Recently, Red Hat’s change in how they distribute the source code of their distro caught my (and the open source world’s) attention. The Register has an excellent historical summary, and there is an article by Bradley M. Kuhn discussing how this move aligns with the GPL. A few days later, a follow-up blog post by Mike McGrath expressed that he sees no value in downstream rebuilders.
In my opinion, it was CentOS that helped RHEL become the dominant Linux distribution on the planet. Rocky and AlmaLinux are like insurance that will help maintain its dominance. I do not believe this move will make Red Hat (or IBM) more revenue.
Additionally, I believe Red Hat will find it challenging to enforce anything if several of their customers download the source code of a particular package, and then one of those customers passes it on to Rocky or AlmaLinux (Who was it? Who broke the subscription contract?).
We have seen stranger things happen. In 2007, Microsoft and Novell tried to sell you Linux IP licenses. The endless SCO juristic actions lasted from 2003 to at least 2010. Both I barely remember today. Maybe this Red Hat move will also be “a thing of the past” soon.
Back in the LINBIT world, I would like to point you in the direction of two new posts on our blog that may be of particular interest to those looking to secure their business data now and in the future.
Our post, ‘Abstracting Persistent Storage Across Environments With LINBIT SDS,’ outlines how using LINSTOR can help your company remain in control of how and where your data is used. Multi-cloud is the new standard for cloud computing, and the flexibility to move storage between clusters is an advantage your organization will likely require sooner than later.
Additionally, ‘The Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure’ is a post that offers readers an excellent overview of HCI while demonstrating the benefits of the system. We invite you to request a demo of LINBIT VSAN, enabling you to see the benefits firsthand.
Regarding software releases, it was very quiet these two weeks. We prepared the existing projects for the recently released Debian Bookworm, and the all-new drbdmon is inching toward its first release.
