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This is Red Hat’s Reddit moment: how dare people other than us benefit from the free labor that we have packaged.

If you had the misfortune of reading the replies to my post, enjoy an explanation without corporate speak.

While the authors of this post need to walk a fine line to attempt to salvage their efforts, I have no stakes on this, and can tell you in black and white the answer to the last question is: yes, IBM and Red Hat are doing this to eliminate their competitors and extract more money from the market.

Time to pay rent:

https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/

@Migueldeicaza Bit lost in the lingo here, but does this mean Red Hat is trying to benefit from all commits made to RHEL-based distro’s while gating all its own contributions behind a subscription paywall?

@maxsteenbergen @Migueldeicaza

Absolutely not. All Red Hat contributions are upstreamed where possible, and made available openly and without restriction at https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms

That might not match precisely the form of the patch in an specific RHEL release, but those _are_ available alongside the binaries. Most differences are due — ironically contrary to the narrative Miguel is pushing — to getting those changes upstream, benefiting everyone and making patches obsolete.

@mattdm @maxsteenbergen people don’t want that, people want the exact replica, the one that is certified by assorted third parties for functionality and device drivers.

The bullshit you spew can work on some naive people, but sadly for you, i am not one of those.

@Migueldeicaza @mattdm @maxsteenbergen

"people want ... the one that is certified"

I want to remark on that point specifically. There is not one line of "certification" in RHEL. As a developer, I cannot write certification.

Certification is part of the support contract that Red Hat provides, not a part of the software. The thing that people want is Red Hat's support.

@mathew @Migueldeicaza @mattdm @maxsteenbergen

Sure, I've supported such software in the past. Generally, it falls into two classes: The first class is software that targets the major version's interface, and that software will run on Stream if you can't or don't want to use RHEL.

The second class is much less common and is only supported on one minor release of RHEL. Rebuilds aren't much good here, because they're be supported for less than six months.

@mathew @Migueldeicaza @mattdm @maxsteenbergen

RHEL works for the second class of apps, providing two or four years of support for a minor release, depending on your contract.

Without extended support, there are just very few reasons to rebuild RHEL.