Carl George

Simply reusing Red Hat’s source RPMs isn’t an open ecosystem. All the EL downstreams finally collaborating is.

Except the only thing they’re collaborating on is obscured sharing of RHEL source RPMs to hide who is violating their subscription terms.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but their business model is using Oracle Linux in their cloud offerings.

Oracle Linux was created to undermine Red Hat profits to prevent Red Hat from competing with Oracle on acquisitions. They also sell their other products, including proprietary ones like Oracle DB, running on top of Oracle Linux.

But those (great) achievements were and are premised on community collaboration, and it’s more than fair to raise a stink about it.

If you value community collaboration, you should be pissed at the RHEL clones. They contribute extremely little, literally just enough to say that they contribute a non-zero amount. That’s the stink you should be raising. The spirit of open source is collaboration. Taking the RHEL source code and just rebuilding without meaningfully contributing may be allowed by open source licenses, but it damn sure isn’t in the spirit of open source.

That is to say, RHEL’s success is based on making it an open standard.

RHEL’s success is based on using open source as a development model, not a business model. It has nothing to do with other distros claiming that RHEL is the standard they have to follow, instead of actually doing the work to be good distros in their own right.

Closing the downstream is a loophole out of this system where they get to profit.

Everyone can build off (and profit off of) the upstreams, including RHEL’s immediate upstream CentOS. Red Hat has no obligation to allow people to duplicate their product exactly. Having a mature understanding of the separation of products and projects is a big factor in Red Hat’s success.

I have no love for oracle, but in general the only freeloaders in FOSS development are companies that use the work of a whole ecosystem of unpaid developers and then use loopholes to restrict access.

It’s ludicrous to suggest that Red Hat, who funds more open source work than any other company, is “freeloading” just because you don’t like their subscription terms. There are a lot of words to describe how you feel about those terms, but “freeloading” just ain’t it.

“Lazy clones” are vital to maintaining the interoperability and openness that make RHEL (or any other corporate distro) attractive and keep them accountable for anticonsumer practices, preventing enshittification.

RHEL clones are not vital to RHEL interoperability or openness. They’re not even relevant to these things. They may like to tell people they are, but it’s bullshit. RHEL’s interoperability comes from Red Hat’s upstream first policy. Improvement made by Red Hat get pushed upstream, both to software projects (e.g. linux, gcc, httpd, etc.) and to distro projects (e.g. Fedora and CentOS). RHEL’s openness is based on the fact that it is open source. RHEL clones could all disappear tomorrow and it won’t affect these aspects of RHEL.

The value proposition has always been in the support and service ecosystem and infrastructure provided by the corporation.

Red Hat’s value proposition isn’t helpdesk style “support me when something breaks” support like you’re suggesting here. It’s not something that only exists during incidents. It’s an ongoing relationship with the vendor that builds the platform that you’re building your business on. It’s being able to request and influence priority of features and bug fixes.

If they kill clones, they are killing the on-ramp and ecosystem that makes their paid offerings so dominant. Students will learn something else, developers would deprioritize rpm, making their paid products less attractive.

Clones going away wouldn’t hurt the free on-ramp to RHEL because the free developer subscription exists now. It’s a better on-ramp than a clone ever could be because it’s actual RHEL, and includes additional products. People like students that don’t need the exact product, just something close enough, can still use and learn on CentOS or Fedora. Developers aren’t going to de-prioritize RPM any worse than they already do.