So during this year Redhat (IBM) has figured they should further complicate their relationship with their community. This time it is not actually about CentOS directly but rather an attempt to prevent the likes of Alma/Rocky/Oracle to use their sources as a way to repackage as their own. The way they opted to go was to move the source code behind a end user license agreement, so only paying customers and partners have access to the source code. A whole lot of bricks were shat this time.
So what?
This time it is a bit harder to actually defend the actions taken, they are not following the spirit of Open Source licensing but rather the letter. By moving the source code away from any public repository and allowing for only signed up entities they very efficiently close down this avenue to repackage the full release. This has been very well written up by several smart individuals so please read/listen to what their thoughts are on this.
So?
This time it is rather bad, not only did they perform a penile move but they also did just lock away many future potential users for some short-sighted gains. To exemplify I have been a hardcore CentOS user, when I started working in enterprise environments the effort to working with a RHEL server was near zero. But for all new system administrators, developers and enthusiasts there is no options left. So instead the next generations will be using other distributions.
What are the alternatives
So clearly there is now many caveats with utilising any code released by Redhat that is not directly licensed by them to you. There is still the developer license available but if they can yank a fully working distribution mid-cycle they can change those terms at a moments notice. For the near future I will stay on Stream-9.
Linux enki 6.1.0-11-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.38-4 (2023-08-08) x86_64 GNU/Linux
In the future I will migrate over to Debian fully (my desktop uname above as proof), but due to the sheer amount of time put into the Ansible automation I currently sport it is a long time before I will be able to make the switch. Debian is not only a strong community driven distribution, it is also not as susceptible to being overtaken like CentOS proved to be. There are other alternatives with similar community driven projects like archlinux and voidlinux to name two. For servers some stability is required so the above might be fun to use on the desktop but not for hosting applications. My main line of thought is to keep away from any company owned distribution (like Ubuntu, Oracle Linux and SUSE).
B-landia.net 