Red Hat going full IBM mode, Fedora implementing telemetry.
I am not worried at all. Fedora and CentOS Stream are upstream of RHEL and I don’t see them giving up community-driven development in either of those projects.
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
You might not be worried for the code, but the project is a different thing. Red Hat has done some serious damage to its image (centos stream, lay off with record profits, lay off of fedora program manager, nasty circumvention of common open source practices). This will affect fedora. I am a long time debian user, but I often suggest fedora as distro for newcomers. I am not doing it again, and I believe many won’t do as well.
At this point it is difficult to trust red hat on their long term commitments. At work we still use rhel, because all our sys admins are used to it, we have licenses, have been using it for ages. So there will not be a big impact for rhel on existing contracts. But on the future, I will actively try to persuade my whole department at least to move out. It is not easy for us, it will require work, but on long term I do not trust red hat/ibm.
Open source market is a difficult market for IBM’s MBAs. Because trust is more important than money. This ibm problem to understand open source world has always existed. And the recent actions proves they haven’t learned yet. It is a pity that rhel and fedora are the only victims here
just
WARNING! half-baked summation ahead!
sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free,
…for about a year. Renewing is hard and manual. Many people gave up and grabbed CentOS for faster deployments before moving to RHEL, and now do the same with Rocky. It’s always easier than the hoops for the dev programme.
It’s amazing how a 130-odd year-old company watched how apple put its ][ in front of school kids to great success, and then intentionally stops making it easy to run EL when faced with the same opportunity. But, if you’ve read cringely, you’ll get the impression that IBM has been sucking for decades, grabbing anything that floats and standing on its head to remain afloat until that thing suffocates.
As a long-time RH customer, it’s hard to believe the RH dev programme is anything other than brochureware, it’s been hobbled and impaired so much. Really, the only question is whether it was ruined accidentally like Support, or ruined intentionally like CentOS. It could go either way.
Between CentOS and Fedora, I reckon people would’ve started moving to Ubuntu, except Ubuntu is making even worse choices.
imho, ubuntu is nightmare with snapd… even you remove it, they will force install each update/upgrade sync… only way is to mark it… and well… it can escape mark last time… :/
My guess is if they want free, they’ll choose Debian.
I’ve seen a lot of “actually debian 12 is the best distro now” stuff lately.
While I agree that Debian 12 is great right now, I’m curious how those opinions will hold in 12 months, when Debian isn’t even half way through it’s update cycle, and people realize they are now a ways behind other distros with regards to package updates.
I love Debian as a rock-solid system. But you have to know what you’re getting into with it too.
Ubuntu LTS has the exact same problem. And unlike Ubuntu, with Debian you have the choice to use sid which is as up to date as Arch usually
@shapis
I’m gonna keep using fedora for now, largely becouse I don’t want to go to the effort to set certain things up all over again, but I’m at least paying enough attention to what’s going on that if they do something I see as to far I’ll switchStill not sure what too though
Fedora is community owned, it’s just the upstream for RedHat. RHEL is based on Fedora. So I don’t really think there’s a cause for concern, unless RedHat uses its powers within the Fedora project (some people involved with the Fedora project are RedHat employees) to make things worse for Fedora but if they do, Fedora will lose users, so RHEL will lose free testers.
Not at all.
I don’t care about fedora.
To be honest, very worried. I used Fedora as my main for about a decade but these days, I just don’t care for it anymore, and every piece of news that comes out about IBM and Red Hat makes me even more worried about the future. Sure, it’s ostensibly community-driven, but Red Hat has historically been very involved with it.
Hopefully I’m wrong, and I’m sure someone will tell me I’m wrong, but Arch and Debian seem to have the best chances at a good future these days.
IDK, I don’t use Fedora anymore and all the redhat problems lol using RPM sounds meh
Yeah I am a bit salty about all of the whole “Opt-out” telemetry thing. I know its just a proposal but just feels a bit slimy.
Fedora is upstream of RHEL which is supposed to result in a mutually beneficial arrangement where Fedora users are essentially testers / bug reporters of code that will eventually make its way into RHEL. Its just part of the collaborative, fast, and “open” nature of FOSS. Adding sneaky/opt-out telemetry just feels like a slap in the face.
super small ex. I am a big Podman user these days, and have submitted a few bug reports so the Podman github repos which has been fixed by RedHat staff. This makes it faster for them to test and release stable code to their paying customers. Just a small example but it adds up across all users to make RHEL a better product for them to sell. Just look into the Fedora discussion forum, there is so much bug reporting and fixing going on that will make its way to RHEL eventually.
Making and arguing for “Opt-out only” telemetry is just so tone deaf to the Linux community as a whole, but I think they got the memo after the shit storm that ensued over the past few days.
But HEY one of the biggest benefits of Linux is that I can pretty painlessly distro hop. I’ve done it before and can do it again. All my actual data is on my home server so no sweat off my back. openSUSE is looking pretty good, maybe I will give it a try.
I don’t see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That’s on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn’t I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it’s not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn’t I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I’ve almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it’s just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that’s just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say “opt out” it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Wow awesome post, you are clearly much more up to date than I am.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Ive been in the Debian camp for a while now with Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc. and I suffer with systemd maybe I made the wrong choice.
Since you seem very knowledgable I have a question. Why do so many, almost all distros use GNOME rather than KDE as their default DE? KDE has been around a long time, they are free and not heavily corporately sponsored and their product is at least equal or perhaps even better than GNOME. I never understood this.
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don’t know much about KDE at all.
Is it true that Bookworm contains non free software in the default release? If so this is sad to hear.
Non-free firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
I suffer with systemd
What’s the problem?
If RH abandoned systemd today it would forever be better than sysvinit. It’s the best tool for the job by miles. A good alternative didn’t exist.
Personally I lost interest in Debian for their hesitation. The community is more interested in being conservative than making good software.
Uh, yeah, Debian is about being stable. Being conservative is aligned with that. When you’re a cornerstone distro, you want to be sure about the changes you’re making, especially when they are likely to have long term, far reaching consequences.
stableis not the only debian release.Yes, and?
I don’t doubt that relying on Red Hat’s code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Nobody’s “relying” on Red Hat. You guys are being insanely dramatic. It’s FOSS software. If Red Hat loses their minds, systemd will just be forked, or there will be a discussion on where to move to next.
Good god.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn’t give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat’s recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn’t help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn’t be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
Yes, and? If those things went closed source tomorrow, the previously open source would not disappear. People could continue to build on it.
Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I’ve even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
There was a strong community discussion because a lot of people didn’t like systemd. After a public democratic decision making process, a decision was made. If something significant happens, another discussion will happen. I don’t understand why you’re talking about disagreements as if they’re the end of the world. “Publically painful”? What does that mean? Debian isn’t a politican. Lennart issuing ‘wake-up calls’ to people is just him being a dipshit. It means nothing for Linux and it’s usability.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat’s future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
Cool, the system is working as intended. Debian can swap Red Hat’s technologies for the other ones. Do you think that it’s not possible to run systemd free Debian, or use KDE instead of GNOME?
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it’s foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
Yes. The decades of work on the kernel will not magically disappear, and people can continue that work. A new one wouldn’t be necessary. Linus barely writes the majority of the kernel code any more. The kernel has shit loads of developers working on it regularly.
This is just FUD bullshit written by someone who doesn’t understand how Linux has been working for the past decade.
I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It’s well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I’m not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat.
As far as I know, systemd is only the default.
At any rate, systemd is already in good working order, and it can and will be forked if necessary. More concerning is stuff like the Dogtag PKI system, which probably isn’t popular enough to be forked.
I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
What exactly does “LGLP” mean?
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Firmware, not software. Wi-Fi firmware, GPU firmware, CPU microcode, that sort of thing. Made unfortunately necessary by modern hardware.
Don’t consider it a betrayal of Debian ideals, because it’s not.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan…but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Lesser_General_Public_License
LGPL, less user freedom, more room to entangle with proprietary crapware.
Firmware is software.
Firmware is software.
Debatable.
Example 1: The microcode hardwired on your CPU (the one before you upload an updated one into it on every boot). Is it software if it’s physically on the chip?
Example 2: Let’s say you have some PCIe card which has a small FPGA chip on the board to handle say some signaling. Is the FPGA circuity software?
I don’t have answers to these. I’m saying the lines are blurred when you look closely what’s software, what’s firmware and what’s hardware.
Fair point…but it seems the Debian stuff being included in their images is all software.
Hey Zucca, I’ve not been around fgo much since around the time otw vanished but remember you from there and I’m still a happy portage user.
I sometimes miss OTW too. But at least there’s Other Things Open Source -subforum where general hardware talk is also fine. There have been few people now trying to create the very minimal RH -free Gentoo installation. I have hopes those people will eventually publish their works as profiles on their overlays.
OTW died because world politic topics, imo. I hate when it ruins things.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I’ll stop now. So /rant
Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs.
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open. So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I’m lazy. Fedora was the only ‘just works’ option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn’t actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn’t get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘just worked’ in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don’t plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Raspberry Pi OS has the same advantage as macOS - both OSes are meant to be run on specific hardware, so everything should just work. ;)
Since you’ve been playing with RPi, have you tried Alpine Linux?
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I’ve stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall ‘testing’ it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn’t seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven’t kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
Not at all. RHEL is still the standard in my field of work and I’m not seeing that going away any time soon. So it makes sense for me to stay in the ecosystem for career development. If I see any evidence of future changes in Fedora that compromises privacy or security I might change my mind.
When kernel-0.96 came public, i checked it out on my Amiga as it was released for Motorola chips as m68k … and still is :)
Then RedHat came with their first distro, so i had it running on a Motorola 68060 for some time. It was the swap from i386 to i686 and later, with Vesa local bus, my Amiga lost the performance race. Then, a good friend gifted me an i686 PC. WindowsXP was on it and boah, what a crazy shit that was. Filenames and libraries had stupid names and in a file hirarchy, everything was just dumb there, so installed RedHat on that and since then it was all good.
Fedora came, RedHat closed their enterprise buisness sector and then we had Fedora. Up until doday im using it and enjoy the community, wich has a very scientific and innovative spirit. Fedora was always one of those distros, going new ways on a stable and solid base, thanks to RedHat.
Even if RedHat would drop out completely with their Fedora support - wich will never happen - Fedora would be mature enuff to survive. Should Fedora nontheless go for another path wich im not happy with, ill change, but it does not look like that
So nope, im not worried a single bit^^
Personally, at this point I don’t fully understand why someone would choose to use Fedora over something like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s such a fantastic, rolling-release distro, that’s super stable, easy to work with, has some amazing tools to work with it for more experienced users (YaST), and now it also means you aren’t involving yourself in the chain-of-FUD that is arising due to RHEL’s incompetence.
I was using Fedora because I needed Appgate for work, and a Mullvad rpm was a bonus. Neither of those are compatible with openSUSE, so I’m back on Arch (btw). Tumbleweed was my first distro, and I’m always looking for an excuse to go back.
I need to use fedora because it’s the near OS with bleeding edge, aside from RHEL that I work daily. Just matter of convenient. I don’t know, SUSE/OpenSUSE seems not for me.
