from Hacker News

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

by mmrezaie on 6/29/23, 7:10 AM with 21 comments

• by reacharavindh on 6/29/23, 8:29 AM

  Honestly, I’m tired of this. We were going to use Rockylinux as a base for the new version of our research cluster at a University used by researchers from all over the world. We are a tightly funded shop with money allocated as parts of research grants. We were running off of CentOS because a few tools that researchers use were built “for” RHEL by the commercial vendors. Since Redhat now considers users of CentOS “freeloaders” and “leeches”, we have to move on to a better distribution that doesn’t have greedy commercial interests and works with the open source community in the spirit of open source including redistribution freedom. To be fair, even though we were using CentOS at no cost, we have reported a fair share of bugs to RH that I hope to believe benefited the overall community.

  We have settled on making the effort to move to Debian for the compute nodes.

  One thing we could not break out of is FreeIPA :-( We are not brave enough to run FreeIPA on Debian or find a completely new alternative in Debian that wouldn’t break us while we are already changing so much. So, we are going to pay for RHEL for one server to run IDM.

  I will tell the researchers that come to us needing RHEL compatibility to pay for RH license out of their research grants, or spend the time and work with me to make their stuff work on Debian(I can already see what choice they will make).

  I hope the fine folks and management gurus at IBM/RH rejoice with their short term profit at the cost of long term loss of faith and ruin.

• by socrates137 on 6/29/23, 11:30 AM

  > Setting aside the large numbers of angry people who don't really understand how open source licenses work, our impression is that the core issue here is that there are an awful lot of people who feel that simply because this is Linux, they have some kind of right to get it for free. Unfortunately, they don't. That is not what the "free" in Free Software means, and it never was.

  Something about this irks me. I realize there are some differences between FOSS, FLOSS, and open source. And I realize sometimes there’s some ambiguity there. But I’m still not sure I agree.

• by pipo234 on 6/29/23, 7:29 AM

  Would it be possible to:

  1. create a free dev account

  2. get the sources

  3. merge changes into rocky repo

  4. have the account terminated by the Hat

  5. goto 1?

  Subversive, but mostly in compliance with GPL and Red Hat EULA... Ish. Kinda.

  But I probably made an error here. Who can point it out?

• by nuker on 6/29/23, 11:55 AM

  Related: GPLv2, Red Hat, and You

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517045