Clash of the Titans: Oracle Jokes with Red Hat (UPDATED)
Red Hat’s move to restrict access to its source code sparked outrage in the Linux community, turning practically all open-source advocates against it. However, everyone was waiting to see how the industry’s big names would react to Red Hat’s move.
SUSE was the first to publish a statement criticizing the move, stating unequivocally that they adhere firmly to the open source’s philosophy and moral norms, confirming that they always have and will continue to do so.
Later, they went even further, claiming their plans to fork RHEL to develop a new distribution based on it, ensuring everyone has free access to enterprise Linux.
UPDATE:
Two more on this topic.
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Linux Is The Next Platform, But Who Pays To Maintain It?
Red Hat has once again dropped another huge boulder into the normally serene – or at least relatively calm – open source waters.
Back in December 2020 it killed off the CentOS distribution that lives downstream from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and created the CentOS Stream variant that lives upstream where bugs are not yet all shaken out. And now Red Hat has announced that it would no longer distribute free RHEL source code to those who aren’t paying customers.
That means projects like Oracle Linux, EuroLinux, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux no longer will see code improvements from Red Hat, a change in a practice that is more than a decade old. Unsurprisingly, those projects and others reacted with fury to Red Hat’s decision, accusing the open source titan of essentially closing its doors to the open source community and accusing IBM of driving the move.
Big Blue bought Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, so believing IBM would be behind the decision isn’t surprising, though it does give it all a conspiratorial vibe to it.
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RHEL users question Red Hat's reliance on CentOS Stream
Despite criticism from developers, Red Hat continues its commitment to CentOS as the delivery vehicle for RHEL, believing it benefits open source developers in the long run.