Ron, I hope you find the videos helpful! I think they summarize the issue better than I ever could.

Jon, I look forward to seeing your write-up on this issue!

I think a lot of the responses I've seen so far are understandable -- Red Hat has an image of being a pioneer in open source development, and closing up source code publication to anyone who isn't a customer is unprecedented and seemingly comes in direct conflict with Red Hat's goals. This is such a controversial development that there's an ongoing Wikipedia discussion on whether RHEL is even considered open-source or is violating the GPL:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#RfC_about_the_source_model_of_RHEL

That being said, I think the community at large may be having a knee-jerk reaction to this news, which isn't helped at all by Red Hat's fairly poor PR handling.

We might just need time to come to an understanding. Red Hat is continuing to contribute engineering resources and infrastructure hosting to open source projects as usual, but it'll be shifting focus toward CentOS Stream development instead of facilitating the proliferation of RHEL clones that inevitably end up directly competing with RHEL.

- Josh

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 12:29 PM Jon "maddog" Hall <jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,

I have been writing up a response to this that goes much deeper into the discussion than most articles I have read have done.   Because I have been busy doing other things (Board Chair of the Linux Professional Institute, defending the Linux Trademark AGAIN, doing virtual presentations and preparing for a long trip to Latin America) I have not had time to finish it, but I should  be able to finish it this weekend.   I have given drafts to other LPI board members, many of whom have been in the FOSS space almost as long as I have and some have been in the computer space....no...few people have been in that space as long as I have.  So far the comments have been good, some saying it was "great".

When it is finished I will post it to the LPI blog (free for everyone to read) and let you guys know.   I would also be happy to talk about it in great depth at a WLUG meeting.

Spoiler Alert:   There is no evil here, and out of it could come great good.

Warmest regards,

md

On Fri, Jul 21, 2023 at 8:25 AM Joshua Stone via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hey everyone,

I didn't talk about the Red Hat controversy at last night's meeting, namely the decision to stop publishing RHEL sources to git.centos.org and the implications this has on the various RHEL clones.

If there's anyone still interested in hearing about the rationale behind this recent decision and the response that's created from clone makers, then I recommend listening to the following Linux Unplugged episodes:

Caught Red-Hatted | LINUX Unplugged 517 (timestamp 00:08:39):


The Clone Grift Wars | LINUX Unplugged 519 (timestamp 00:06:02)


I hope that brings some much-needed context to the discussion.

- Josh
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