Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, June 28, CTOnews.com previously reported that Red Hat's new policy of restricting access to RHEL code caused an uproar in the industry. Red Hat was once accused of "betraying" the open source spirit and becoming an "evil company".

Mike McGrath, vice president of Red Hat, recently responded through his official blog, and the full text has been translated into Chinese by Red Hat and published on its official Wechat account. The article claims that RHEL is based on CentOS Stream, while the library of CentOS Stream is completely public, so it is completely incorrect to say that RHEL is closed source. In addition, Red Hat also emphasizes that downstream reconstructors have no value, so they will not provide support for these developers to tilt resources.

The full text of CTOnews.com transcription is as follows:

Last weekend, I spent a lot of time thinking about the industry's reaction to my last blog. Some people call us evil; others call me the IBM executive who was inserted to turn Red Riding Hood into a closed source-that's just one of the more "friendly" terms. Next, there are a few things we would like to clarify.

My name is Mike McGrath. I'm the vice president of Red Hat Core platform Engineering. I have been working at Red Hat for 16 years, and before joining Red Hat, I was a volunteer for the Fedora project. Open source, and everything related to open source, is very important to me. Over the past week, I have seen a lot of people say a lot of unkind and untruthful things to our hard-working Red Hat staff, who, like me, value the core values of the work we do.

Although there are different opinions about Red Hat, we always make sure that the fruits of our hard work are also available to non-customers. Red Hat has adopted and will always adopt the open source development model. When we find a vulnerability or write a new feature, we contribute our code upstream. This benefits not only Red Hat and our customers, but also everyone in the community.

We are not simply taking the upstream package and rebuilding it. At Red Hat, thousands of people spend time writing code, implementing new features, fixing bugs, integrating different software packages, and then providing long-term support services-something our customers and partners need.

This means that we spend a lot of time and countless nights reverse porting patches to code that is 5 to 10 years old or more; whenever we support 3-4 major release streams at the same time, patches and reverse migrations are provided for all versions.

In addition, when we develop fix patches for problems in RHEL, we apply it not only to RHEL-- but also to upstream projects such as Fedora, CentOS Stream, or the kernel project itself, and then reverse migrate. Maintaining and supporting an operating system for 10 years is a daunting task-the work we do is of great value.

We always and always send our code upstream, complying with the open source licenses used by our products, including GPL. When I say that we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I am telling the truth. I am shocked and disappointed that so many people have so many misunderstandings about open source software and GPL, especially industry observers and even those who are experienced, I think they should know the truth better. Details, including open source licenses and rights, are important. These are things that Red Hat helped form and that Red Hat needs to protect and develop.

In response to the anger caused by our recent decision on downstream source code, I feel that this anger is either from those who are not willing to pay for the time, effort and resources required to produce the red hat company Linux, or from those who want to repackage it for their own benefit. These requirements for RHEL code are dishonest.

For those who work hard in long hours and nights and believe in open source values, we must reward them for their efforts. Simply repackaging and reselling the code produced by these contributors does not add any value and makes the production of open source software unsustainable.

The value provided by Red Hat includes key reverse migration efforts, as well as future features and technologies for upstream development. If the mode of production of open source software becomes unsustainable, it will stop, to the detriment of anyone.

I want to make a special mention of rebuilders, which are different from distributions that may add new architectures or compilation flags (we fully support you to extend the capabilities of Linux instead of imitating them).

Not long ago, Red Hat found the work of rebuilders (such as CentOS) valuable. So we pushed the SRPM package (source package) to git.centos.org so that they could easily rebuild; we even removed the brand identity for them. Recently, we have realized that there is no value in having downstream reconstructors.

It was once widely accepted that these free rebuilds were designed to train RHEL experts, not to sell them. I wish we could live in that world, but this is not the case. Instead, we found a group of users, many of them from large or very large IT organizations, who wanted the stability, lifecycle, and hardware ecosystem of RHEL without actually supporting maintainers, engineers, document writers, and other creators of RHEL in more roles. These users also decided not to choose any of the many other commercial Linux distributions.

In a healthy open source ecosystem, competition and innovation complement each other. Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, AWS and Microsoft have all created related Linux distributions, and carried out brand promotion and ecosystem development work. These variants all use and contribute Linux source code, but none of them claim to be "fully compatible" with other distributions.

In the end, we didn't find the value of rebuilding RHEL, and we have no obligation to make the job of the rebuilder easier; that's our call.

When we launched CentOS Stream, people were confused about its existence. I admit that this decision changes the long-standing traditional practice, which may cause some confusion. This is manifested in accusing us of being "closed" and "violating" the GPL agreement.

There is a CentOS Stream binary executable; there is a corresponding source code base. CentOS Stream's source code repository in GitLab is where we built the RHEL distribution, which is open to everyone. It is absolutely untrue and inaccurate to call RHEL a "closed source".

CentOS Stream updates faster than RHEL, and RHEL doesn't necessarily point to the latest code, but that's where the code is. If you can't find it, it's a bug, please let us know.

We also offer free Red Hat developer subscriptions and RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure for open source infrastructure. Developers subscribe to a free RHEL for developers and can be used on up to 16 systems. Again, this is free. Individuals can use it for their own work, while RHEL customers can use it for employees' work. RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure aims to provide free RHEL for open source projects (whether or not they have anything to do with Red Hat) to meet their infrastructure and development needs.

Finally, I want to say to all open source companies, whether your code is currently open source or whether you are considering switching to open source mode. From any point of view, Red Hat is completely open source and has been using the open source development model. I hope many open source companies will be as successful as we are. It is up to you to decide whether downstream reconstruction is valuable to you and make the process easy or not.

If you just rebuild the code without adding value or making any changes to the existing code, this is the real threat to all open source companies. This is a real threat to open source, and it is possible to change open source back to activities that are only applicable to amateurs and hackers.

We don't want that, and I know our community members, customers and partners don't want that either. Innovation takes place upstream. Working constructively on the basis of others is at the core of open source. Let us continue to promote innovation, support each other and move forward.

▲ Picture Source Red Hat Wechat official account

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