this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Wow, that's a weird take. The host brings up several points on the other side too, and the Red Hat employee even acknowledges some shortcomings, but all you really heard was "RedHat good everyone else bad" when you listened to that?
I mean, you want multiple perspectives, you need to include someone who has a stake in both. The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side, does it not make sense to bring in someone from RedHat? Why are they automatically just "company yes men"?
How can you ever have any kind of nuance or understanding of the other side if you just view it black and white like that? I've read and understood the claims from people that are upset with Red Hat, and I kind of get it, but I also think these people don't really understand the value of what it is they're using. Under-appreciating what you get for "free" is a very, very common sentiment among FOSS users (and I'm no exception, I'm sure I'm guilty of it too). But the facts here are simple; no one is really "losing" anything here except Rocky and Alma, and they should not have built their business model on basically taking de-branded RHEL and selling support for it directly.
Like I said, Fedora is not going anywhere, CentOS Stream is not going anywhere. If you are a Red Hat customer, the source code of whatever you run is always fully available. There is literally nothing being lost by anyone except those who wanted to use Rocky/Alma as a perfect 1:1 clone of RHEL without contributing a single penny back to RedHat. Yet somehow, the narrative has been changed into "Redhat is being evil and violating the spirit of open source and blah blah blah" and somehow, conveniently, no one has noticed that all of the narrative seems to only benefit/support Rocky and Alma? No one finds that the least bit suspicious?
Whether or not RedHat is going to suddenly claw back a bunch of business from all these people that were using "free" RHEL, that I highly doubt. As far as a move to try to regain perceived losses, I doubt RedHat is going to have any success with that, if that's their intention. But see, I can have the opinion that they're removing loopholes for competitors who add absolutely nothing (whether monetary or code contributions) but take and "resell", and I can also have the opinion that it's probably not going to change the bottom line much because people who were used to getting "RHEL" for "free" aren't going to start paying for RHEL, they're just going to go elsewhere.
TBF someone did say stream 'wasn't a great name' which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.
If: "The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side" as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat's payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don't want employees debating this stuff.
If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn't seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating "freeloaders".
I've been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I'm happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past....but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn't want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.
Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn't often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8
In light of the community response to the Red Hat situation that podcast really did feel like a marketing piece from Red Hat.
Things are getting entertaining though as Oracle have indeed, as hoped, stepped up to question Red Hat's moral ethics 😂 https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/10/oracle_ibm_rhel_code/
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8
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