What we changed (my opinion: doesn’t represent what Red Hat is saying, has said, or will say) was an optimization (or correction for an oversight) to our CI/CD process after making CentOS the upstream to RHEL. We used to sanitize the RHEL srpms of Red Hat trademarks, graphics, proprietary information, embargoed information or source, etc. Since of a lot of the RHEL developers are CentOS, Fedora, upstream developers and this helped especially those CentOS developers. But if RHEL is downstream and already a git pull of those CentOS, Fedora, upstream, then sanitizing srpms is redundant, duplicative and even unnecessary for CentOS’s benefit.

note that i am not arguing whether RHEL clones should exist, but only whether they are able to exist without anyone breaking any kind of contract. i do hope you are right, but the current public sentiment seems to be that this is not the case.

Almost all my accounts have some CentOS or other RHEL clones. We’re not suing those customers because they chose another Linux for a part of their footprint. We’re also not suing the clone makers. You’d think with all the lawyers we have access to, that would be an easy way to kill off clones. But we’re upstream first. Best ideas win. They tell you that on day one.

exactly that is the crux of the problem that is getting everyone upset. do customers still have access to that?

the access to the upstream git repos hasn’t changed

but that does not allow building a 100% RHEL clone. although it is probably enough to build something sufficiently compatible. which is i think the way one of the former clones went and which is probably good enough for at least a subset of clone users. like for me, i just want a distribution that has long term stable releases. RHEL compatibility is actually secondary to not important at all in my use case.

btw: i am happy we can have this discussion without the emotions that usually go along with it. it can be difficult to get something across with all the noise everyone else is making.

   >> That srpm repo was taken away

   > exactly that is the crux of the problem that is getting everyone upset. do customers still have access to that?

   >> the access to the upstream git repos hasn’t changed

   > but that does not allow building a 100% RHEL clone. although it is probably enough to build something sufficiently compatible.

The GPL is a license and contract between two entities. We have no such contracts with non-customers. Maybe that is unfortunate.

In 2019 before IBM completed the acquisition, (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1087423/000108742319...), we had Sales & Marketing expenses of $1.38B. We spent $668.5M on R&D. About $2B spent on employees selling, marketing, teaching, documenting, building, maintaining, certifying, supporting, enhancing, testing OSS, including contributions to conferences, foundations, consortiums, of many, many different OSS interests. Over 200 upstream projects (https://redhatofficial.github.io/#!/main). I think about all the folks I've worked with in Consulting, Support, Engineering, Sales, Product Management, Technical Marketing, Recruiting. I think about their families and loved ones. ...And I feel like we're doing alright by OSS with what we're getting out of it. It might not be a perfect or ideal model for everyone. Most of us are willing to improve where we can.

   > btw: i am happy we can have this discussion without the emotions that usually go along with it. it can be difficult to get something across with all the noise everyone else is making.

when CentOS started, there were no sanitized srpm either as far as i know. it was part of the CentOS project to sanitize them. the only difference then is that those unsanitized srpms were previously public, and now they no longer are. is that correct?

if that is the case, and any clone project can get access to these srpms by paying for a single license, i don't see what the big deal is. there is nothing red hat hasn't already been doing "worse" ever since RHEL started, with the only possible exception of making srpms no longer public.

again, assuming this is correct, is there really any downside to making those srpms public?

But why wouldn't you want to collaborate with us in the upstream? Are they maybe implicitly recognizing the value in the engineering that Red Hat does? Or maybe even just the name Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

as far as i can tell it is the promise of long term stability and security updates. and the compatibility.

small businesses who can't afford a RHEL license but need that kind of promise without the other support features that red hat offers. or they develop applications that need to be able to run on RHEL. there is a market for that, and the current CentOS stream or any distribution based on it can't make the same promise as a clone.

but time will tell, alternative distributions based on CentOS stream previously didn't exist. there is one now, if i read that right, and it should be able to take some of the market that RHEL clones are in. and maybe eventually also show that their releases have an almost equal level of longterm stability and updates, as well as sufficient RHEL compatibility.

the only drawback of a distribution based on stream is the security updates that don't come until they are in RHEL. but then how long should it take for an RHEL security update to make it into CentOS stream?