My friend.... You are 100% correct. It was several years ago when Canonical started to go against Community Standards and tried to "Nickel and Dime" other distros for using Ubuntu as their base that gave birth to LMDE. Team Mint knew what was coming and got prepared. I'm still hoping that 2023 will be the last year LM is based on Ubuntu and go 100% Debian.
My hunch is that System 76 are likely to parallel their Rust development with a more direct relationship to Debian, bypassing Ubuntu, over the next few years and for much the same reasons: They're trying to run a business and they won't appreciate being dicked about by Canonical. Mint already did this of course with LMDE because of unease with the status of Ubuntu.
If in 2023 people don't understand that we can get more things done by working together instead against each other then we are just screwed, the future only exists with open source software.
@@jhoughjr1 you must be a Windows dev. Or even worse, a Windows user who's not skilled enough to use Linux. Because this is the most ignorant comment ive ever heard. The internet and todays technology as you know it were built on Linux. They were built on trust. We dont doubt our systems integrity, because we can read our systems code, and even change it. And considering that Linux is free, I would say its even better quality than Windows or MAC. Maybe 20 years ago no. But today, we have distros that are just as sleek and modern as Windows and Mac (PoP OS, Elementary, Garuda come beautiful straight outta the box), while also offering customization and control to a point the Windows and Mac would never dare. So what are you paying for? Beauty? Linux has it. User-Friendly? Linux now has it. Stability? lol. Fedora and Debian are just as secure as Windows with less bugs and viruses. You're definitely not paying for privacy. lol. So....what are you paying for? The ability to install a program with one click of a button? You can with Linux now too. (Most common packages at least ). I literally cant think of anything. Oh yeah, i know what youre paying for...that back door the U.S. government has to pay people to maintain and monitor. Have fun with that. lol
I'm glad Redhat and Canonical have done what they have done. Maybe we can finally get away from the ivory tower of corporate distros, and community distros will reap the benefits.
I'm on Arch based Distros after being on Gentoo. Sure I've started with Ubuntu .. erm it was 2010 ^^. But I switched pretty fast. I prefer community driven Distros and those moves and behavior of corporations just proving my point, and yours. I agree!
The entire community is watching RedHat right now. If they somehow get to have their cake and eat it too then we’ll see an all out blitz of corporate acquisitions of every last distribution with a corporate structure.
If you think this is bad, wait till the day comes when the hardware companies (Intel, Samsung, AMD, Apple, WD, Seagate etc) start to charge subscription for use of their hardware... Yes, their hardware not yours. And by the way, just because corporations want to make a profit, it doesn't make them evil. And just because the Linux community produces free software it doesn't make them saintly. Everything is a trade-off.
Just wanted to add my two cents. I work in the government aerospace industry and the powers that be currently prefer Linux distributions that have corporate backing. If something seriously goes wrong, this industry wants to be able to hold someone accountable and/or have someone to help with support. I'm not defending RH. Just adding some context. TY for your videos!
You're not wrong, and arguably this is what it's all really about. I suspect it's all about F500 and government customers. If an organization pays for 500 subscriptions for their Production systems (to have them backed by Standard/Premium Support) and runs another 1500 dev/test systems on Rocky Linux (which would have been on CentOS pre-Stream), Red Hat wants to bring those dev/test systems into the fold. They are providing ways to do this without increasing subscription costs (Developer Subscription for Teams, primarily) which actually should be less-risk for organizations because there would be no difference (no lag) between the current supported RHEL version and Rocky/Alta/whatever. Red Hat would also benefit from this situation by understanding just how many non-PROD systems an org has deployed; something that they wouldn't have accurate insight into right now if they are on Rocky/etc. Conceivably, these systems would report back into RH Insights, which is a great resource for Operations teams (big org benefit) as well as providing insights to RH account managers (I'm not crystal clear on how much of that info is automatically shared, or if it's negotiated in the service contract -- I don't mean to speak out of turn here). Also while many may recoil at this type of information harvesting/sharing being a big intrusion by Red Hat, understand that the management of IT organizations get a lot of benefit from this as well. Whether it is right for a particular org or not is entirely up to them; I'm not here to judge.
I know that here in the UK over a decade ago many government bodies, schools, etc would only use Windows and proprietary software for the same reason. However, many were unwilling to make a contribution to Wikepedia, and similar even though they were using it all the time.
We don't trust the government either kiddo. Or the aerospace industry either. They are the problem and the cause of all the problems. Greed, nepotism, information control, lies, tyranny. Grow up.
That makes distribution selection easy if you're using Linux for your defense corporation. The question is, "Which Linux distribution do you choose if you need enterprise capability and you don't want to be ripped off by insiders?"
@@brettlaw4346 Linux is quite capable of going closed source at any time and any entity is free to go open or closed. The choice is up to We the people as well, to decide if we want transparency, or lies, deception, censorship and endless wars. :D
@@Dan01-01 I love company involvement in software. It really has brought a lot of good code to the table. In my experience, I don't want to use software primarily backed and provided by a company for my own stuff. Contributed to? Most definitely. Owned? Nah. Or if it is a company/corporate owned product, have an extra tool on the shelf as a backup
That was a comprehensive and useful look at why corporate distributions have broken the trust. Having said that, all code in a distribution is licensed under the Gnu Public License v2 or v3. This means that at a minimum, a company has to make the source code available, at a zero or non-zero cost, and that all licencees must make the source code available to everybody to whom they distribute their releases. If RedHat/IBM violates that, they will be sued, and they will lose. There have been many cases filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against wealthy violators of the GPL. The GPL applies to source code, which includes the code to build and package the software into a distribution. So in that sense it is open, and that's why those two derivatives of CentOS 8 can exist. However, when somebody says "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", the Linux part is licensed under GPL but the "Red Hat Enterprise" part is not. The folks at Red Hat have the right to curate the software in their distribution, and curation always involves making decisions with which people don't agree. And that is because "RHEL" or "Ubuntu" are products which are derived from the open-source Linux. One of the reasons Linux distribution owners curate Linux distro products is so that they can efficiently provide long-term support and security patches. If they had to test the incredibly large numbers of permutations and combinations of software to ensure reliable support, they would never be able to do it profitably. i.e. Efficient (and even free) long term support is what we get in exchange for disagreeable decisions made by the curators of Linux distribution. That problem remains whether the Linux distributor is a big corporation or a community of like-minded Linux advocates.
IBM in the last 20 some years has done quite a bit of questionable cost-cutting measures for short-term profits/growth arguably at the expense for long-term profits/growth; I remember starting around 2003 when they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi and then their PC business (most notable the ThinkPad brand which is the gold standard for enterprise laptops even today) to Lenovo in 2005. Xbox 360 and PS3 were using IBM CPU tech in the mid 2000s. Even Apple was using their CPU tech until 2005. Moreover, IBM eventually sold their server business to Lenovo in 2014. Rather than spend more money for R&D on core competencies or innovate, they mainly did stock buybacks especially when they were run by Samuel J. Palmisano. In short, I believe all this crappy behavior in Redhat results from the higher-ups in IBM with their bean counter mentality to reach certain so-called "KPIs." However like many people, I think this will destroy a lot of goodwill, brand awareness, and overall trust which have helped cement RHEL as the "standard" in its industry. If you look at IBM's stock price since the turn of the century, it's been more or less the same, but adjusted for inflation, it's actually worth less now than back then.
IBM has been making faaaarrrrrr more questionable choices in their pursuit of profit over their history than anything to do with Hitachi, Xbox, etc... Ok, less questionable and more straight up evil villain. I mean, Nazis. Apartheid. Little things.
Tinycorelinux has given me what i need to learn how to strip something down & build it back up...i feel like if i get a 27 year old laptop to run a basic system customized by myself then im ready to move even deeper into this linux journey that started over 20years ago as a youth mentor..Thankyou to all the Linux Teachers who keep encouraging others to see the benefits stick with it..🤜🏽🤛🏽💗
GNU/Linux is a community project at it's core. Corporations contribute but also gain vast amount of capital from OUR project. Not the other way around. Community is always the core of this ecosystem. So the main effort an attention SHOULD always be the community oriented ones because that's the tradition and heritage of us. Other ones come and go but they never will/should be the main priority. We are open to them but also doesn't mean we're gonna give them the keys to our houses so the speak. They will help us by contribution, AS LONG AS IT IS PROTABLE. There's no loyalty to beside capital, in corporate world.
Wouldn't be surprised if Linux isn't all but totally co-opted by companies in the future. With Google, IBM, Microsoft and many others having fingers in the pie, eventually the average, regular Joe gets shut out. Perhaps there's something I'm missing or not understanding, but I wouldn't be surprised with that outcome.
@@Xenotypic Then we fork it we are people who supported before company freaks realized they can make money from it. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds are the key people as the masterminds behind this movement. All other left is replaceable at the end. I fully believe in being upfront and real instead of compassionate or inclusive. I am not scared if the corporate crowd that came with shiny new features left. Privacy & Security, self reliance all the way.
To be completely fair 99% of the code for linux and its distributions are contributed by companies. But what makes linux unique is that it is multiple employees of these companies working together without an end goal of profit. Also I think most people good enough to contribute are obviously going to take positions that will pay them for their time.
Corporations like IBM/Red Hat picking around the edges of the Linux space are representative of capitalism testing the defenses of one of the few surviving, successful emblems of communist ideals in the world.
@@XrayTheMyth23 Linux kernel started as fun side project for an engineer with love of computers and distaste for current corporate owned, for lack of a better word backward ass policies without proper support because of negligence. You must probably know better than me about the GNU part and Stallman. I don't see any other parts as essential so they should uphold their contract with the foss foundation and not try to skimp, abuse their power or we will create and migrate to new safe heaven. I am very well aware of our situation and the difference of power with our aggressors. However I am not gonna slither, cower or cuck out against any big corporation. This is not the only hill to die in my life but this is critical since it supports other freedom foundations as it is in the infrastructure.
Well said. I came to the same conclusions 20 years ago, when it was time for me to settle down on a distribution for life. I figured if I was going to commit to Linux I would stay away from corporate distros. for the same reasons you mentioned here.
I've been using Fedora as a daily driver for a while now. It was one thing when when Red Hat decided to pull their stunt with CentOS but this new revelation has me considering switching my daily driver and server OS. I have also been studying for RHCSA certification but now I feel like maybe I should start looking at a vendor neutral cert.
I like fedora. Should we move to Debian 12 desktop? It's stable but outdated compared to fedora. Any other distros (no rolling updates, please) that's up to date like fedora with gnome? For 2010s hardware? Thanks!
@@investrada If you like Debian 12 (stable) and absolutely need one or two packages from testing (or sid), apt-pinning is a thing and you can get the best of both worlds. Note that with Sid-parts this does have the potential to break your stable system, so you would want to have some good regression testing, but it's possible.
What is the main goal of any system administrator? Stability. What does any system administrator hate? Surprises. Any surprises, both good and bad. Because they are unexpected and non-predictable. Stability is the base of any system. And RedHat has lost its stability. We cannot trust them anymore. They are too surprising for my taste. If you need support use Debian and buy the support from some company providing that kind of service. You can switch that company anytime if they fail you.
I think that many of Red Hats intentions have been overruled by IBM. This is why the apparently contradictory statements. I would look for a number of leadership changes in Red Hat in the coming year.
@@donaldmickunas8552 Of course. And I even think that IBM wants to kill RedHat and make them their internal division without all their freedoms. They make it slowly to prevent employees from rage quitting and to prevent stock fall.
Maybe not immediately, but I have a feeling that a lot of us will land on Debian 12 for both our servers and desktops. Just a thought after digesting the news mentioned in the movie for a couple days... And I was (until the last weekend) a full blown RPM/Red Hat distros user...
And to think, I've predicted that Debian 12 will become the most downloaded release in the history of that distribution. I'm not sure if I made that prediction publicly or not (I guess I just did). It'll be interesting to see the download numbers after all of this, so I definitely agree!
Welcome to our precious and much valued home (debian), just please don't try to make it another RHEL, leave the RHEL ideas in the RHEL side and embrace Debian for what it is. Our beloved Debian is what it is today thanks to that particular way of running the distro approach. For a reference of what I mean, look at the political and social mess that the Californians are making in Texas, the flee California because it's doomed, but don't fully embrace the Texas way and are corrupting a perfectly working society over there too 💀
@@johndododoe1411 well there are always reasons but don't ask me, I'm not he one doing it hahahah... May be it's just a freeing experience to leave California even if you're a mostly brainwashed woke I guess
Debian has its share of developer drama, but all in all, it's a solid distribution with a trustworthy organization behind it. I'm very happy with it, and have been for decades.
Jay, thanks for this video. You covered one of the main reasons why I joined Debian 22 years ago and never left, even during crisis times that happened during our long journey. The community of peers is THE reason to stay in a distro project (as well as any other FOSS project). Having a company that owns and decides for a whole community is a certain recipe for problems one day or another. The other reason is a sort of egoistic one: when something does not work I can fix it by myself or at least discuss with teams and maintainers, as well as release managers about possible solutions for updating next point release. This is the way.
I still like and use openSUSE, despite its corporate lineage. I can't find a more stable rolling release. It's also the best XFCE implementation I've seen.
is it not different though? that suse is just a sponsor for opensuse and not the actual code provider, in fact isn't it that suse enterprise is based on opensuse?
This is the same thing as Netflix and the password sharing. They're just pissing off users who are ultimately a strain on the system, but still add benefit. But these orgs who aren't paying for enterprise support, very few of them will suddenly start paying and I suspect most will just switch to something different rather than just start paying. Much like the Twitter and Reddit APIs, I think we're falling out of a golden age of computer and internet progress as big corps start to tighten their purse strings.
I work for a very large tech company and we're currently in talks with Red Hat to onboard our current centos 7 infra to RHEL. I heard Red Hat is willing to bend over backwards to give us a good deal because we will end up being one of their biggest customers if we decide to go for that. Us in the FOSS community don't like what Red Hat is doing and hope they would fail but unfortunately corporations, especially ones with the money, will always choose the path of least resistance because they can't afford causing any disruptions to their business operations. They also like the fact by signing a support contract with Red Hat now they have something legally binding, and not just a pinky promise like that of Centos which they can walk back on any time with no legal repercussions. At least in the short term, I'm not seeing Red Hat going anywhere.
@@cobra-chicken I'm not surprised they're willing to do whatever to get customers signed on. Get the customers in and squeeze more money out of them later. Not in an evil sort of way, but it's one of the foundational principles of the subscription model. And it'll work out as long as Red Hat can prove their value.
After I heard the news about IBM bought Red hat, I started My migration plan of all my Red hat Linux based distributions. Now I'm happy for that decision.
It's almost like someone at IBM is constantly thinking 'what decision could we make that would be a disaster for us and our users?' and then they make that decision.
They built people sorting machines for the NAZI's IBM's German subsidiary, known as "Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH" (Dehomag), played a role in providing punch-card tabulation machines to the German government and various industries, including the military.
This is one of the reasons why I stuck with Debian and Debian-based distros even when companies were looking specifically for RedHat knowledge and RHEL certification. RHEL has always been pseudo proprietary and I've disliked it since the beginning. I now dabble with multiple distros but I am vary of tools built by for-profit companies that can pull a RedHat move at any minute (I am specifically talking about Canonical's Ubuntu and EQT Partner's OpenSUSE)
OK, but Satellite and Ansible Automation Platform are some useful tools for big (corp) environments... there is very little Free Software that approaches that level of sophistication (upstream AWX is OK; Ansible without Tower/controller is pretty good but the pieces don't come together in the same way).
@@Alexander-ix2jp That could happen to any distro, even Debian or Arch. People pick on Mint for when that happened and yes it was bad it happened but they did correct the issue.
@@warthunder1969 I agree mate, nothing is 100% secure nowadays. And you're right on the second part too, they fixed the issue. My problem is that back then some folks from the Ubuntu community warned them about Mint not being secure enough and it wasn't taken seriously until the breach happened. I'm all for community distros, but I do want security to be taken seriously and treated as a top tier priority (ideally without sacrificing ease of use too much). Not sure how Mint is doing today though, left when that happened back then and haven't tried since, so my experience might be outdated by this point. Ymmv as always 👍🏻
@@Alexander-ix2jp - compromised ISOs never passed checksum verification. If someone won't do the basics of validating a download authenticity, security isn't very import to them.
There is a legal loophole that will allow Alma Linux and Rocky Linux to continue to provide RHEL clones, at least for a while. First of all, I am not a lawyer, however I was a program manager at a very major company. Lets just say that everyone who is reading this knows this company well. The product my division made mixed highly proprietary code in a Linux system. We had to be extremely careful to adhere to all proprietary licenses as well as all the open source licenses. I have spent many hours directly working with lawyers to make sure that I understood the intricacies of all the open source licenses so I can work with the software developers to make sure everything was done correctly. This was part of my job for over 10 years. There are two important facts about Copy Left licenses. 1) Copy Left licenses require that if you distribute a binary derived from Copy Left license source code to someone outside your organization, then you must make the source code available to them. If the person receiving the derived work asks for the source, the distributing organization has to give it to them. This is why Red Hat can place the source code behind a paywall and/or only give it out to people who are subscribers. This is absolutely legal. The last thing I want to say on the topic is that while I don’t have to give the Copy Left licensed source to someone who I did not make a binary distribution (i.e. make it publicly post it on the web), I can make it available to the general public if I choose to do so. 2) Copy Left licenses requires you to license all derived work with the same license as the original source code. The Copy Left licenses expressly forbids organizations from placing additional restrictions on derived works. Of course, this goes out the the window if Red Had owns the copyright to the source code. In this case Red Had is free to make future distributions of the same code under a non Copy Left license. However, then can’t retroactively change the license to code already distributed under a Copy Left license. So, If I have a copy of CentOS that contains a Copy Left licensed version of something, Red Hat can reach into my computer and claim that code is now proprietary. Putting all of this together leads to a legal fact that Red Hat hopes doesn’t become known to the general public. If I pay for a subscription to RHEL, I can demand to get all of the Copy Left licensed source code. While Red Hat doesn’t have to give me any non Copy Left licensed source, their customers will demand it, so there is a near 100% chance that they will distribute non Copy Left , Open Source licensed code ( MIT and BSD are considered Open Source, but not Copy Left). Once a customer has the Copy Left licensed source code, he can do anything he wants to it, including posting it online or directly give it to Alma and Rocky Linux. This is equally absolutely legal and there is nothing that Red Hat can do about it. Red Had can close this loop hole by changing the license to any code that they own the copyright to a proprietary license. That will prevent customers from the re-distribution the source. We just need to hope that Red Had customers refuse to purchased licenses to a Linux distribution that contains significant amounts of proprietary licensed code.
@@johndododoe1411Nope. They cannot. If they don't own the code in question (like the Linux kernel or the GNU coreutils), they they have no right to not follow the license. They can make future versions of software they own the rights to not GPL anymore, but what's already been released cannot be made proprietary and what they don't own the rights to cannot be made proprietary without express consent of the developers, and good luck getting 5% of those developers to allow for that use when the GPL was created _for this very reason._
IBM ruins everything it touches. Softlayer was awesome. IBM made it suck. When IBM took over Red Hat, I saw this coming. Red Hat just needs to fork FreeBSD and just keep it closed source since that’s what they seem to want.
I'm still surprised IBM went and purchased RedHat and not SuSE. SuSE had a long standing Linux support for many of IBMs hardware such as s390, as400/iSeries, x86 for many years, even decades.
@@KnightRiderOfVoid I mean, SUSE was already owned by an American company (Novell) at one point in their life, and it was utter hell for SUSE with layoffs galore. The only good thing to come from that era is openSUSE. 2011 was a breadth of fresh air for SUSE and openSUSE.
@@BenTyger Because IBM wants what is already established, Redhat has the government linux server market. Then they run it into the ground, its the IBM way.
@@timburns2374 Or the days of going to Border's and leaving with a handtruck stack of $50-$80 computer books - that will all be obsolete in a few years.
That would be the original Red Hat Linux which would evolve in the early 2000s to become Fedora Core and eventually Fedora. Wow. RHEL was a separate product.
If the point of RedHat's decision is to stop downstream distros then how could Alma and Rocky figure this out? I have a hunch that the real target is Oracle and they are willing to sacrifice Alma and Rocky on the way.
Goofy though because solid forks exist, anyone using red hat can beat feet without getting caught up too badly unless they have an addiction to some proprietary stuff.
@@ryanleemartin7758 All the big guys are locking down but I think redhats is more a defensive posture to keep the code more static, although it sucks for downstream many of the downstream distros already have a backup plan, reminds me of when Apple closed off Herd and everyone was pissed.
Well said Jay! Well said! TRUST is key. I appreciate your video and perspective. I have almost everything here running Debian - and with Bookworm, am even looking to phase out the remainder of servers. On my desktops, I'm using LMDE (Mint + Debian) and have found it lighter than the main Mint releases based on Ubuntu. One thing I just discovered is that Debian 12 (Bookworm) has LXD available natively in the repository. That means NO SNAP requirement. I'm pondering moving some of my Proxmox LXC instances to pure Debian/LXD. I'm going to re-watch your LXD video and do some tinkering this weekend.
Surely the likes of the Apache Foundation, Mozilla and FSF can stop Red Hat (aka IBM) dead in their tracks for their contravention of the source code publishing clauses in their licenses? Heck, isn't the Linux kernel published under a license that requires source code publication?
No they can’t. Only a court can. They are providing the source code with their product. But the product is behind a different license. I don’t blame RedHat. It was good while it lasted and now it is time to move on to Debian.
@@joshallen128And that's the problem. The GPLv3 fixed that. Guess what didn't move to the v3 license. The Linux kernel. Guess what did? The GNU coreutils, aka, bash, emacs, etc.
@@joshallen128Not really anymore as of Debian 12. Nonfree firmware is now included if the live environment detects it is needed and only if it is needed.
Gnome's leadership also thinks it should be nearly impossible to uninstall mahjong without putting users into the situation where you can uninstall the entire desktop, since, you know, solitaire is a vital dependency. Also all 8000 translations in firefox. The list goes on. Soooooo, probably not the best thing to raise up as a bad thing to do.
The irksome thing for me re: Gnome (and for that matter KDE) is that every new iteration of the environment lost some flexibility/configurability. I've been using linux as my primary home and work OS for over 25 years now, and I am very particular about how my X desktop is laid out. First Gnome, then KDE, made it more difficult and then impossible to shove the toolbars/widgets/stickynotes, terminal windows, etc, around precisely how I'd like. How is it that making it less possible for the user to do things the way they want making things *more* user friendly?!?!?! Gnome vs. Unity vs. KDE? XFCE wins for me. :D
What has been overlooked here is the APPLICATIONS. Enterprises deploy applications, some of which is "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS). In the past, some folks would use one of the free RHEL respins (Scientific Linux, CentOS, Oracle Linux - and more recently AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux) for their non-production testing. Traditionally COTS products would "certify" on either RHEL/CentOS or SUSE. With the rise of OpenStack (where Ubuntu Server was a default OS), more COTS software is now certified on Ubuntu. But there isn't an extensive COTS certified list for Debian. And that's why IBM's announcement last week has caused a lot of turmoil. Some of these commercial customers don't appreciate the idea of being "forced" into buying RHEL, especially in the current worldwide economic situation.
@@FuriouS1976 I run Debian on my servers but packages are really outdated for a daily driver especially if you're a developer. That was mainly why Fedora was so attractive.
Well, Flatpak is highly promoted by Red Hat, the #1 competitor to Canonical. So it's a "them vs us" in this case. Aside all that, indeed RH has every right to protect their product. And if any dev wants to support RHEL, the free dev licenses should be enough. But if you use Linux FOR the apps that are created for it, nothing stops you from switching to another OS if you don't want to pay licenses. As for Canonical, it probably won't go the RH way as they are not the source but an intermediary, Debian is the source here & every sane sysadmin should be thankful for Debian's existence.
Debian is awesome; can't argue with that, and Debian 12 is probably the best version of Debian yet, with almost all DEs (apart from GNOME) on their latest version at the time of Bookworm's (Debian 12) release, Flatpak now on a version that is fully functional, and nonfree drivers included on the installation media when needed (which on modern hardware is pretty much a given), I think Debian could overtake Red Hat and I hope more companies support it, because it truly embodies the spirit of FOSS: Collaboration between many different users making a product better for all of them and more. I think Red Hat had their moment in the sun, but as they say: "You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." - They.
Yes, not many shareholders invest in privacy and freedom. 15:45 Yes, but there is more than one big blob of people when it comes to desktop environments and a community is more than just people in general or volunteers who share a common interest. It needs some sort of relationship between those people.
As a noob im just grateful for guys like yourself & chris titus & a few others that keep us with solutions to fit our needs ...im compiling from kernel and building on top step by step...i will be honest the commercialization and all the legal stuff makes it a little intimidating for people that want to learn the code base neccessary to build our own things...but i keep going i love learning & building useful things
The legal stuff is one reason why I use Free/OpenBSD primarily now, and generally ignore copyleft software when I am building something. Too much legal stuff to worry about when I just want to build something fun and cool
@@classicrockonlyThe problem with that is that any person or company can make alterations to the code (including bug fixes) and make the result proprietary under permissive licenses. That's why (in my opinion) GNU & Linux are much better and more successful; copyleft is meant to give everybody the same freedoms that the original copyleft code writers had.
If all you want to do is build something fun and cool, their is no legal issue, as long as you have code, you can do whatever you want with it. You can just not share what you made with others.
@@cameronbosch1213 thus, you restrict the user and developer and violate freedom 0. I would surely call Linux very successful, but it most certainly is not because of its license
On a similar vein, FreePBX is now owned and run by Sangoma and runs on a Linux known as Sangoma Linux. I used to run FreePBX long before it was owned by Sangoma and back then it was "Open Source". However, since the "FreePBX" has run on Sangoma Linux the FreePBX prooduct has become a pain in the backside to get to function the way I used to get it to work. I can't help suspect that there are underlying non-published changes in the Sangoma linux that effectively causes FreePBX to be problematic unless it is installed on in-house Sangoma equipment that I presume actually uses a completely different Sangoma Linux. I have as a result abandoned anything FreePBX and everything Sangoma. They broke my trust.
Yeah, I feel pretty much the same. All those hours spent on distro I cannot continue to work with because of all the drama they create. I am also moving to Debian, I hope this one will stay drama free, at least until I get retired 😊
Complete your certification as planned. This announcement from Red Hat shouldn’t affect large RHEL corporations/subscribers in the long run. That’s where RHEL certification is valuable.
I absoloutely agree. Switched back to Debian on all servers since the snap package pressure. My favorite distribution on Desktop machines is Mint for over a decade. Every year I try different distros because of my nosiness... I see some fancy stuff (mostly on this great channel) and I check it out... no-brainer with Proxmox, nowadays (also learned here). But in the end I always find myself using Mint again. Its fancy (imho), its stable, and the most important thing, I like the spirit of the Mint people (they awake my Ubuntu doubts, some years ago). Thank you for this great channel and for this important video !
IMHO there's two type of Linux distributions: corporate-backed, and hobbyist-level. Let's not forget that many of Debian core packages are maintained by Canonical. The difference is that you get to use it for free because many enterprise customer would rather use something else. If the offering that RHEL made isn't compelling, then as their VP said, use something that make sense for your usecase. Ultimately, FOSS as a community has always been a byproduct of the intersection of capitalistic decisions - again, try looking at the patch contributions for Linux kernel and see how many are contributed by companies.
> Can RedHat do this? Absolutely, they can do this. Indeed, RedHat/IBM seems to understand the meaning of Free Software and Open Source Development better than most of the FOSS community do. Free Software does not and never did imply an Open Source Development Model despite the confusion that OSI marketing has created by essentially conflating Free Software with an Open Source Development Model. Moreover, the FSF and GNU project explicitly states this fact in their critique of the term Open Source and in their reassurance that Software Freedom is not incompatible with Commercial and Closed Source Software Development Models. Finally, developing Free Software -- software which respects it's users freedom -- in no way establishes an obligation between any person (natural or legal) to make source code available to your competitors or the entire human race. That is not what Free Software has ever been. It is a License between the persons making the software available and the persons receiving the software, and nobody gets to dictate who anyone else does business with and on what terms they interact. (If it did then anyone who is involved in FOSS in any way would effectively be making themselves slaves!) RedHat is [perhaps rightly] getting some pushback from the FOSS community for breaking the social contract that they established with their users but the reasoning that many in the FOSS community are giving for their anger at RedHat ranges from simply wrong to INSANE. In fact, I hope that by doing this I hope RedHat/IBM proves that it is possible to offer your users Free Software without hiding behind or resorting to the "trinket-selling" that currently typifies the various FOSS Business Models, and which only guarantees that Nonfree Software will remain the lions share of all software developed.
@@diablobarcelona FreeBSD lacks the market share and number of developers. The Linux kernel runs on billions of devices (Android smartphones, for example) and tons of servers and a decent number of desktops. FreeBSD runs on a much smaller number of servers, much smaller number of desktops, and a bunch of proprietary routers and appliances whose source is not open.
@@dfs-comedy my original comment was based on enterprise, not desktop, mobiles, whatever. For enterprises a solid, stable and mature operating system alternative would be FreeBSD vs (RHEL/Rocky/Alma/Blahblahblah).
I agree trying *BSD instead of Linux, by the way: I use FreeBSD - and it is working good!. But: What is Linux, which of the thousands distributions? And there is not only a fight between RedHat and others, the fight is between so many others. Linux is a very ununique operating system...
@@ngtube9 Linux is not an operating system. its a kernel. Whereas FreeBSD is a complete operating system 😉(Sorry for being pedantic). Hence why I'm saying for enterprise grade OS, IMO FreeBSD ticks boxes. Sure it will not meet the requirements of all, but certainly most I would say it would especially a conservative enterprise like say a bank, but it would need some sort of commercial support backing.
I had been a CentOS user since about 2005, but when Red Hat pulled the plug on CentOS 8 (which I had just migrated my small home lab to), I simply re-implemented everything in Debian and never looked back. I get where you're coming from with Canonical (and agree), but now I wonder about Suse's relationship with the OpenSuse community. I understand that relationship is and has been very good, but perhaps that reflects a cultural difference, as Suse is a European company. and Red Hat and Canonical are not.
UK and US have more company oriented legislation, EU is not so nice to companies and SUSE is a drop in the bucket compared to IBM. Ironically Valve is doing most of the goodwill work massaging hardware support into Linux to escape the clutches of MS and their DX monopoly.
This is a good summary of the situation. I would be following your footsteps with moving things to debian, but i find that debian just isn't close enough to the new programs and updates I want. I would like something community run kinda in-between Ubuntu's stability approach and Arch's bleeding edge approach. I'm getting a bit annoyed by the maintenance burden of Arch too, so that's not helping my situation. I still have time to consider things though because I'm not redoing my servers or Linux systems any time soon though.
@@tomasagustinbenik38 how up to date is Sid usually? I think I found the kernel version at 6.3.7-1 which should be rather new. If they do keep things up to date like this I would give it a shot. I might have to look more into it.
@@SyphistPrime 6.3.7 is new, yes. Give it a shot. Just be careful with the dependencies of the software you use. If you need to use any special software, with specific dependencies that Debian hasn't updated yet, you may build them from source.
@@tomasagustinbenik38 I'm used to the AUR so building from the source wouldn't be a problem. I might also be open to trying Flatpaks if I can get theming to work with them. Thanks for the suggestion. It's definitely on my radar when it wasn't before.
@@ilyasabi8920 well, IBM started to be an owner since 2014, if I am not mistaken. But what is happening for the last 3 years with RHEL is really crazy. For me personally it is really sad to see it, as I am a Fedora Ambassador & I spend some time on new releases testings etc.. Really looks like it is some dead end..
It's always sad when an engineer like myself watches over the years how money hungry corporations consume everything in their path, just to make money. Jay, nobody is safe, no matter the operating system, because we, the users, actually have no say in the future of any system out there. Ok, maybe through our usage and community services, but other than that, nothing. Funny... I switched from Windows to Linux because of corporate issues and handcuffs, forcing their opinion on users who must pay for everything.
And now they're trying to push telemetry into Fedora 40. TBH, I've tried to avoid corporate-backed distros because of fear that some shit is going to eventually happen. And happened it did.
There are 2 circumstances where it makes financial sense for a corporation to screw over its customers: 1. When your customers have no choice but to continue doing business with you 2. When your customers opinions of you are already so low that nothing you can do could possibly make it any worse Read into that what you will, speaking purely in general terms wink wink lol
Man, the new release of Debian 12 Bookworm is very fortuitous for the FOSS community. I have it on my old Asus Intel gen1 i5 laptop and it's the fastest this computer has worked in years. This is my rock music recording machine. A whole hard drive dedicated to recording everything I play on my guitar and band practices. I'm strongly considering moving from Pop!_OS to Debian 12 on my main machine as well (Tuxedo Aura 15 gen1). If I can get my main games on Steam to work Debian will be my new mainstay.
It's a sad paradox: No money, and open source will slowly die of lack of resources. Inject money (from corpo) and you will be their bitch. There must be a middle ground, maybe. For now, expect most open source projects "supported" by big corpo, will start to make changes to the way the project is going. Red Hat is simply doing what most corporations will do, in time.
I've been using Bunsenlabs for a while, it's a continuation of Crunchbang's ethos of efficiency while also tweaking itself to be as power-user friendly as it can be. (only big downside I've run into is having to drop to a safe mode shell just to install Nvidia's drivers) Since you're going on the anti-corp war path anyway, any chance you'll give that one a review?
Sigh. The #1 reason I wanted Ubuntu is for their flavor, Ubuntu Studio. Debian doesnt seem to have anything like that. A nice collection of optional groups of packages, and tweaked and pre-configured for audio. (EDIT: Debian also doesn't have PPAs.) Now I'm scared for 24.04 LTS. One showstopper when it comes to my computer in particular is Wi-Fi drivers. I guess it's time to look at a ThinkPenguin adapter, which this channel has covered before. EDIT: In retrospect, I've always wondered why MXLinux (a Debian derivative, not Ubuntu) topped Distrowatch rankings. What are the chances that it's at least partially for reasons discussed in this video?
Fantastic Video. Very explanatory. In Brazil, in general, not much has been said about the subject. But I liked your views, not just on Red Hat, but Canonical as well. In the end, now you can understand why Linux Mint maintains two versions - One with Ubuntu and the other with Debian - I think it's close to what you said here. Big hug from Brazil!
I love every second of this video. Thank you, Jay. I used to run big corporations distros, but I just stopped. I was planning on having my own server. It will definitely be debian after all this.
Once any open source project becomes monetized, things often take a turn for the worse for the open source community. Companies tend to lose interest in supporting the community since they no longer receive direct payment for the product. The result? They will keep liyng to you because they do not care about you anymore. What's even more disheartening is that this seems to have become the norm in today's industry. Consider this simple question: Who other than engineers invest countless hours, weeks, and even months in building these incredible products?
@Jay - this drama is actually critical information for considered decision making in a practical sense. I suspect that RH are being squeezed for revenue more than before, to me this implies that they are no longer realising RoI on their old models and IBM are pushing them to cash in the cred and good will of the business. I can't help but think - SCO 2.0? In the end though - the attitude of a company is wildly important and it does seem all too rare for commercially developed distros to really stick to their ethos, model, word, etc. This isn't just disturbing and irksome - it's really really really expensive. You sink a lot of investment into a sinking ship and it not only costs your firm or organisation to correct the problem - it creates a problem that is difficult to solve, really hard to communicate and often hardest of all to justify especially to C-Suite types who may have read the vendor's name in the WSJ but have little information beyond the impression management that firm's PR people have undertaken. Trust and integrity are highly nuanced and awfully difficult to communicate reliably, this is actually a bigger problem than a company that has a more obvious failing like a serious security breach or financial problems. Remediation for those type of problems is easier to communicate, understand and attain approval/support for but subversive behaviour is much harder to "sell" upstream. Were I to hedge bets out there I'd be going for conservative, consistent and reliable vendors over even similar vintage ones that have a potential motivation change like this. I've been through that "vendor going bad" scenario at least a dozen times and it's just painful for no genuinely good reason, particularly if you've tried to build a relationship with that vendor to raise your standing as a priority client and site beyond your mere financial spend. A good reliable relationship costs less to run and starts to form an intangible asset and the fact that RH is treating this with lip service indicates that something's rotten in the state of Denmark up there at Big Blue indeed. Debian all the way for me - I like the fact that most things you run into have been hit a dozen times before, the way it's the root for the vast majority of SBC and specialist builds and the surprising lack of overhead for things like running a NAS build on REALLY old hardware (HP N36L's anyone? I have two!). We're heading for a SHTF situation with supply chains, parts, resources, infosec, etc. and that's going to get 5-6 times worse if hot war DOES kick off in one of the major flashpoints; conservative ethos, builds and support arrangements will save you when the next guy is down because a sub hit an esoteric piece of undersea carrier gear or a cloud provider is choking from a malware attack. Customers are NOT going to tolerate "oh but we lost connection to our offshore provider".
I've been a very happy Fedora user for about 3 years but this whole situation has me questioning that decision. As you say the drama is stressful. Seriously looking at alternatives at this point as I don't really feel like supporting this mess. I've looked at Arch in the past because of this same anxiety but honestly there seems to be a lot of drama there too. And I'm not convinced I want to go with a rolling release. And then there's Debian which I have very little experience with beyond Ubuntu which I don't really like. So I guess it's time to do some research and thinking. But yeah this situation has hurt the Linux community for sure. And the Fedora community should be pissed about it. But as I understand things they exist because of the benevolence of Redhat and that alone is concerning.
I'm very disappointed that a large part of Fedora users seems to defend Redhat. Maybe it is time for a Fedora fork that is independent of Redhat but that will not succeed if the community doesn't want to follow.
I like fedora. Should we move to Debian 12 desktop? It's stable but outdated compared to fedora. Any other distros (no rolling updates, please) that's up to date like fedora with gnome? For 2010s hardware? And isn't IBM is paying Linus? Thanks!
@@investrada I don't know that much yet but from what I can see the latest Debian is on gnome 43, Fedora 38 is gnome 44. So that's not too bad. Of course from what I understand Debian has much longer release cycles. But honestly I'm already happy on gnome 42 (I'm still on Fedora 36 here) so figure I should be find on gnome 43 for awhile to come. I find the Fedora cycles to be too short anyway so I skip every other version anyway. I also don't like the idea of rolling releases which is why Arch seems like it's not an option. I'm just starting this research now so it's possible I won't ever get to installing Deb 12 and I'll find something better but I'm not keen on these weird custom tweaked forks of bigger projects like Nobara (a fork of fedora that's getting lots of attention). I feel I'm maturing in terms of what I want from Linux so if I can get everything I want from Debian I may go that way.
I moved from RedHat when they issued stock in 1999. I saw the writing on the wall back then. I used Mandrake as a stopgap until I found Gentoo Linux in 2002. I stuck with them since. I do have a machine I built with Arch as a daily driver. I'm testing Nix on a laptop, but I'm not sure I will go with that one as a daily driver. To add, Gentoo is a great server OS. I built a Gentoo server and it served me well for many years until I retired the machine due to the difficulty of finding parts for it.
Old Network/System Admin here (I started in the early 90's).... I have not installed Redhat in several years. But... They were on my "Trusted List" until now. As for Canonical/Ubuntu, I gave up on them when 16.04 was released. This was the 1st version they treated like a BETA and let the end-users debug. IMO.... This mess was a page from Microsoft's Playbook. Now.... I currently only trust 2 distros for server installs: Debian and Slackware.
That takes me back. When I started out as a sysadmin we had the lovely choice of "Roll your own Unix ... or SunOS 2.0" I still have an ancient fileserver which runs the last ever OpenSolaris release from Sun themselves (6.something) and it is still just carrying on a treat. Oracle from what I can see have kept with the tradition of keeping a free version available.. Maybe they gain from having a hundred or so community "parasites" debugging their junk when it breaks. Not me tho.. I run Gentoo on my servers.. because isn't being a sysadmin supposed to be hard?
I respect your decision and understand why you’ve posted this video. I don’t believe this coverage is fair to both sides of the open source coin (companies one one face, community on the other). Many wonderful open source projects & products struggle to stay afloat. Server costs, storage, maintenance… you know the list if issues many creators and developers face in our freedom respecting world. We still struggle with the term “Free software” and convincing users to pay for “Free” software. I believe this coverage will do more harm to our community because it doesn’t include the full face of the issue; just the parts that generate clicks. I wish you no ill will, but I also wish this coverage had more depth.
Well, System76 has been very trustworthy with Pop!_OS over the years, and the fact their trying to de-Ubuntify their distro and get rid of snaps, similarly to Linux Mint, should be a sign that System76 (at least the current owner of it) is a good person/company and isn't one is complete greedy like Canonical.
Snap packages are all about a paywall to continue using Ubuntu in an enterprise. I don't object to Canonical making money. I do object to Canonical trying to make money by forcing "non-features" on users. If they provide a compelling advantage for the enterprise in terms of real features and functionality, they will get customers. Snaps being mandatory, and the snap servers and repos not being mirrorable, are not a feature. I've shifted my organization to Debian.
Debian 12 is totally user friendly, we as community waited for too long for that. I have XFCE there, I have 32-bit and ARM support. This is the way. I even have snaps, if I want them.
You fail to mention one thing with Ubuntu and why they don't allow official flavors to ship Flatpak anymore. The reason is web browsers, the main web browsers are packaged as a snap thus the Ubuntu base requires Snaps. They did that foe uniformity and the best compatibility with each other.
In the past, we have been quite “political” about X flavor of Linux (distro) vs Y flavor. I think that from now, we actually need to be “political” about the economy we are all part of, because more people are pushed outside of said economy. Not by choice, but by consequences originating outside of individual “free” choice. I don’t think there is a real “freedom” in modern day political economy, at least not the way we usually believe, teach or learn. If a large group of users end up somewhat alienated by some corporate decisions - well, a “group” is a society, not just a heap of individuals. Maybe a small rethink of what “social” means to us, especially when Linux itself IS a community effort through decades… 👍
@@rimaq_ No, at least not in a modern or post-modernist sense. Libertarian values as stated some 200+ years ago, were at the time in opposition to late stage feudalism, on track with how most people were mere subjects (at best). Gravely simplifying , the enlightenment era grew from there. The last 40-ish years the liberal right has (in my view) misappropriated and oversold “freedom”. A bit like the mid to late 1800’s, when a similar process pushed an emergent working class towards a new socialist ideal. A tipping point, as we got 50 years of war, two of them global (new phenomenon). Post 1950 things sobered up across the west, a fragile stasis upheld by the Cold War. During THIS time, economic growth was as egalitarian as it could be in modern time. Right or wrong, but MOST people, businesses, corporations and governments (in the west) prospered. However (a big one), resources had to come from something (and somewhere) to sustain said growth. Push ecological outcomes into the mix, here we are. We knew by the 1970’s but only hippies and some scientists said so. Cunning lawmakers across the west therefore slashed financial regulations, “liberating” capital. Goods down, finance up. Liberating people? Not so much… I know, I’m simplifying beyond forgiveness, but this is a YT comment… Our current political economy is half baked. If economy only factors in business, macro and fiscal - individuals and communities both lose out (we CAN see that, right?). If work (also necessary work) for any wage feels meaningless to an increasing number of people, they’re not participating in the economy, just keeping the wheels of capital going. I’m NOT saying that the classical left (socialism) is the answer in our time, but hyper capitalist liberalism clearly isn’t either. Both extremes share a severe lack of holistic and dynamic accounting of existential gains and losses. Reductionism need it’s counterpart in a sense of life itself. We clearly aren’t “machines”, society not a mechanical model. Details need context. People need purpose, not just money and ownership. There is freedom in taking part, less so the more we can’t. Freedom isn’t a policy or an ideology, more a sense of being enabled to live and to belong - simultaneously.
I started using Red Hat around version 3 or 4.. but I quickly moved to Slackware and tried a lot of other distros. I used Arch way before it was the "cool" thing to run. I have built LFS (and made scripts to automate it). But I never used Debian back in the days, but today it's the best distro I have ever used.
For a small business like LLTV moving away from commercial offerings is probably the right choice but for a larger business it wouldn't be. When something goes wrong upper management want someone to blame and a team of $company engineers on site fixing things. These moves from Red Hat and Canonical are disappointing for the community but in some ways I think they are a good sign, it means there's enough interest in Linux that people are willing to fight over it.
One of the greatest things about linux is it's open source, both for education and transparency. Removing open source from linux defeats all that linux was created for in the first place. I'm a Fedora fan, I love the newer stable packages for my desktop. I'm considering a fedora server to play around with but maybe for servers debian would be a better choice for higher level of security. I've just grown to trust Fedora and best of all it has a great community.
Just be aware who runs and sponsors Fedora....Red Hat! Will they pull the plug on that as well in the future, lets hope not. But the past few years may suggest that nothing is safe from there clutches.
"One of the greatest things about linux is it's open source" which part -- the Linux kernel? the base GNU/Linux operating system? or the vast ecosystem of packages/applications that work on top of that? I mean it's true (more or less) of all of them (getting fuzzier when you get down to the app/package level, which can involve all kinds of different licenses), but when people refer to Linux as one-big-thing it seems like there is a lack of understanding. Make no mistake, the kernel all by itself is pretty useless to the average user. Building your own toolset around it is something almost nobody has done -- they use GNU.
Thank you. How do you feel about OpenSuse as a corporation and it's backed Linux projects? Or do they go in the same boat? Out of the larger Linux offerings backed by a corporation they seem to have the least amount of headlines that cause big stirs in the overall Linux community., at least that I've seen.... Hopefully Tumbleweed and MicroOS keep on as they have been. On the Debian end, I've used it for years for back end tasks and the recent version release has been a great boon, IMO , :)
@@theaveragecactus I believe that's correct, and that's the reason why Fedora hasn't had a ginormous hit from RHEL drama. It's because Fedora is upstream, and RHEL sponsors them. But I would trust SUSE a million times more than RH, which is why openSUSE is my daily driver. openSUSE is upstream SUSE, and SUSE sponsors them. It's a very similiar middle ground situation like with Fedora and RHEL. It's not direct, like Canonical and Ubuntu, or System76 and Pop!_OS, but not complete community driven like Debian.
First of all, I am now retired. I'm from command line time. Operating systems DOS, Sinix, Novell, Fedora. From the beginning, Linux was an alternative to Microsoft. A lot has happened in the last 5 years. Ubuntu was up to Snap Top. There were a lot of drivers, plus the PPA. For servers, I find it good. So that nobody keeps their paws clean, the prompt is enough for me. That, however, was when I turned my attention to Debian and distros based on it. My hardware is colorful. Old to current. It was hard to find drivers or to find drivers for Debian from the Ubuntu PPA. The drivers from Debian 12 are integrated via DKMS. Unfortunately not optimal. My favorite desktops XFCE and KDE. lend a hand Unfortunately, I use an app that is only available as a snap. Freedom has its price. For acquaintances, friends, environment I continue to use Unbuntu. They know that. So good *Conclusion* a) I'm not a fan of Flatpack, Snap or Appimage. b) The spirit of freedom of the commune. c) Debian, distributions based on it are my personal favourites. d) When the big players have their hands on things, it turns out badly. Sooner or later.
I am so glad to see someone having my thoughts about community driven versus company driven operating systems, and refine it to a cohesive statement. Thank you LLTV!
I have been using Debian on my game servers since Debian 8. Everytime there is an update/upgrade it typically breaks the server, well the COPY of the server I was testing the update/upgrade on. Debian has NO LTS. It is what it is, a rock solid distro with fantastic community support, but not necessarily concerned with version backward compatibility. (case in point, the update that replaced MySQL with MariaDB, which broke databases until all of the MySQL libraries were uninstalled and removed and replaced with MariaDB ones, and a lot of recompiling done.) This puts server admins in a difficult position. Do you stick with the old version and not install all the security patches or spend all the time trying to figure out all the places where the upgrade broke things?
At work, we use RHEL for every Linux based system. I think there's a CentOS or two kicking around. Obviously built before the OS's departure. I started Linux using Slackware in the 90s I want to say, but drifted away from Linux because it was just too over the top for compatibility issues, hardware difficulties, driver problems, and all that, and I just didn't have the experience or the "want" at the time to tinker. I've always wanted a machine to RUN and do what I need it to do. If I had a second machine at the time, that might have been different. Then comes real employment, and I was able to afford and be able to maintain my own set of machines. I did end up getting a Linux distribution going JUST for network file sharing at the office, and not Windows (Remember Melissa? Yeah, we got nailed hard on that one). So for that reason, I literally built up a brand new machine, fat drive space, and set it up as a file server using Samba. Then I got into a different job, dumped into the deep end with Linux, and Windows in tandem. 90% of our stuff when I started was RHEL4, so I had to learn it. At home, I started looking at RHEL for stuff for me for my home lab, but, dollars just didn't make sense, and I didn't like paywalls for ANYTHING (Still don't). So I found Ubuntu and Debian and for a while, I was tossing around which I preferred. I eventually settled on Debian. 100% text console stuff though, no UI. My main rig is Win10 that I use every day. My work laptop runs Win10. All my day to day employment revolves around both ecosystems. My three Dell servers are running ProxMox and MOST of the OS's on it are Debian. To me, for my home lab, Linux at its core is what I'm interested in. Short of relearning and reconfiguring for a different directory structure for whatever flavour is all I concern myself with. I don't care about the UI because I don't daily drive or look at a Linux GUI, unless it's text.
It remains to be seen how many will eventually flee the Redhat ecosystem. What many don't understand is that people who run Redhat (and its derivatives) on servers often run Fedora on their desktop. It would be an inconvenience to run a Debian server and Fedora on the desktop. If enough people flee the Redhat server system for Debian, Fedora users will decrease too.
I teach at a tech school, we educate future it admins. We used to teach the students Centos because a lot of corporate stuff uses Redhat, so it was an obvious choice. Then Centos got canned and our linux department rewrote a lot of teaching materials to use Rocky instead, because corporations tend to use Redhat, so why not.. Now our students are being taught Debian instead, because even though Redhat is a big player in the corporate world, they are no longer to be trusted - and we tell the students why.. I wonder if Redhat will still be a preferred corporate choice 5 years from now - our students are moving from "Redhat, yeah I already have experience with that from Centos/Rocky" to "Redwhatnow?!? I'm used to Debian"..
Corporations are about making money and power. A corporation may start out with good intentions and values but time and changes in leadership will bring it back to money and power. We are attracted to the apparent benefits of their advances in technology and software but they end up being traps to ensnare us. How many of the corporations who have used Red Hat for years can afford to move away? Such moves are expensive in both time and money. Switching mission critical systems may be impossible. Google did the same sort of thing by initially offering excellent software for “free”. Today, we realize the true cost. Yet, how many of us can really move away or even really want to move away. We are addicted to the bells and whistles. We are addicted to the ecosystem. They have many of us trapped. I respect and applaud the courage of Learn Linux TV for moving away from Ubuntu to Debian. That cannot be easy as I’m sure a lot of testing and research is taking place before any total replacement takes place. Kudos to everyone involved.
I'm a little bit confused about one single thing in the red-hat drama: where Fedora sits in there? Isn't it also a distribution based on RH? Am I missing something? I've used Ubuntu and its flavours for about 10 years, Arch for some time, new user to the Fedora community. Do I have to think about letting go Fedora and instead give another shot to Arch? I switched to Fedora just to avoid snap. I know I can apt purge snapd, but it seems to me switching to another platform to be a safer way to do so. Also, sorry to listen you'll drop your flavour. I didn't know about it, or I'll definetely tried it. I don't know if now it has any sense, being discontinued.
@@CrossHusky that also doesn't mean changes to RHEL won't effect other red hat projects certainly. There will be consequences and that will affect red hats decisions in the future. At best it will create friction on the core and community built outer layer.
We starting switching to Ubuntu lts releases once the Centos 8 support debacle. Originally we were one of the companies that were enticed by the 10 year support. We decided we're done with them after that.
I think the scarier part is what about the projects they brought to the Linux ecosystem? Ansibel, Wayland, Podman, etc... If you can't trust Red Hat with their distro why trust them with the rest of the projects they have built?
we're already screwed with systemd, wich in itself is a good idea and decent implementation, but what can we expect from red hat will they close the source to systemd too?
I agree with what was presented in this video and I read a number of comments, which all were very well articulated. Something that I would add to all the comments is that there is a difference between choosing a server OS and a workstation OS. There are a number of factors that come into consideration when choosing a server OS. The workstation situation is not quite as crucial, because you can easily replace whatever workstation you have on your laptop or computer and customize it to what your needs are. In addition, the size of your business and what your business does can influence the choice of a server OS. From the philosophy of what linux is about, I totally disagree with Red Hat's approach. If I wasn't an enterprise business or if I was a developer, for example, I would also be very upset with the change of direction. For companies that are already paying for an enterprise license, I don't know if they will be as impacted as the ones that don't. The move towards Debian that was mentioned in this video, at least for the file server, is never a bad option. From my experience, Debian is quite stable as an OS and there are no crazy unexpected changes. As far as the software packages being a bit older, I never had an issue with that, because on the server side, I don't have to necessarily depend on the software packages for my applications. I can download whatever version I want and install them manually. Only thing I would be concerned about is hardware support. However, since a lot of server installations are virtual, even that has become less of a factor. If you are independent, not an enterprise business, you have the flexibility of choosing your own direction and in that case I would focus on the applications you are dependent on and choose the server OS that best accommodates that. Also, you have to take in consideration what your skill sets and experience are at the moment. The more skill and experience you have the more options that will work for you, because at the core, it's all linux. If you are an enterprise business, things can be a bit more complicated. The business entity, most likely, will insist on having a relationship with a company such as Red Hat. The last point I wanted to address is trust. When it comes to philosophies, which some linux and unix operating systems are based on, there usually won't be a lot of drastic changes. However, in business, sometimes you have to be flexible for the sake of your business success. For those of you who own businesses, I imagine you've had to do the same at some point. Businesses are continually looking at changes that they need to make to increase revenue. Sometimes, when they are in a difficult situation, there is a risk that they could make a decision that negatively impacts customers and users. This is what I am guessing is partially behind what Red Hat is doing.
I don't think it is fair to lump Canonical and Red Hat into the same category. Red Hat is locking down their source code. While I'm not the biggest fan of snaps, there is no part of Ubuntu that keeps me from installing Flatpacks on my desktop if I chose to do so. That's a far cry from the Red Hat model which locks it down and you have no choice but to pay. I've always understood Red Hat to be in the business of support that they sell to clients. They want their distro to be the most stable and reliable being that it is an enterprise offering. You don't want your server to crash due to any bugs. That's why I don't get them locking it down. They sell support, the distro has been free. I really think it might have something to do with Oracle Linux, but not sure exactly why.
Is it legal under the GPL for RedHat to do this? (10:48) Linus T has said that the best thing he ever did was to GPL the Linux kernel. The effect of the Gnu Public Licence is that if you modify GPL'd code you must make the source available. Sure, you can stop others using your trademarks (as Red Hat has always done) but you can't stop them from using your code once the trademarks are removed. What am i missing here, please?
Honestly i always was wary of company backed distros since sooner or later they'll backstab you but since i fell in love with fedora i ignored it. However redhat's continued and troubling behavior made me reconsider. So is there any distro similar to fedora that isn't opensuse or Arch and it's derivatives? since i kinda had a bad experience with those distros before and i don't wanna repeat it. TIA.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. I think IBM / RedHat is going to have a bitter reminder of this lesson very soon if they continue their actions.
Isn't Pop!_OS owned by System76?. I'd just skip and move to Debian or some other community-run distro at this point. I realize that system76 is a stalwart supporter of open source but at this poin it's not a question of IF that will change but WHEN.
That's basically what I was saying - I started migrating servers and the rest will follow. I prioritized servers since that's what faces the public. A decision on workstations is next. If System76 stays with Ubuntu, I don't know if I will continue with them. Debian on the desktop is VERY likely for me at this point.
Pop and Mint, being based on Ubuntu, have always irked me as 'second derivatives' of Debian. Both are good projects, but I wish they would have just based themselves on Debian instead.
I already made a choice to go with Debian. Right now, I'm writing a script to install Debian (with BTRFS subvolumes for snapper and systemd-boot, besides the know bugs), and I loving this! Debian is really great!
@@barma1309 It's good enough, for my personal use. It's my personal machine, workstation, I don't intend to use Debian on a server yet (as I don't need/use servers).
I want to love open source but I've been disillusioned by trying multiple Linux distros. I'm finding that they don't quite match the capabilities, utility, responsiveness, polish, and usability of closed source apps and operating systems. I've been trying to wrap my head around the concept of open source by trying to understand what makes it better than closed source. I'm not a programmer so the claim of being able to inspect the code yourself is moot as I can't do that with either product. Also all the problems of trust and politicking that are supposed to be the downside of corporate owned releases seem just as bad in the open source world. Who really gets to contribute code to an open source OS? It seems, to me, that even open source releases are effectively controlled by but a small number of people who can actually approve changes and commit them. You can't tell me that there's never in-fighting and drama going on between those programmers. I don't buy the fantasy that programmers are the platonic ideal of objectivity, efficiency, fairness, and zero drama. You don't want to be at the whims of some company? Well, you're just going to find yourself at the whims of a small number of programmers who just happen to have a wild hair on a Wednesday and decide to proceed with the exact worst implementation because it "makes sense" to their brain but makes zero sense to an average user. For example, why are terminal commands so wildly different between distros? I'm pretty annoyed and far less productive with having to learn and unlearn and relearn basic commands and switches. I have so many suggestions for improvement in Linux but all I can expect from the open source community is an inane defense of why the way it is, is the absolute best and only way it should be. There's too much ego in the community for progress at a meaningful pace to occur. After playing around with some Linux distros, I've found that open source OSs are written by programmers for programmers, end users be damned. Not only does the open source community not like the opinion of basic end-users, they actively disdain users. What's worse, is there's zero incentive for them to make their product better. At least with a corporation, they have a block of paying customers who have some chance (maybe a small chance, but a chance nonetheless) of displaying their satisfaction by taking their money elsewhere which can prompt a change. As an end user, I'd rather use a product from a company that I can exert a feather's weight of influence with than an open source alternative from a community that hates me. I would say you people need to get your act together, but I'm not really inclined to tell people what to do, especially when I have to concede, you get what you pay for.
You have mentioned things which I have talked about. Whenever I criticize Linux and Foss to improve themselves, zealots come and lecture me... But offer me no solutions. I can say this as a programmer and daily user.
I think this is why Linux Mint always builds a Debian release with each new release based on Ubuntu. Smart move on Mints part.
Lmde which is cool but lm includes a way to install device drivers rather easy
Yep. Love that project.
My friend.... You are 100% correct. It was several years ago when Canonical started to go against Community Standards and tried to "Nickel and Dime" other distros for using Ubuntu as their base that gave birth to LMDE. Team Mint knew what was coming and got prepared. I'm still hoping that 2023 will be the last year LM is based on Ubuntu and go 100% Debian.
@fahimhoq3166 No
thousands of Linux Mint users are right now saying: "I warned you guys." After arguing with Canonical for what... five years or more😀
The worst about this situation is that we need funding and the vast majority of it comes from corporations.
@@FuriouS1976 most of these companies aren't using that much software from random garage hackerdude
@@notoriouslycuriouswombat Who said they were?
People spend $1000 on some sweatshop hardware like an iPhone; but they are unwilling to donate $5 to a great OS like Debian
@@ultravioletiris6241 That is because it is free so why should they pay for it, that is a lot of the Linux mentality.
@@FenrasulfrSadly true. You either have to donate, accept that you are forced to pay, or accept to be at the mercy of companies.
My hunch is that System 76 are likely to parallel their Rust development with a more direct relationship to Debian, bypassing Ubuntu, over the next few years and for much the same reasons: They're trying to run a business and they won't appreciate being dicked about by Canonical. Mint already did this of course with LMDE because of unease with the status of Ubuntu.
Goddamn I hate Ubuntu haters like you.
I love that idea but I wish they would base on Sid or otherwise somehow do a rolling release like tumbleweed
If in 2023 people don't understand that we can get more things done by working together instead against each other then we are just screwed, the future only exists with open source software.
Idk open source software is mostly hippies crying about drama and buggy software. Thats why people pay money for quality.
@@jhoughjr1 As we've never seen payed software failing....
That's what ...
@@jhoughjr1 you must be a Windows dev. Or even worse, a Windows user who's not skilled enough to use Linux. Because this is the most ignorant comment ive ever heard. The internet and todays technology as you know it were built on Linux. They were built on trust. We dont doubt our systems integrity, because we can read our systems code, and even change it. And considering that Linux is free, I would say its even better quality than Windows or MAC. Maybe 20 years ago no. But today, we have distros that are just as sleek and modern as Windows and Mac (PoP OS, Elementary, Garuda come beautiful straight outta the box), while also offering customization and control to a point the Windows and Mac would never dare. So what are you paying for? Beauty? Linux has it. User-Friendly? Linux now has it. Stability? lol. Fedora and Debian are just as secure as Windows with less bugs and viruses. You're definitely not paying for privacy. lol. So....what are you paying for? The ability to install a program with one click of a button? You can with Linux now too. (Most common packages at least ). I literally cant think of anything. Oh yeah, i know what youre paying for...that back door the U.S. government has to pay people to maintain and monitor. Have fun with that. lol
I'm glad Redhat and Canonical have done what they have done. Maybe we can finally get away from the ivory tower of corporate distros, and community distros will reap the benefits.
I'm on Arch based Distros after being on Gentoo. Sure I've started with Ubuntu .. erm it was 2010 ^^. But I switched pretty fast.
I prefer community driven Distros and those moves and behavior of corporations just proving my point, and yours. I agree!
The entire community is watching RedHat right now. If they somehow get to have their cake and eat it too then we’ll see an all out blitz of corporate acquisitions of every last distribution with a corporate structure.
Debian is already been seeing an increase of users since the amazing release of D12.
If you think this is bad, wait till the day comes when the hardware companies (Intel, Samsung, AMD, Apple, WD, Seagate etc) start to charge subscription for use of their hardware... Yes, their hardware not yours. And by the way, just because corporations want to make a profit, it doesn't make them evil. And just because the Linux community produces free software it doesn't make them saintly. Everything is a trade-off.
@@rcdenis1 A corporations making a profit from the work for others that produced it for free use is evil.
Just wanted to add my two cents. I work in the government aerospace industry and the powers that be currently prefer Linux distributions that have corporate backing. If something seriously goes wrong, this industry wants to be able to hold someone accountable and/or have someone to help with support.
I'm not defending RH. Just adding some context.
TY for your videos!
You're not wrong, and arguably this is what it's all really about. I suspect it's all about F500 and government customers.
If an organization pays for 500 subscriptions for their Production systems (to have them backed by Standard/Premium Support) and runs another 1500 dev/test systems on Rocky Linux (which would have been on CentOS pre-Stream), Red Hat wants to bring those dev/test systems into the fold. They are providing ways to do this without increasing subscription costs (Developer Subscription for Teams, primarily) which actually should be less-risk for organizations because there would be no difference (no lag) between the current supported RHEL version and Rocky/Alta/whatever.
Red Hat would also benefit from this situation by understanding just how many non-PROD systems an org has deployed; something that they wouldn't have accurate insight into right now if they are on Rocky/etc. Conceivably, these systems would report back into RH Insights, which is a great resource for Operations teams (big org benefit) as well as providing insights to RH account managers (I'm not crystal clear on how much of that info is automatically shared, or if it's negotiated in the service contract -- I don't mean to speak out of turn here).
Also while many may recoil at this type of information harvesting/sharing being a big intrusion by Red Hat, understand that the management of IT organizations get a lot of benefit from this as well. Whether it is right for a particular org or not is entirely up to them; I'm not here to judge.
I know that here in the UK over a decade ago many government bodies, schools, etc would only use Windows and proprietary software for the same reason. However, many were unwilling to make a contribution to Wikepedia, and similar even though they were using it all the time.
We don't trust the government either kiddo. Or the aerospace industry either. They are the problem and the cause of all the problems. Greed, nepotism, information control, lies, tyranny. Grow up.
That makes distribution selection easy if you're using Linux for your defense corporation. The question is, "Which Linux distribution do you choose if you need enterprise capability and you don't want to be ripped off by insiders?"
@@brettlaw4346 Linux is quite capable of going closed source at any time and any entity is free to go open or closed. The choice is up to We the people as well, to decide if we want transparency, or lies, deception, censorship and endless wars. :D
You simply cannot trust companies which are public companies depending on market.
Public companies are always demonic
We cannot trust the market.
Then you realized that almost half of distros today are company owned and those pushing innovation in linux are usually company owned distros....
@@ChimeraX0401it's almost as if money brings resources for more development, right
@@Dan01-01 I love company involvement in software. It really has brought a lot of good code to the table. In my experience, I don't want to use software primarily backed and provided by a company for my own stuff. Contributed to? Most definitely. Owned? Nah. Or if it is a company/corporate owned product, have an extra tool on the shelf as a backup
That was a comprehensive and useful look at why corporate distributions have broken the trust. Having said that, all code in a distribution is licensed under the Gnu Public License v2 or v3. This means that at a minimum, a company has to make the source code available, at a zero or non-zero cost, and that all licencees must make the source code available to everybody to whom they distribute their releases. If RedHat/IBM violates that, they will be sued, and they will lose. There have been many cases filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against wealthy violators of the GPL.
The GPL applies to source code, which includes the code to build and package the software into a distribution. So in that sense it is open, and that's why those two derivatives of CentOS 8 can exist.
However, when somebody says "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", the Linux part is licensed under GPL but the "Red Hat Enterprise" part is not. The folks at Red Hat have the right to curate the software in their distribution, and curation always involves making decisions with which people don't agree. And that is because "RHEL" or "Ubuntu" are products which are derived from the open-source Linux. One of the reasons Linux distribution owners curate Linux distro products is so that they can efficiently provide long-term support and security patches. If they had to test the incredibly large numbers of permutations and combinations of software to ensure reliable support, they would never be able to do it profitably. i.e. Efficient (and even free) long term support is what we get in exchange for disagreeable decisions made by the curators of Linux distribution. That problem remains whether the Linux distributor is a big corporation or a community of like-minded Linux advocates.
IBM in the last 20 some years has done quite a bit of questionable cost-cutting measures for short-term profits/growth arguably at the expense for long-term profits/growth; I remember starting around 2003 when they sold their hard drive division to Hitachi and then their PC business (most notable the ThinkPad brand which is the gold standard for enterprise laptops even today) to Lenovo in 2005. Xbox 360 and PS3 were using IBM CPU tech in the mid 2000s. Even Apple was using their CPU tech until 2005. Moreover, IBM eventually sold their server business to Lenovo in 2014. Rather than spend more money for R&D on core competencies or innovate, they mainly did stock buybacks especially when they were run by Samuel J. Palmisano.
In short, I believe all this crappy behavior in Redhat results from the higher-ups in IBM with their bean counter mentality to reach certain so-called "KPIs." However like many people, I think this will destroy a lot of goodwill, brand awareness, and overall trust which have helped cement RHEL as the "standard" in its industry. If you look at IBM's stock price since the turn of the century, it's been more or less the same, but adjusted for inflation, it's actually worth less now than back then.
ibm lives from quarter to quarter because they are public traded
IBM has been making faaaarrrrrr more questionable choices in their pursuit of profit over their history than anything to do with Hitachi, Xbox, etc... Ok, less questionable and more straight up evil villain. I mean, Nazis. Apartheid. Little things.
@@willi1978 IBM lives quarter to quarter because they have no vision or competent management.
yeah IBM has been ran into the ground since Pomocino.
The problem when "not engineer" became higher up, same story with phillips
Tinycorelinux has given me what i need to learn how to strip something down & build it back up...i feel like if i get a 27 year old laptop to run a basic system customized by myself then im ready to move even deeper into this linux journey that started over 20years ago as a youth mentor..Thankyou to all the Linux Teachers who keep encouraging others to see the benefits stick with it..🤜🏽🤛🏽💗
GNU/Linux is a community project at it's core. Corporations contribute but also gain vast amount of capital from OUR project. Not the other way around. Community is always the core of this ecosystem. So the main effort an attention SHOULD always be the community oriented ones because that's the tradition and heritage of us. Other ones come and go but they never will/should be the main priority. We are open to them but also doesn't mean we're gonna give them the keys to our houses so the speak. They will help us by contribution, AS LONG AS IT IS PROTABLE. There's no loyalty to beside capital, in corporate world.
Wouldn't be surprised if Linux isn't all but totally co-opted by companies in the future. With Google, IBM, Microsoft and many others having fingers in the pie, eventually the average, regular Joe gets shut out. Perhaps there's something I'm missing or not understanding, but I wouldn't be surprised with that outcome.
@@Xenotypic Then we fork it we are people who supported before company freaks realized they can make money from it. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds are the key people as the masterminds behind this movement. All other left is replaceable at the end. I fully believe in being upfront and real instead of compassionate or inclusive. I am not scared if the corporate crowd that came with shiny new features left. Privacy & Security, self reliance all the way.
To be completely fair 99% of the code for linux and its distributions are contributed by companies. But what makes linux unique is that it is multiple employees of these companies working together without an end goal of profit. Also I think most people good enough to contribute are obviously going to take positions that will pay them for their time.
Corporations like IBM/Red Hat picking around the edges of the Linux space are representative of capitalism testing the defenses of one of the few surviving, successful emblems of communist ideals in the world.
@@XrayTheMyth23 Linux kernel started as fun side project for an engineer with love of computers and distaste for current corporate owned, for lack of a better word backward ass policies without proper support because of negligence. You must probably know better than me about the GNU part and Stallman. I don't see any other parts as essential so they should uphold their contract with the foss foundation and not try to skimp, abuse their power or we will create and migrate to new safe heaven. I am very well aware of our situation and the difference of power with our aggressors. However I am not gonna slither, cower or cuck out against any big corporation. This is not the only hill to die in my life but this is critical since it supports other freedom foundations as it is in the infrastructure.
Well said. I came to the same conclusions 20 years ago, when it was time for me to settle down on a distribution for life. I figured if I was going to commit to Linux I would stay away from corporate distros. for the same reasons you mentioned here.
I've been using Fedora as a daily driver for a while now. It was one thing when when Red Hat decided to pull their stunt with CentOS but this new revelation has me considering switching my daily driver and server OS. I have also been studying for RHCSA certification but now I feel like maybe I should start looking at a vendor neutral cert.
I like fedora. Should we move to Debian 12 desktop? It's stable but outdated compared to fedora.
Any other distros (no rolling updates, please) that's up to date like fedora with gnome? For 2010s hardware?
Thanks!
@@investrada If you like Debian 12 (stable) and absolutely need one or two packages from testing (or sid), apt-pinning is a thing and you can get the best of both worlds. Note that with Sid-parts this does have the potential to break your stable system, so you would want to have some good regression testing, but it's possible.
What is the main goal of any system administrator? Stability. What does any system administrator hate? Surprises. Any surprises, both good and bad. Because they are unexpected and non-predictable. Stability is the base of any system. And RedHat has lost its stability. We cannot trust them anymore. They are too surprising for my taste.
If you need support use Debian and buy the support from some company providing that kind of service. You can switch that company anytime if they fail you.
I think that many of Red Hats intentions have been overruled by IBM. This is why the apparently contradictory statements. I would look for a number of leadership changes in Red Hat in the coming year.
@@donaldmickunas8552 Of course. And I even think that IBM wants to kill RedHat and make them their internal division without all their freedoms. They make it slowly to prevent employees from rage quitting and to prevent stock fall.
Maybe not immediately, but I have a feeling that a lot of us will land on Debian 12 for both our servers and desktops. Just a thought after digesting the news mentioned in the movie for a couple days... And I was (until the last weekend) a full blown RPM/Red Hat distros user...
And to think, I've predicted that Debian 12 will become the most downloaded release in the history of that distribution. I'm not sure if I made that prediction publicly or not (I guess I just did). It'll be interesting to see the download numbers after all of this, so I definitely agree!
@@LearnLinuxTV It definitely could be a wild year for Debian!
Welcome to our precious and much valued home (debian), just please don't try to make it another RHEL, leave the RHEL ideas in the RHEL side and embrace Debian for what it is. Our beloved Debian is what it is today thanks to that particular way of running the distro approach.
For a reference of what I mean, look at the political and social mess that the Californians are making in Texas, the flee California because it's doomed, but don't fully embrace the Texas way and are corrupting a perfectly working society over there too 💀
@@KnightRiderOfVoidWhy would anyone flee to Texas as long as Paxton and his friends are in charge?
@@johndododoe1411 well there are always reasons but don't ask me, I'm not he one doing it hahahah... May be it's just a freeing experience to leave California even if you're a mostly brainwashed woke I guess
Debian has its share of developer drama, but all in all, it's a solid distribution with a trustworthy organization behind it. I'm very happy with it, and have been for decades.
Jay, thanks for this video. You covered one of the main reasons why I joined Debian 22 years ago and never left, even during crisis times that happened during our long journey. The community of peers is THE reason to stay in a distro project (as well as any other FOSS project). Having a company that owns and decides for a whole community is a certain recipe for problems one day or another. The other reason is a sort of egoistic one: when something does not work I can fix it by myself or at least discuss with teams and maintainers, as well as release managers about possible solutions for updating next point release. This is the way.
I still like and use openSUSE, despite its corporate lineage. I can't find a more stable rolling release. It's also the best XFCE implementation I've seen.
is it not different though? that suse is just a sponsor for opensuse and not the actual code provider, in fact isn't it that suse enterprise is based on opensuse?
The difference is honestly an American company vs a German one. SUSE is not an American corporation so there are cultural differences.
This is the same thing as Netflix and the password sharing. They're just pissing off users who are ultimately a strain on the system, but still add benefit. But these orgs who aren't paying for enterprise support, very few of them will suddenly start paying and I suspect most will just switch to something different rather than just start paying. Much like the Twitter and Reddit APIs, I think we're falling out of a golden age of computer and internet progress as big corps start to tighten their purse strings.
Bustacheeze.........Yup, Linux users mostly don't like purse strings. It's not like RedHat offers anything that other don't for free.
I work for a very large tech company and we're currently in talks with Red Hat to onboard our current centos 7 infra to RHEL. I heard Red Hat is willing to bend over backwards to give us a good deal because we will end up being one of their biggest customers if we decide to go for that. Us in the FOSS community don't like what Red Hat is doing and hope they would fail but unfortunately corporations, especially ones with the money, will always choose the path of least resistance because they can't afford causing any disruptions to their business operations. They also like the fact by signing a support contract with Red Hat now they have something legally binding, and not just a pinky promise like that of Centos which they can walk back on any time with no legal repercussions. At least in the short term, I'm not seeing Red Hat going anywhere.
@@cobra-chicken I'm not surprised they're willing to do whatever to get customers signed on. Get the customers in and squeeze more money out of them later. Not in an evil sort of way, but it's one of the foundational principles of the subscription model. And it'll work out as long as Red Hat can prove their value.
Just wait until RHEL turns into Creative Cloud. 🤮🤮
After I heard the news about IBM bought Red hat, I started My migration plan of all my Red hat Linux based distributions. Now I'm happy for that decision.
It's almost like someone at IBM is constantly thinking 'what decision could we make that would be a disaster for us and our users?' and then they make that decision.
I read in news, they layoff lots of people and replace them with AI.
They built people sorting machines for the NAZI's
IBM's German subsidiary, known as "Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH" (Dehomag), played a role in providing punch-card tabulation machines to the German government and various industries, including the military.
This is very wise. Do not trust corporation. You can't predict how they roll you.
This is one of the reasons why I stuck with Debian and Debian-based distros even when companies were looking specifically for RedHat knowledge and RHEL certification. RHEL has always been pseudo proprietary and I've disliked it since the beginning. I now dabble with multiple distros but I am vary of tools built by for-profit companies that can pull a RedHat move at any minute (I am specifically talking about Canonical's Ubuntu and EQT Partner's OpenSUSE)
OK, but Satellite and Ansible Automation Platform are some useful tools for big (corp) environments... there is very little Free Software that approaches that level of sophistication (upstream AWX is OK; Ansible without Tower/controller is pretty good but the pieces don't come together in the same way).
This is why I come back to Linux Mint and LMDE. No stupid corporate nonsense just good software that releases when its ready, not on a time schedule.
But that can also mean reduced security as seen in 2016 / 2017 when Linux Mint isos were distributed with malware.
@@Alexander-ix2jp That could happen to any distro, even Debian or Arch. People pick on Mint for when that happened and yes it was bad it happened but they did correct the issue.
@@warthunder1969 I agree mate, nothing is 100% secure nowadays. And you're right on the second part too, they fixed the issue. My problem is that back then some folks from the Ubuntu community warned them about Mint not being secure enough and it wasn't taken seriously until the breach happened. I'm all for community distros, but I do want security to be taken seriously and treated as a top tier priority (ideally without sacrificing ease of use too much). Not sure how Mint is doing today though, left when that happened back then and haven't tried since, so my experience might be outdated by this point. Ymmv as always 👍🏻
@@Alexander-ix2jp True. I can't comment either on the security part. I guess with community distros we take it for granted
@@Alexander-ix2jp - compromised ISOs never passed checksum verification. If someone won't do the basics of validating a download authenticity, security isn't very import to them.
There is a legal loophole that will allow Alma Linux and Rocky Linux to continue to provide RHEL clones, at least for a while. First of all, I am not a lawyer, however I was a program manager at a very major company. Lets just say that everyone who is reading this knows this company well. The product my division made mixed highly proprietary code in a Linux system. We had to be extremely careful to adhere to all proprietary licenses as well as all the open source licenses. I have spent many hours directly working with lawyers to make sure that I understood the intricacies of all the open source licenses so I can work with the software developers to make sure everything was done correctly. This was part of my job for over 10 years.
There are two important facts about Copy Left licenses. 1) Copy Left licenses require that if you distribute a binary derived from Copy Left license source code to someone outside your organization, then you must make the source code available to them. If the person receiving the derived work asks for the source, the distributing organization has to give it to them. This is why Red Hat can place the source code behind a paywall and/or only give it out to people who are subscribers. This is absolutely legal. The last thing I want to say on the topic is that while I don’t have to give the Copy Left licensed source to someone who I did not make a binary distribution (i.e. make it publicly post it on the web), I can make it available to the general public if I choose to do so. 2) Copy Left licenses requires you to license all derived work with the same license as the original source code. The Copy Left licenses expressly forbids organizations from placing additional restrictions on derived works. Of course, this goes out the the window if Red Had owns the copyright to the source code. In this case Red Had is free to make future distributions of the same code under a non Copy Left license. However, then can’t retroactively change the license to code already distributed under a Copy Left license. So, If I have a copy of CentOS that contains a Copy Left licensed version of something, Red Hat can reach into my computer and claim that code is now proprietary.
Putting all of this together leads to a legal fact that Red Hat hopes doesn’t become known to the general public. If I pay for a subscription to RHEL, I can demand to get all of the Copy Left licensed source code. While Red Hat doesn’t have to give me any non Copy Left licensed source, their customers will demand it, so there is a near 100% chance that they will distribute non Copy Left , Open Source licensed code ( MIT and BSD are considered Open Source, but not Copy Left). Once a customer has the Copy Left licensed source code, he can do anything he wants to it, including posting it online or directly give it to Alma and Rocky Linux. This is equally absolutely legal and there is nothing that Red Hat can do about it.
Red Had can close this loop hole by changing the license to any code that they own the copyright to a proprietary license. That will prevent customers from the re-distribution the source. We just need to hope that Red Had customers refuse to purchased licenses to a Linux distribution that contains significant amounts of proprietary licensed code.
Yes! I dreamt of something similar! (though what I dreamt of was worse than what you imagined)
@@kbhasiThey impose restrictions on their customers to block that .
@@johndododoe1411Nope. They cannot. If they don't own the code in question (like the Linux kernel or the GNU coreutils), they they have no right to not follow the license. They can make future versions of software they own the rights to not GPL anymore, but what's already been released cannot be made proprietary and what they don't own the rights to cannot be made proprietary without express consent of the developers, and good luck getting 5% of those developers to allow for that use when the GPL was created _for this very reason._
And also, if Red Hat stops doing with business with enough customers, they'll run out of willing customers and there goes all of their profits! 😂
IBM ruins everything it touches. Softlayer was awesome. IBM made it suck. When IBM took over Red Hat, I saw this coming. Red Hat just needs to fork FreeBSD and just keep it closed source since that’s what they seem to want.
But FreeBSD is miles behind the Linux in everything. But I do love FreeBSD myself, it is not just the performer that Linux is.
I'm still surprised IBM went and purchased RedHat and not SuSE. SuSE had a long standing Linux support for many of IBMs hardware such as s390, as400/iSeries, x86 for many years, even decades.
@@BenTygeroh it's really simple, SUSE is german, not the same as buying a US company
@@KnightRiderOfVoid I mean, SUSE was already owned by an American company (Novell) at one point in their life, and it was utter hell for SUSE with layoffs galore. The only good thing to come from that era is openSUSE.
2011 was a breadth of fresh air for SUSE and openSUSE.
@@BenTyger Because IBM wants what is already established, Redhat has the government linux server market. Then they run it into the ground, its the IBM way.
Red Hat was my first Linux distro back in '96. Back then, the OS was on CDs as part of a Linux book.
Ah the good old days when we went to the computer store and bought software in a flashy box. I miss those days but I don't miss crt monitors 😄
@@timburns2374 Or the days of going to Border's and leaving with a handtruck stack of $50-$80 computer books - that will all be obsolete in a few years.
chuckcrizer.......My first Linux was Redhat 5.1 on a System on a Disk I bought back in '99. Still have that old IDE disk sitting in a drawer. lol.
That would be the original Red Hat Linux which would evolve in the early 2000s to become Fedora Core and eventually Fedora. Wow. RHEL was a separate product.
If the point of RedHat's decision is to stop downstream distros then how could Alma and Rocky figure this out? I have a hunch that the real target is Oracle and they are willing to sacrifice Alma and Rocky on the way.
Goofy though because solid forks exist, anyone using red hat can beat feet without getting caught up too badly unless they have an addiction to some proprietary stuff.
@@GoonyMclinux True. I actually lean a bit more to RedHats side of the argument.
@@ryanleemartin7758 All the big guys are locking down but I think redhats is more a defensive posture to keep the code more static, although it sucks for downstream many of the downstream distros already have a backup plan, reminds me of when Apple closed off Herd and everyone was pissed.
Its so odd to see Red Hat and Microsoft essentially switch positions…
@@tolstoy143 embrace, extend, extinguish?
Well said Jay! Well said! TRUST is key. I appreciate your video and perspective. I have almost everything here running Debian - and with Bookworm, am even looking to phase out the remainder of servers. On my desktops, I'm using LMDE (Mint + Debian) and have found it lighter than the main Mint releases based on Ubuntu.
One thing I just discovered is that Debian 12 (Bookworm) has LXD available natively in the repository. That means NO SNAP requirement. I'm pondering moving some of my Proxmox LXC instances to pure Debian/LXD. I'm going to re-watch your LXD video and do some tinkering this weekend.
Surely the likes of the Apache Foundation, Mozilla and FSF can stop Red Hat (aka IBM) dead in their tracks for their contravention of the source code publishing clauses in their licenses? Heck, isn't the Linux kernel published under a license that requires source code publication?
No they can’t. Only a court can.
They are providing the source code with their product. But the product is behind a different license.
I don’t blame RedHat. It was good while it lasted and now it is time to move on to Debian.
True I mean unless this gets taken to court and maybe a new rewrite of the gpl is needed to close this loophole IDK it's SUS
@@joshallen128And that's the problem. The GPLv3 fixed that. Guess what didn't move to the v3 license. The Linux kernel. Guess what did? The GNU coreutils, aka, bash, emacs, etc.
For these obvious reasons, i have switched from ubutnu to debian, the transition was smooth.
The thing that sucks is driver support
@@joshallen128Not really anymore as of Debian 12. Nonfree firmware is now included if the live environment detects it is needed and only if it is needed.
Always stay true to your convictions. I recently switched to Debian for the same reasons on what Ubuntu is doing. Using qtile so far on it.
Gnome's leadership also thinks it should be nearly impossible to uninstall mahjong without putting users into the situation where you can uninstall the entire desktop, since, you know, solitaire is a vital dependency. Also all 8000 translations in firefox. The list goes on. Soooooo, probably not the best thing to raise up as a bad thing to do.
The irksome thing for me re: Gnome (and for that matter KDE) is that every new iteration of the environment lost some flexibility/configurability. I've been using linux as my primary home and work OS for over 25 years now, and I am very particular about how my X desktop is laid out. First Gnome, then KDE, made it more difficult and then impossible to shove the toolbars/widgets/stickynotes, terminal windows, etc, around precisely how I'd like. How is it that making it less possible for the user to do things the way they want making things *more* user friendly?!?!?! Gnome vs. Unity vs. KDE? XFCE wins for me. :D
Is fedora going to lose its charm
They are community driven and is upstream from Red Hat.
@@GoatzombieBubba Anything could happen if their masters decide otherwise. All this upstream/downstream is bullshit
@@GoatzombieBubba community driven but Red Hat owns Fedora trademark and a lot of Red Hat employees work on Fedora
What has been overlooked here is the APPLICATIONS. Enterprises deploy applications, some of which is "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS). In the past, some folks would use one of the free RHEL respins (Scientific Linux, CentOS, Oracle Linux - and more recently AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux) for their non-production testing. Traditionally COTS products would "certify" on either RHEL/CentOS or SUSE.
With the rise of OpenStack (where Ubuntu Server was a default OS), more COTS software is now certified on Ubuntu.
But there isn't an extensive COTS certified list for Debian.
And that's why IBM's announcement last week has caused a lot of turmoil. Some of these commercial customers don't appreciate the idea of being "forced" into buying RHEL, especially in the current worldwide economic situation.
wow u actually said a lot of things and it didn't even mean anything.
Interesting
@@zenethboiron8563 I truly hope that's a joke or else you need to learn how to read.
I've been a fedora user for 13 years.... I don't really want to switch, but I'd rather do so before redhat/IBM destroy it too.
@@FuriouS1976 I run Debian on my servers but packages are really outdated for a daily driver especially if you're a developer. That was mainly why Fedora was so attractive.
Well, Flatpak is highly promoted by Red Hat, the #1 competitor to Canonical. So it's a "them vs us" in this case. Aside all that, indeed RH has every right to protect their product. And if any dev wants to support RHEL, the free dev licenses should be enough. But if you use Linux FOR the apps that are created for it, nothing stops you from switching to another OS if you don't want to pay licenses. As for Canonical, it probably won't go the RH way as they are not the source but an intermediary, Debian is the source here & every sane sysadmin should be thankful for Debian's existence.
Debian is awesome; can't argue with that, and Debian 12 is probably the best version of Debian yet, with almost all DEs (apart from GNOME) on their latest version at the time of Bookworm's (Debian 12) release, Flatpak now on a version that is fully functional, and nonfree drivers included on the installation media when needed (which on modern hardware is pretty much a given), I think Debian could overtake Red Hat and I hope more companies support it, because it truly embodies the spirit of FOSS: Collaboration between many different users making a product better for all of them and more.
I think Red Hat had their moment in the sun, but as they say:
"You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." - They.
Isn't RHEL also an intermediary? Fedora and CentOS Stream are both upstream of it.
Yes, not many shareholders invest in privacy and freedom.
15:45 Yes, but there is more than one big blob of people when it comes to desktop environments and a community is more than just people in general or volunteers who share a common interest. It needs some sort of relationship between those people.
As a noob im just grateful for guys like yourself & chris titus & a few others that keep us with solutions to fit our needs ...im compiling from kernel and building on top step by step...i will be honest the commercialization and all the legal stuff makes it a little intimidating for people that want to learn the code base neccessary to build our own things...but i keep going i love learning & building useful things
The legal stuff is one reason why I use Free/OpenBSD primarily now, and generally ignore copyleft software when I am building something. Too much legal stuff to worry about when I just want to build something fun and cool
@@classicrockonlyThe problem with that is that any person or company can make alterations to the code (including bug fixes) and make the result proprietary under permissive licenses. That's why (in my opinion) GNU & Linux are much better and more successful; copyleft is meant to give everybody the same freedoms that the original copyleft code writers had.
If all you want to do is build something fun and cool, their is no legal issue, as long as you have code, you can do whatever you want with it. You can just not share what you made with others.
@@cameronbosch1213 thus, you restrict the user and developer and violate freedom 0. I would surely call Linux very successful, but it most certainly is not because of its license
@classicrockonly That _is_ one of the reasons it was successful. Probably not the _only_ reason, but it _was_ a reason.
On a similar vein, FreePBX is now owned and run by Sangoma and runs on a Linux known as Sangoma Linux. I used to run FreePBX long before it was owned by Sangoma and back then it was "Open Source". However, since the "FreePBX" has run on Sangoma Linux the FreePBX prooduct has become a pain in the backside to get to function the way I used to get it to work. I can't help suspect that there are underlying non-published changes in the Sangoma linux that effectively causes FreePBX to be problematic unless it is installed on in-house Sangoma equipment that I presume actually uses a completely different Sangoma Linux. I have as a result abandoned anything FreePBX and everything Sangoma. They broke my trust.
Yeah, I feel pretty much the same. All those hours spent on distro I cannot continue to work with because of all the drama they create. I am also moving to Debian, I hope this one will stay drama free, at least until I get retired 😊
Believe me, if Debian attempted to pull a Red Hat, there would be much more concerning matters...
I’m literally in the middle of studying for the RHCE and I kickstarted my Linux studies with RHEL-based distros :(
Complete your certification as planned. This announcement from Red Hat shouldn’t affect large RHEL corporations/subscribers in the long run. That’s where RHEL certification is valuable.
RHEL is still good to learn for enterprise support. Official RHEL ISOs work just fine to learn.
I absoloutely agree. Switched back to Debian on all servers since the snap package pressure. My favorite distribution on Desktop machines is Mint for over a decade. Every year I try different distros because of my nosiness... I see some fancy stuff (mostly on this great channel) and I check it out... no-brainer with Proxmox, nowadays (also learned here). But in the end I always find myself using Mint again. Its fancy (imho), its stable, and the most important thing, I like the spirit of the Mint people (they awake my Ubuntu doubts, some years ago). Thank you for this great channel and for this important video !
IMHO there's two type of Linux distributions: corporate-backed, and hobbyist-level. Let's not forget that many of Debian core packages are maintained by Canonical. The difference is that you get to use it for free because many enterprise customer would rather use something else. If the offering that RHEL made isn't compelling, then as their VP said, use something that make sense for your usecase. Ultimately, FOSS as a community has always been a byproduct of the intersection of capitalistic decisions - again, try looking at the patch contributions for Linux kernel and see how many are contributed by companies.
What in the world has Red Hat done? CentOS killed, and now they are trying to kill all RHEL clones? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat
> Can RedHat do this?
Absolutely, they can do this. Indeed, RedHat/IBM seems to understand the meaning of Free Software and Open Source Development better than most of the FOSS community do.
Free Software does not and never did imply an Open Source Development Model despite the confusion that OSI marketing has created by essentially conflating Free Software with an Open Source Development Model. Moreover, the FSF and GNU project explicitly states this fact in their critique of the term Open Source and in their reassurance that Software Freedom is not incompatible with Commercial and Closed Source Software Development Models.
Finally, developing Free Software -- software which respects it's users freedom -- in no way establishes an obligation between any person (natural or legal) to make source code available to your competitors or the entire human race. That is not what Free Software has ever been. It is a License between the persons making the software available and the persons receiving the software, and nobody gets to dictate who anyone else does business with and on what terms they interact. (If it did then anyone who is involved in FOSS in any way would effectively be making themselves slaves!)
RedHat is [perhaps rightly] getting some pushback from the FOSS community for breaking the social contract that they established with their users but the reasoning that many in the FOSS community are giving for their anger at RedHat ranges from simply wrong to INSANE.
In fact, I hope that by doing this I hope RedHat/IBM proves that it is possible to offer your users Free Software without hiding behind or resorting to the "trinket-selling" that currently typifies the various FOSS Business Models, and which only guarantees that Nonfree Software will remain the lions share of all software developed.
Time for people to adopt #FreeBSD ... rock solid stable, long history, no corporate
@@GladeSwope there's more history in terms of years for FreeBSD than Linux.
@@diablobarcelona FreeBSD lacks the market share and number of developers. The Linux kernel runs on billions of devices (Android smartphones, for example) and tons of servers and a decent number of desktops. FreeBSD runs on a much smaller number of servers, much smaller number of desktops, and a bunch of proprietary routers and appliances whose source is not open.
@@dfs-comedy my original comment was based on enterprise, not desktop, mobiles, whatever. For enterprises a solid, stable and mature operating system alternative would be FreeBSD vs (RHEL/Rocky/Alma/Blahblahblah).
I agree trying *BSD instead of Linux, by the way: I use FreeBSD - and it is working good!. But: What is Linux, which of the thousands distributions? And there is not only a fight between RedHat and others, the fight is between so many others. Linux is a very ununique operating system...
@@ngtube9 Linux is not an operating system. its a kernel. Whereas FreeBSD is a complete operating system 😉(Sorry for being pedantic). Hence why I'm saying for enterprise grade OS, IMO FreeBSD ticks boxes. Sure it will not meet the requirements of all, but certainly most I would say it would especially a conservative enterprise like say a bank, but it would need some sort of commercial support backing.
I had been a CentOS user since about 2005, but when Red Hat pulled the plug on CentOS 8 (which I had just migrated my small home lab to), I simply re-implemented everything in Debian and never looked back. I get where you're coming from with Canonical (and agree), but now I wonder about Suse's relationship with the OpenSuse community. I understand that relationship is and has been very good, but perhaps that reflects a cultural difference, as Suse is a European company. and Red Hat and Canonical are not.
Canonical is U.K. based. Suse I think is German.
UK and US have more company oriented legislation, EU is not so nice to companies and SUSE is a drop in the bucket compared to IBM. Ironically Valve is doing most of the goodwill work massaging hardware support into Linux to escape the clutches of MS and their DX monopoly.
This is a good summary of the situation. I would be following your footsteps with moving things to debian, but i find that debian just isn't close enough to the new programs and updates I want. I would like something community run kinda in-between Ubuntu's stability approach and Arch's bleeding edge approach. I'm getting a bit annoyed by the maintenance burden of Arch too, so that's not helping my situation. I still have time to consider things though because I'm not redoing my servers or Linux systems any time soon though.
What about Debian Sid?
@@tomasagustinbenik38 how up to date is Sid usually? I think I found the kernel version at 6.3.7-1 which should be rather new. If they do keep things up to date like this I would give it a shot. I might have to look more into it.
@@SyphistPrime 6.3.7 is new, yes. Give it a shot. Just be careful with the dependencies of the software you use. If you need to use any special software, with specific dependencies that Debian hasn't updated yet, you may build them from source.
@@tomasagustinbenik38 I'm used to the AUR so building from the source wouldn't be a problem. I might also be open to trying Flatpaks if I can get theming to work with them. Thanks for the suggestion. It's definitely on my radar when it wasn't before.
PureOS has flatpak support and merges packages from Debian Unstable...
RedHat really does some crazy crap for the last time... CentOS... Layoffs... Now the RHEL source code... What the hell?!
Of course; since acquisition decisions made by IBM board, what did people expect? 😂
@@ilyasabi8920 well, IBM started to be an owner since 2014, if I am not mistaken. But what is happening for the last 3 years with RHEL is really crazy. For me personally it is really sad to see it, as I am a Fedora Ambassador & I spend some time on new releases testings etc.. Really looks like it is some dead end..
It's always sad when an engineer like myself watches over the years how money hungry corporations consume everything in their path, just to make money. Jay, nobody is safe, no matter the operating system, because we, the users, actually have no say in the future of any system out there. Ok, maybe through our usage and community services, but other than that, nothing. Funny... I switched from Windows to Linux because of corporate issues and handcuffs, forcing their opinion on users who must pay for everything.
So when does the Mastering Debian Server book come out?
And now they're trying to push telemetry into Fedora 40. TBH, I've tried to avoid corporate-backed distros because of fear that some shit is going to eventually happen. And happened it did.
There are 2 circumstances where it makes financial sense for a corporation to screw over its customers:
1. When your customers have no choice but to continue doing business with you
2. When your customers opinions of you are already so low that nothing you can do could possibly make it any worse
Read into that what you will, speaking purely in general terms wink wink lol
Or even Apple.
Is just as that sometimes both can happen at once. That's when people say "Arr, Hell".
That would be a good name for a distro perhaps?
Man, the new release of Debian 12 Bookworm is very fortuitous for the FOSS community. I have it on my old Asus Intel gen1 i5 laptop and it's the fastest this computer has worked in years. This is my rock music recording machine. A whole hard drive dedicated to recording everything I play on my guitar and band practices. I'm strongly considering moving from Pop!_OS to Debian 12 on my main machine as well (Tuxedo Aura 15 gen1). If I can get my main games on Steam to work Debian will be my new mainstay.
Do you plan to release a new book on maintaining servers, this time focused on Debian?
😅
It's a sad paradox: No money, and open source will slowly die of lack of resources. Inject money (from corpo) and you will be their bitch.
There must be a middle ground, maybe. For now, expect most open source projects "supported" by big corpo, will start to make changes to the way the project is going.
Red Hat is simply doing what most corporations will do, in time.
I've been using Bunsenlabs for a while, it's a continuation of Crunchbang's ethos of efficiency while also tweaking itself to be as power-user friendly as it can be. (only big downside I've run into is having to drop to a safe mode shell just to install Nvidia's drivers) Since you're going on the anti-corp war path anyway, any chance you'll give that one a review?
it begs the question, what is the *new* role of Centos Stream under this scenario?
Sigh. The #1 reason I wanted Ubuntu is for their flavor, Ubuntu Studio. Debian doesnt seem to have anything like that. A nice collection of optional groups of packages, and tweaked and pre-configured for audio. (EDIT: Debian also doesn't have PPAs.)
Now I'm scared for 24.04 LTS.
One showstopper when it comes to my computer in particular is Wi-Fi drivers. I guess it's time to look at a ThinkPenguin adapter, which this channel has covered before.
EDIT: In retrospect, I've always wondered why MXLinux (a Debian derivative, not Ubuntu) topped Distrowatch rankings. What are the chances that it's at least partially for reasons discussed in this video?
I think AV Linux is a good alternative.
I'm certain that this is one important reason underlying the DistroWatch rankings.
Fantastic Video. Very explanatory. In Brazil, in general, not much has been said about the subject. But I liked your views, not just on Red Hat, but Canonical as well. In the end, now you can understand why Linux Mint maintains two versions - One with Ubuntu and the other with Debian - I think it's close to what you said here.
Big hug from Brazil!
I love every second of this video. Thank you, Jay. I used to run big corporations distros, but I just stopped. I was planning on having my own server. It will definitely be debian after all this.
make your own from scratch and not use someone else's hardwork.
Once any open source project becomes monetized, things often take a turn for the worse for the open source community. Companies tend to lose interest in supporting the community since they no longer receive direct payment for the product. The result? They will keep liyng to you because they do not care about you anymore.
What's even more disheartening is that this seems to have become the norm in today's industry.
Consider this simple question: Who other than engineers invest countless hours, weeks, and even months in building these incredible products?
I have been using Debian for over 10 years for servers, 100% satisfaction
@Jay - this drama is actually critical information for considered decision making in a practical sense. I suspect that RH are being squeezed for revenue more than before, to me this implies that they are no longer realising RoI on their old models and IBM are pushing them to cash in the cred and good will of the business. I can't help but think - SCO 2.0? In the end though - the attitude of a company is wildly important and it does seem all too rare for commercially developed distros to really stick to their ethos, model, word, etc. This isn't just disturbing and irksome - it's really really really expensive. You sink a lot of investment into a sinking ship and it not only costs your firm or organisation to correct the problem - it creates a problem that is difficult to solve, really hard to communicate and often hardest of all to justify especially to C-Suite types who may have read the vendor's name in the WSJ but have little information beyond the impression management that firm's PR people have undertaken.
Trust and integrity are highly nuanced and awfully difficult to communicate reliably, this is actually a bigger problem than a company that has a more obvious failing like a serious security breach or financial problems. Remediation for those type of problems is easier to communicate, understand and attain approval/support for but subversive behaviour is much harder to "sell" upstream.
Were I to hedge bets out there I'd be going for conservative, consistent and reliable vendors over even similar vintage ones that have a potential motivation change like this. I've been through that "vendor going bad" scenario at least a dozen times and it's just painful for no genuinely good reason, particularly if you've tried to build a relationship with that vendor to raise your standing as a priority client and site beyond your mere financial spend. A good reliable relationship costs less to run and starts to form an intangible asset and the fact that RH is treating this with lip service indicates that something's rotten in the state of Denmark up there at Big Blue indeed.
Debian all the way for me - I like the fact that most things you run into have been hit a dozen times before, the way it's the root for the vast majority of SBC and specialist builds and the surprising lack of overhead for things like running a NAS build on REALLY old hardware (HP N36L's anyone? I have two!). We're heading for a SHTF situation with supply chains, parts, resources, infosec, etc. and that's going to get 5-6 times worse if hot war DOES kick off in one of the major flashpoints; conservative ethos, builds and support arrangements will save you when the next guy is down because a sub hit an esoteric piece of undersea carrier gear or a cloud provider is choking from a malware attack. Customers are NOT going to tolerate "oh but we lost connection to our offshore provider".
I've been a very happy Fedora user for about 3 years but this whole situation has me questioning that decision. As you say the drama is stressful. Seriously looking at alternatives at this point as I don't really feel like supporting this mess. I've looked at Arch in the past because of this same anxiety but honestly there seems to be a lot of drama there too. And I'm not convinced I want to go with a rolling release. And then there's Debian which I have very little experience with beyond Ubuntu which I don't really like. So I guess it's time to do some research and thinking. But yeah this situation has hurt the Linux community for sure. And the Fedora community should be pissed about it. But as I understand things they exist because of the benevolence of Redhat and that alone is concerning.
I'm very disappointed that a large part of Fedora users seems to defend Redhat. Maybe it is time for a Fedora fork that is independent of Redhat but that will not succeed if the community doesn't want to follow.
What's the drama with Arch? Been using it for years but haven't paid much attention to community stuff
I like fedora. Should we move to Debian 12 desktop? It's stable but outdated compared to fedora.
Any other distros (no rolling updates, please) that's up to date like fedora with gnome? For 2010s hardware?
And isn't IBM is paying Linus?
Thanks!
@@investrada I don't know that much yet but from what I can see the latest Debian is on gnome 43, Fedora 38 is gnome 44. So that's not too bad. Of course from what I understand Debian has much longer release cycles. But honestly I'm already happy on gnome 42 (I'm still on Fedora 36 here) so figure I should be find on gnome 43 for awhile to come. I find the Fedora cycles to be too short anyway so I skip every other version anyway. I also don't like the idea of rolling releases which is why Arch seems like it's not an option. I'm just starting this research now so it's possible I won't ever get to installing Deb 12 and I'll find something better but I'm not keen on these weird custom tweaked forks of bigger projects like Nobara (a fork of fedora that's getting lots of attention). I feel I'm maturing in terms of what I want from Linux so if I can get everything I want from Debian I may go that way.
@@PixelOverload to me a rolling release is the drama.
I moved from RedHat when they issued stock in 1999. I saw the writing on the wall back then. I used Mandrake as a stopgap until I found Gentoo Linux in 2002. I stuck with them since. I do have a machine I built with Arch as a daily driver. I'm testing Nix on a laptop, but I'm not sure I will go with that one as a daily driver. To add, Gentoo is a great server OS. I built a Gentoo server and it served me well for many years until I retired the machine due to the difficulty of finding parts for it.
Old Network/System Admin here (I started in the early 90's).... I have not installed Redhat in several years. But... They were on my "Trusted List" until now. As for Canonical/Ubuntu, I gave up on them when 16.04 was released. This was the 1st version they treated like a BETA and let the end-users debug. IMO.... This mess was a page from Microsoft's Playbook. Now.... I currently only trust 2 distros for server installs: Debian and Slackware.
That takes me back. When I started out as a sysadmin we had the lovely choice of "Roll your own Unix ... or SunOS 2.0" I still have an ancient fileserver which runs the last ever OpenSolaris release from Sun themselves (6.something) and it is still just carrying on a treat. Oracle from what I can see have kept with the tradition of keeping a free version available.. Maybe they gain from having a hundred or so community "parasites" debugging their junk when it breaks. Not me tho.. I run Gentoo on my servers.. because isn't being a sysadmin supposed to be hard?
I respect your decision and understand why you’ve posted this video. I don’t believe this coverage is fair to both sides of the open source coin (companies one one face, community on the other). Many wonderful open source projects & products struggle to stay afloat. Server costs, storage, maintenance… you know the list if issues many creators and developers face in our freedom respecting world. We still struggle with the term “Free software” and convincing users to pay for “Free” software. I believe this coverage will do more harm to our community because it doesn’t include the full face of the issue; just the parts that generate clicks. I wish you no ill will, but I also wish this coverage had more depth.
I’ve been using RHEL and (even more) AlmaLinux for a while since they’re actually good and stable OS’es. Red Hat doing this is just devastating.
Let's use Arch based distro!
It consumes merely 400MB memory just after boot up.
Where 3.6GB is occupied by Windows 11.
I havent finished the entire video but are your thoughts on Pop!_OS the same being that it is a company ran distro?
Well, System76 has been very trustworthy with Pop!_OS over the years, and the fact their trying to de-Ubuntify their distro and get rid of snaps, similarly to Linux Mint, should be a sign that System76 (at least the current owner of it) is a good person/company and isn't one is complete greedy like Canonical.
Snap packages are all about a paywall to continue using Ubuntu in an enterprise. I don't object to Canonical making money. I do object to Canonical trying to make money by forcing "non-features" on users. If they provide a compelling advantage for the enterprise in terms of real features and functionality, they will get customers. Snaps being mandatory, and the snap servers and repos not being mirrorable, are not a feature. I've shifted my organization to Debian.
Debian 12 is totally user friendly, we as community waited for too long for that. I have XFCE there, I have 32-bit and ARM support. This is the way. I even have snaps, if I want them.
You fail to mention one thing with Ubuntu and why they don't allow official flavors to ship Flatpak anymore. The reason is web browsers, the main web browsers are packaged as a snap thus the Ubuntu base requires Snaps. They did that foe uniformity and the best compatibility with each other.
In the past, we have been quite “political” about X flavor of Linux (distro) vs Y flavor. I think that from now, we actually need to be “political” about the economy we are all part of, because more people are pushed outside of said economy. Not by choice, but by consequences originating outside of individual “free” choice.
I don’t think there is a real “freedom” in modern day political economy, at least not the way we usually believe, teach or learn. If a large group of users end up somewhat alienated by some corporate decisions - well, a “group” is a society, not just a heap of individuals. Maybe a small rethink of what “social” means to us, especially when Linux itself IS a community effort through decades… 👍
This is very true. People have been saying that this is the inevitable outcome of capitalism for centuries.
Since we are openly talking politics, are you advocating for libertarian thought?
@@rimaq_ No, at least not in a modern or post-modernist sense. Libertarian values as stated some 200+ years ago, were at the time in opposition to late stage feudalism, on track with how most people were mere subjects (at best). Gravely simplifying , the enlightenment era grew from there.
The last 40-ish years the liberal right has (in my view) misappropriated and oversold “freedom”. A bit like the mid to late 1800’s, when a similar process pushed an emergent working class towards a new socialist ideal. A tipping point, as we got 50 years of war, two of them global (new phenomenon). Post 1950 things sobered up across the west, a fragile stasis upheld by the Cold War. During THIS time, economic growth was as egalitarian as it could be in modern time. Right or wrong, but MOST people, businesses, corporations and governments (in the west) prospered.
However (a big one), resources had to come from something (and somewhere) to sustain said growth. Push ecological outcomes into the mix, here we are. We knew by the 1970’s but only hippies and some scientists said so. Cunning lawmakers across the west therefore slashed financial regulations, “liberating” capital. Goods down, finance up. Liberating people? Not so much…
I know, I’m simplifying beyond forgiveness, but this is a YT comment… Our current political economy is half baked. If economy only factors in business, macro and fiscal - individuals and communities both lose out (we CAN see that, right?). If work (also necessary work) for any wage feels meaningless to an increasing number of people, they’re not participating in the economy, just keeping the wheels of capital going.
I’m NOT saying that the classical left (socialism) is the answer in our time, but hyper capitalist liberalism clearly isn’t either. Both extremes share a severe lack of holistic and dynamic accounting of existential gains and losses. Reductionism need it’s counterpart in a sense of life itself. We clearly aren’t “machines”, society not a mechanical model. Details need context. People need purpose, not just money and ownership.
There is freedom in taking part, less so the more we can’t. Freedom isn’t a policy or an ideology, more a sense of being enabled to live and to belong - simultaneously.
I started using Red Hat around version 3 or 4.. but I quickly moved to Slackware and tried a lot of other distros. I used Arch way before it was the "cool" thing to run. I have built LFS (and made scripts to automate it). But I never used Debian back in the days, but today it's the best distro I have ever used.
For a small business like LLTV moving away from commercial offerings is probably the right choice but for a larger business it wouldn't be. When something goes wrong upper management want someone to blame and a team of $company engineers on site fixing things. These moves from Red Hat and Canonical are disappointing for the community but in some ways I think they are a good sign, it means there's enough interest in Linux that people are willing to fight over it.
One of the greatest things about linux is it's open source, both for education and transparency. Removing open source from linux defeats all that linux was created for in the first place. I'm a Fedora fan, I love the newer stable packages for my desktop. I'm considering a fedora server to play around with but maybe for servers debian would be a better choice for higher level of security. I've just grown to trust Fedora and best of all it has a great community.
Just be aware who runs and sponsors Fedora....Red Hat! Will they pull the plug on that as well in the future, lets hope not. But the past few years may suggest that nothing is safe from there clutches.
"One of the greatest things about linux is it's open source"
which part -- the Linux kernel? the base GNU/Linux operating system? or the vast ecosystem of packages/applications that work on top of that?
I mean it's true (more or less) of all of them (getting fuzzier when you get down to the app/package level, which can involve all kinds of different licenses), but when people refer to Linux as one-big-thing it seems like there is a lack of understanding.
Make no mistake, the kernel all by itself is pretty useless to the average user. Building your own toolset around it is something almost nobody has done -- they use GNU.
Thank you. How do you feel about OpenSuse as a corporation and it's backed Linux projects? Or do they go in the same boat? Out of the larger Linux offerings backed by a corporation they seem to have the least amount of headlines that cause big stirs in the overall Linux community., at least that I've seen.... Hopefully Tumbleweed and MicroOS keep on as they have been. On the Debian end, I've used it for years for back end tasks and the recent version release has been a great boon, IMO , :)
correct me if I'm wrong, but opensuse is not corporate owned, rather it's the base for suse enterprise and suse just sponsors them
@@theaveragecactus I believe that's correct, and that's the reason why Fedora hasn't had a ginormous hit from RHEL drama. It's because Fedora is upstream, and RHEL sponsors them. But I would trust SUSE a million times more than RH, which is why openSUSE is my daily driver. openSUSE is upstream SUSE, and SUSE sponsors them. It's a very similiar middle ground situation like with Fedora and RHEL. It's not direct, like Canonical and Ubuntu, or System76 and Pop!_OS, but not complete community driven like Debian.
First of all, I am now retired. I'm from command line time. Operating systems DOS, Sinix, Novell, Fedora.
From the beginning, Linux was an alternative to Microsoft. A lot has happened in the last 5 years. Ubuntu was up to Snap Top. There were a lot of drivers, plus the PPA.
For servers, I find it good. So that nobody keeps their paws clean, the prompt is enough for me.
That, however, was when I turned my attention to Debian and distros based on it. My hardware is colorful. Old to current. It was hard to find drivers or to find drivers for Debian from the Ubuntu PPA. The drivers from Debian 12 are integrated via DKMS. Unfortunately not optimal. My favorite desktops XFCE and KDE. lend a hand Unfortunately, I use an app that is only available as a snap. Freedom has its price.
For acquaintances, friends, environment I continue to use Unbuntu. They know that. So good
*Conclusion*
a) I'm not a fan of Flatpack, Snap or Appimage.
b) The spirit of freedom of the commune.
c) Debian, distributions based on it are my personal favourites.
d) When the big players have their hands on things, it turns out badly. Sooner or later.
I am so glad to see someone having my thoughts about community driven versus company driven operating systems, and refine it to a cohesive statement. Thank you LLTV!
I have been using Debian on my game servers since Debian 8. Everytime there is an update/upgrade it typically breaks the server, well the COPY of the server I was testing the update/upgrade on. Debian has NO LTS. It is what it is, a rock solid distro with fantastic community support, but not necessarily concerned with version backward compatibility. (case in point, the update that replaced MySQL with MariaDB, which broke databases until all of the MySQL libraries were uninstalled and removed and replaced with MariaDB ones, and a lot of recompiling done.) This puts server admins in a difficult position. Do you stick with the old version and not install all the security patches or spend all the time trying to figure out all the places where the upgrade broke things?
I only use community based distros, the community made Linux, they’re its lifeblood.
At work, we use RHEL for every Linux based system. I think there's a CentOS or two kicking around. Obviously built before the OS's departure. I started Linux using Slackware in the 90s I want to say, but drifted away from Linux because it was just too over the top for compatibility issues, hardware difficulties, driver problems, and all that, and I just didn't have the experience or the "want" at the time to tinker. I've always wanted a machine to RUN and do what I need it to do. If I had a second machine at the time, that might have been different.
Then comes real employment, and I was able to afford and be able to maintain my own set of machines. I did end up getting a Linux distribution going JUST for network file sharing at the office, and not Windows (Remember Melissa? Yeah, we got nailed hard on that one). So for that reason, I literally built up a brand new machine, fat drive space, and set it up as a file server using Samba.
Then I got into a different job, dumped into the deep end with Linux, and Windows in tandem. 90% of our stuff when I started was RHEL4, so I had to learn it.
At home, I started looking at RHEL for stuff for me for my home lab, but, dollars just didn't make sense, and I didn't like paywalls for ANYTHING (Still don't). So I found Ubuntu and Debian and for a while, I was tossing around which I preferred. I eventually settled on Debian. 100% text console stuff though, no UI.
My main rig is Win10 that I use every day. My work laptop runs Win10. All my day to day employment revolves around both ecosystems. My three Dell servers are running ProxMox and MOST of the OS's on it are Debian.
To me, for my home lab, Linux at its core is what I'm interested in. Short of relearning and reconfiguring for a different directory structure for whatever flavour is all I concern myself with. I don't care about the UI because I don't daily drive or look at a Linux GUI, unless it's text.
i really wonder what this distro is gonna look like without the support of the community.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a distro for big paying corpos, although you can use it for free up to 16 systems if you make a developer account.
I am saying i wonder what this distro is gonna look like without the support of the linux community.
@@llortaton2834 same as it is now.. red hat pays developers to work on their distribution.
The company makes around two and a half billion a year.
It remains to be seen how many will eventually flee the Redhat ecosystem. What many don't understand is that people who run Redhat (and its derivatives) on servers often run Fedora on their desktop. It would be an inconvenience to run a Debian server and Fedora on the desktop. If enough people flee the Redhat server system for Debian, Fedora users will decrease too.
@@locatemarbles my guess not many from there main target audience.. the vast majority of the companies that use red hat...
Could careless about this
I teach at a tech school, we educate future it admins. We used to teach the students Centos because a lot of corporate stuff uses Redhat, so it was an obvious choice. Then Centos got canned and our linux department rewrote a lot of teaching materials to use Rocky instead, because corporations tend to use Redhat, so why not.. Now our students are being taught Debian instead, because even though Redhat is a big player in the corporate world, they are no longer to be trusted - and we tell the students why.. I wonder if Redhat will still be a preferred corporate choice 5 years from now - our students are moving from "Redhat, yeah I already have experience with that from Centos/Rocky" to "Redwhatnow?!? I'm used to Debian"..
Corporations are about making money and power. A corporation may start out with good intentions and values but time and changes in leadership will bring it back to money and power. We are attracted to the apparent benefits of their advances in technology and software but they end up being traps to ensnare us.
How many of the corporations who have used Red Hat for years can afford to move away? Such moves are expensive in both time and money. Switching mission critical systems may be impossible. Google did the same sort of thing by initially offering excellent software for “free”. Today, we realize the true cost. Yet, how many of us can really move away or even really want to move away. We are addicted to the bells and whistles. We are addicted to the ecosystem. They have many of us trapped.
I respect and applaud the courage of Learn Linux TV for moving away from Ubuntu to Debian. That cannot be easy as I’m sure a lot of testing and research is taking place before any total replacement takes place. Kudos to everyone involved.
AlmaLinux is “owned” by CloudLinux, Inc., they control the board, and even share the same devs and personnel.
I'm a little bit confused about one single thing in the red-hat drama: where Fedora sits in there? Isn't it also a distribution based on RH? Am I missing something?
I've used Ubuntu and its flavours for about 10 years, Arch for some time, new user to the Fedora community.
Do I have to think about letting go Fedora and instead give another shot to Arch?
I switched to Fedora just to avoid snap. I know I can apt purge snapd, but it seems to me switching to another platform to be a safer way to do so.
Also, sorry to listen you'll drop your flavour. I didn't know about it, or I'll definetely tried it. I don't know if now it has any sense, being discontinued.
Fedora is the base for RHEL, contrary to popular belief.
@@CrossHusky thank you for the info! I don't know why I was sure it to be the contrary. Better this way
@@CrossHusky that also doesn't mean changes to RHEL won't effect other red hat projects certainly. There will be consequences and that will affect red hats decisions in the future. At best it will create friction on the core and community built outer layer.
We starting switching to Ubuntu lts releases once the Centos 8 support debacle. Originally we were one of the companies that were enticed by the 10 year support. We decided we're done with them after that.
I think the scarier part is what about the projects they brought to the Linux ecosystem? Ansibel, Wayland, Podman, etc... If you can't trust Red Hat with their distro why trust them with the rest of the projects they have built?
we're already screwed with systemd, wich in itself is a good idea and decent implementation, but what can we expect from red hat will they close the source to systemd too?
@@juliorolandi6694Systemd was always garbage, but they somehow tricked other distros to adopt it .
I agree with what was presented in this video and I read a number of comments, which all were very well articulated. Something that I would add to all the comments is that there is a difference between choosing a server OS and a workstation OS. There are a number of factors that come into consideration when choosing a server OS. The workstation situation is not quite as crucial, because you can easily replace whatever workstation you have on your laptop or computer and customize it to what your needs are. In addition, the size of your business and what your business does can influence the choice of a server OS. From the philosophy of what linux is about, I totally disagree with Red Hat's approach. If I wasn't an enterprise business or if I was a developer, for example, I would also be very upset with the change of direction. For companies that are already paying for an enterprise license, I don't know if they will be as impacted as the ones that don't.
The move towards Debian that was mentioned in this video, at least for the file server, is never a bad option. From my experience, Debian is quite stable as an OS and there are no crazy unexpected changes. As far as the software packages being a bit older, I never had an issue with that, because on the server side, I don't have to necessarily depend on the software packages for my applications. I can download whatever version I want and install them manually. Only thing I would be concerned about is hardware support. However, since a lot of server installations are virtual, even that has become less of a factor.
If you are independent, not an enterprise business, you have the flexibility of choosing your own direction and in that case I would focus on the applications you are dependent on and choose the server OS that best accommodates that. Also, you have to take in consideration what your skill sets and experience are at the moment. The more skill and experience you have the more options that will work for you, because at the core, it's all linux. If you are an enterprise business, things can be a bit more complicated. The business entity, most likely, will insist on having a relationship with a company such as Red Hat.
The last point I wanted to address is trust. When it comes to philosophies, which some linux and unix operating systems are based on, there usually won't be a lot of drastic changes. However, in business, sometimes you have to be flexible for the sake of your business success. For those of you who own businesses, I imagine you've had to do the same at some point. Businesses are continually looking at changes that they need to make to increase revenue. Sometimes, when they are in a difficult situation, there is a risk that they could make a decision that negatively impacts customers and users. This is what I am guessing is partially behind what Red Hat is doing.
I don't think it is fair to lump Canonical and Red Hat into the same category. Red Hat is locking down their source code. While I'm not the biggest fan of snaps, there is no part of Ubuntu that keeps me from installing Flatpacks on my desktop if I chose to do so. That's a far cry from the Red Hat model which locks it down and you have no choice but to pay.
I've always understood Red Hat to be in the business of support that they sell to clients. They want their distro to be the most stable and reliable being that it is an enterprise offering. You don't want your server to crash due to any bugs. That's why I don't get them locking it down. They sell support, the distro has been free. I really think it might have something to do with Oracle Linux, but not sure exactly why.
Is it legal under the GPL for RedHat to do this? (10:48)
Linus T has said that the best thing he ever did was to GPL the Linux kernel.
The effect of the Gnu Public Licence is that if you modify GPL'd code you must make the source available. Sure, you can stop others using your trademarks (as Red Hat has always done) but you can't stop them from using your code once the trademarks are removed.
What am i missing here, please?
Honestly i always was wary of company backed distros since sooner or later they'll backstab you but since i fell in love with fedora i ignored it. However redhat's continued and troubling behavior made me reconsider. So is there any distro similar to fedora that isn't opensuse or Arch and it's derivatives? since i kinda had a bad experience with those distros before and i don't wanna repeat it.
TIA.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. I think IBM / RedHat is going to have a bitter reminder of this lesson very soon if they continue their actions.
Good point. But general speaking, I think any corporate owned OSes are a bad idea.
Isn't Pop!_OS owned by System76?. I'd just skip and move to Debian or some other community-run distro at this point.
I realize that system76 is a stalwart supporter of open source but at this poin it's not a question of IF that will change but WHEN.
That's basically what I was saying - I started migrating servers and the rest will follow. I prioritized servers since that's what faces the public. A decision on workstations is next. If System76 stays with Ubuntu, I don't know if I will continue with them. Debian on the desktop is VERY likely for me at this point.
Pop and Mint, being based on Ubuntu, have always irked me as 'second derivatives' of Debian. Both are good projects, but I wish they would have just based themselves on Debian instead.
I already made a choice to go with Debian. Right now, I'm writing a script to install Debian (with BTRFS subvolumes for snapper and systemd-boot, besides the know bugs), and I loving this! Debian is really great!
Btfrs is not stable, you thought it's good idea to use unstable fs?
@@barma1309 It's good enough, for my personal use. It's my personal machine, workstation, I don't intend to use Debian on a server yet (as I don't need/use servers).
I want to love open source but I've been disillusioned by trying multiple Linux distros. I'm finding that they don't quite match the capabilities, utility, responsiveness, polish, and usability of closed source apps and operating systems. I've been trying to wrap my head around the concept of open source by trying to understand what makes it better than closed source. I'm not a programmer so the claim of being able to inspect the code yourself is moot as I can't do that with either product. Also all the problems of trust and politicking that are supposed to be the downside of corporate owned releases seem just as bad in the open source world. Who really gets to contribute code to an open source OS? It seems, to me, that even open source releases are effectively controlled by but a small number of people who can actually approve changes and commit them. You can't tell me that there's never in-fighting and drama going on between those programmers. I don't buy the fantasy that programmers are the platonic ideal of objectivity, efficiency, fairness, and zero drama. You don't want to be at the whims of some company? Well, you're just going to find yourself at the whims of a small number of programmers who just happen to have a wild hair on a Wednesday and decide to proceed with the exact worst implementation because it "makes sense" to their brain but makes zero sense to an average user. For example, why are terminal commands so wildly different between distros? I'm pretty annoyed and far less productive with having to learn and unlearn and relearn basic commands and switches. I have so many suggestions for improvement in Linux but all I can expect from the open source community is an inane defense of why the way it is, is the absolute best and only way it should be. There's too much ego in the community for progress at a meaningful pace to occur.
After playing around with some Linux distros, I've found that open source OSs are written by programmers for programmers, end users be damned. Not only does the open source community not like the opinion of basic end-users, they actively disdain users. What's worse, is there's zero incentive for them to make their product better. At least with a corporation, they have a block of paying customers who have some chance (maybe a small chance, but a chance nonetheless) of displaying their satisfaction by taking their money elsewhere which can prompt a change. As an end user, I'd rather use a product from a company that I can exert a feather's weight of influence with than an open source alternative from a community that hates me. I would say you people need to get your act together, but I'm not really inclined to tell people what to do, especially when I have to concede, you get what you pay for.
You have mentioned things which I have talked about.
Whenever I criticize Linux and Foss to improve themselves, zealots come and lecture me... But offer me no solutions.
I can say this as a programmer and daily user.