEL "closed source" is absolutely untrue and inaccurate. CentOS Stream is updated faster than RHEL. Although RHEL does not necessarily point to the latest code, the code is there.
In this incident, the key point ignored by most critics is: GPL only requires Red Hat to provide binary files to it. The parties provide the source code, rather than making it available to the world. Red Hat customers still have access to the source code, so Red Hat is not violating the GPL. The GPL doesn't free them from the Red Hat contract: they can redistribute the source code if they want to, but equally Red Hat can respond to them doing so by terminating their customer contract, which is 100% compliant GPL'd.
Any business has the legal right to defend its models and products. Putting aside the large number of people who don't really understand how open source licenses work, our impression is that there are a lot of people who feel that just because this is Linux, they are somehow entitled to get it for free. But in fact, they don't. That's not what "free" means in free software, and it never has been.
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