Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution that targets its products primarily for businesses.
Shortly after the news about the restriction of access to Red Hat code (news that we share here) and which distributions affected as Alma Linux and Rocky Linux made their position known Faced with the situation, informing the community about the changes that must be made to their roadmaps.
Mike McGrath vice president of development for Fedora and CentOS at Red Hat, via a blog post, has disclosed the position of the company about the recent events of stopping publishing RHEL srpm packages to the git.centos.org repository and leaving the repository as the only public source of RHEL CentOS Stream package code.
According to McGrath, Red Hat operates in accordance with the requirements of the GPL license., remains a supporter of open development processes and continues to act for the good of the community opening up your code and pushing changes upstream. The CentOS Stream project's Git repository includes the sources of all packages that RHEL releases are based on, and this repository is available to everyone without restrictions.
They have called us wicked; I got a call from an IBM executive who was set up to turn Red Hat closed source, and that's just the "nice" stuff. So let's clear things up.
At the same time, development of CentOS Stream is proceeding with some progress and not always the latest versions of the packages can match the RHEL packages, but all the code is in the repository and can be found if desired.
If changes are missing from CentOS Stream or inconsistencies are observed, this situation should be treated as a bug that should be reported and fixed. However, Red Hat sees no value in rebuilding from RHEL and is not required to make things easy for distributions that perform rebuilds.
Despite what is said about Red Hat these days, we make our hard work easily accessible to non-customers. Red Hat uses and always will use an open source development model. When we find a bug or write a feature, we contribute our code upstream. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers.
We don't just take upstream packages and rebuild them. At Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fix bugs, integrate different packages, and then support that work for a long time—something our customers and partners need.
Red Hat's dissatisfaction stems from the fact that the company invests heavily in maintenance long-term package development, new feature development, testing and backporting of changes, and creators of reconstructions resell other people's work without participating in it and without providing anything in return.
According to Red Hat, the distribution of products that are completely duplicates of other developments and created on the basis of a simple rebuild, without making their own changes, pose a threat to open source companies, as well as the entire open source ecosystem. , since they can bring open source software to a state that the bunch of hobbyists and hackers were in.
According to developers of alternative RHEL builds such as AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, stopping the release of package code on git.centos.org will make it more difficult to prepare fully binary compatible RHEL builds that are identical in behavior (at the bug level). Since the CentOS Stream repository is out of sync with RHEL, packages may have some missing patches, some packages (for example, with the kernel) are released late, the version numbers of the packages in CentOS Stream, and RHEL don't always match.
Also, the RHEL distribution is supported for 10 years, while CentOS Stream is updated for 5 years. Alternative RHEL builds are presented as a system of counterbalances, compensating for the business model of RedHat, which imposes additional terms when providing applications under the GPL and ignores the right granted in the GPL to unrestricted copies of the product.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.
It seems perfect to me, this way the bunch of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives would be avoided, that we have now and we would have a purer Linux and the elementary school chorizos couldn't charge a penny for work that isn't theirs, let them do it from zero just like they did with solus os for example.