Red Hat has made RHEL closed source. This sparked much controversy and Oracle did a write up to accuse Red Hat’s actions.
Do we consider Red Hat to be on some anti-open-source scheme? Should we boycott Fedora and other Red Hat-sponsored distros that are used to create this closed source distro? (And I’m not sure if RH’s actions has violated the GPL.)
Maybe community-made distros like NixOS or Debian secured with Kicksecure will be better recommendations?
Well, it is still open source, and even with new restrictions the majority of Red Hat’s developer contributions are upstream, they are very much an open source company.
Fedora asked its community for feedback about a proposal to add opt-out privacy-conscious telemetry.
In both cases when all nuance is removed it becomes disingenuous and misleading, it’s harmful because it’s easier to spread such a black and white view compared to the truth and people end up making decisions based on it.
I’d argue that it’s really in a gray area of open source. It’s not publicly available, which is part of the definition of open source. You have to have an account to access the more stable downstream, and while the account is free, my understanding is that anything released using said code is restricted to Red Hat’s agreements. This is also causing problems for AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux since they can no longer act as downstream distros, which is incredibly important for stability and why people were up in arms over CentOS switching up upstream to begin with. Relying on upstream code isn’t great for stable software.
As for Fedora, the fact that it’s opt out instead of opt in concerns me. At least with Ubuntu it’s opt in. If this was the only recent change then I wouldn’t consider it much of an issue, but between making it opt out and the changes they’ve done with RHEL, not to mention IBM’s history of anti-competitive behavior, I have some serious doubts to their long term intentions. Besides, the feedback had been overwhelmingly negative but it’s definitely not stopping them from attempting to push this.
If they’re skirting the GPL and definition of open source like this now, then what other changes are they going to try to do in the next 5-10 years? IBM being involved complicates the situation in ways most other distros don’t have to worry about.
While it makes things less convenient I would still argue that’s splitting hairs, everything in RHEL was in CentOS Stream and can be assembled from the source code there.
Actually (it’s buried in the discussion so I can’t find it at the moment), Matthew Miller (I think it was him) gave Ubuntu as an example of how it might work in Fedora, i.e. you’ll be presented with the option after initial install, it’s not going to be something that’s buried in settings.