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Red Hat in full spin mode after restrictions on Enterprise Linux sources

by on28 June 2023


Open source rebellion

Red Hat is finding itself with a rebellion on its hands after it announced it would limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and limited to the CentOS Stream sources.

This move causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux and has been greeted with the same unbridled joy from open sourcers as Tsar Putin had when he heard his former cook was marching on Moscow.

Red Hat this week issued another blog post by Mike McGrath, the VP of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat. In the post, he talks up "Red Hat's commitment to open source" in which he said that the outfit did make its hard work readily accessible to non-customers.

“Red Hat uses and will always use an open-source development model. When we find a bug or write a feature, we contribute our code upstream. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers. We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open-source licenses the use of our products, which includes the GPL. When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it.”

He said that much of the anger from the recent decision around the downstream sources come from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit.

“This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous... Simply rebuilding code without adding value or changing it, represents a real threat to open-source companies everywhere. This is a real threat to open source, and one that has the potential to revert open source back into a hobbyist- and hackers-only activity."

 

Last modified on 28 June 2023
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