![]() ![]() These variants all utilize and contribute Linux source code, but none claim to be “fully compatible” with the others. Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, AWS and Microsoft all create Linux distributions with associated branding and ecosystem development efforts. In a healthy open source ecosystem, competition and innovation go hand-in-hand. These users also have decided not to use one of the many other Linux distributions. Instead, we’ve found a group of users, many of whom belong to large or very large IT organizations, that want the stability, lifecycle and hardware ecosystem of RHEL without having to actually support the maintainers, engineers, writers, and many more roles that create it. I wish we lived in that world, but it’s not how it actually plays out. The generally accepted position that these free rebuilds are just funnels churning out RHEL experts and turning into sales just isn’t reality. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder. We pushed our SRPMs out to in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild we even de-branded it for them. There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. I want to specifically mention the rebuilders, different from distributions that might, for example, add a new architecture or compile flag (we fully support you in expanding Linux capabilities rather than imitating them). If that work becomes unsustainable, it will stop, and that's not good for anyone. That includes critical backporting work and future features and technologies under development upstream. Simply repackaging the code that these individuals produce and reselling it as is, with no value added, makes the production of this open source software unsustainable. We have to pay the people to do that work - those passionate contributors grinding through those long hours and nights who believe in open source values. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous. I feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. The details - including open source licenses and rights - matter, and these are things Red Hat has helped to not only form but also preserve and evolve. I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much wrong about open source software and the GPL in particular -especially, industry watchers and even veterans who I think should know better. When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it. We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL. Maintaining and supporting an operating system for 10 years is a Herculean task - there‘s enormous value in the work we do. Additionally, when we develop fixes for issues in RHEL, we don't just apply them to RHEL - they are applied upstream first, to projects like Fedora, CentOS Stream or the kernel project itself, and we then backport them. ![]() This is about the hours and late nights we spend backporting a patch to code that is now 5 to 10 years old or older at any given time, we are supporting 3-4 major release streams, while applying patches and backports to all. At Red Hat, thousands of people spend their time writing code to enable new features, fixing bugs, integrating different packages and then supporting that work for a long time - something that our customers and partners need. We don’t simply take upstream packages and rebuild them. This benefits everyone in the community, not just Red Hat and our customers. When we find a bug or write a feature, we contribute our code upstream. ![]() Red Hat uses and will always use an open source development model. Over the past week, I’ve seen many people say many unkind and untrue things about hard-working Red Hatters who, like me, value this work to its core.ĭespite what’s currently being said about Red Hat, we make our hard work readily accessible to non-customers. Open source and all that phrase entails are very important to me. I’ve been here for 16 years, and before I started working here, I was a volunteer in the Fedora Project. My name is Mike McGrath, and I’m the Vice President of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat. We’ve been called evil I was called an IBM exec who was installed to turn Red Hat closed source - and that’s only the “nice” stuff. I spent a lot of time walking this weekend thinking about the reaction from our industry to my last blog post.
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