this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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I like the meme but the most hilarious aspect of the saga to me is still that Oracle got out on a stage and with a straight face proclaimed that they are the bastion of openness for freeloading RHEL source code to make Oracle Linux. That shit never gets old.
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.
"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. Only when the company starts actively harming their product, or trust is lost, will clones hurt sales.
If they want a proprietary OS, they can build it themselves. The value proposition has always been in the support and service ecosystem and infrastructure provided by the corporation. Only when the company starts actively harming their product, or trust is lost, will clones hurt Red Hat's business.
My university uses Rocky. If it didn't exist, they would probably just use debian. Because it does exist, hundreds of students will be exposed to and learn to use enterprise linux, and will likely contribute to its corporate user base at companies that require RHEL.
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.
So basically all those who used CentOS and did not contribute anything even though CentOS cried for contributions for years until Red Hat eventually bought them? (=Most notably Oracle.)
Red Hat is still the biggest FOSS contributor. (I use openSUSE and SteamOS, btw, so I'm not even a RH product user.)
It's really not a loophole. The GPL spells it out directly that the source code is only mandatory to be offered to those who get the binaries. A loophole is networked execution that was not even thought about when the original GPL was written and then was "closed" by the AGPL and later intended to be left open by the GPLv3.
Those actions seem to have lead to creating that new OpenELA organization, basically to what CentOS wanted for years but their cries fell on deaf ears. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.