I've been a bit busy with a new career and some real life happenings and haven't been as active here as I'd like. So I'm attempting to remedy that with my opinion on recent open source news of Redhat's decision to move their source code behind a subscriber agreement (effectively killing off some of the RHEL community driven clones like Rocky and Alma Linux).

My Take on Redhat's Source Changes

I know with a swift search from your favorite search engine and you'll be caught up on Redhat's changes in limiting access to their source code behind account creation on their site. In case you don't want to search for it I always enjoy The Linux Experiment's videos and his take on many news it's in the open source world. You can watch his take at the following video at 1:28 seconds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DALfAGy0PuM

My opinion?

Obviously, my opinion is way late to the game and yet one more opinion out there on the internet. Part of me shares the thoughts of the community that is upset about it. While I don't use Redhat flavored Linux distros for every use case, I did make use of Alma Linux in my own home network setups and more when I desired stable and reliable OS updates for critical elements of my network. I love Alma Linux as it gave me a chance to play with a 1:1 RHEL OS in an enthusiast way and build skills to play around with RHEL if needed for my real career. By being able to spin up VMs in Proxmox with Alma Linux and the learning I'd done with that it allowed me to be ready when my job asked me to run, patch, and maintain a RHEL server in AWS for them. I felt right at home with the experience I'd gained with playing with Alma Linux. Yes, I am aware that RHEL offers some developer or hobbiest licenses for free but using Alma was nice and I didn't have to create an account, give my email address and more information to yet another source that may one day get compromised, etc.

The other part of me gets Redhat's position. In my opinion, community clones like Alma and Rocky give people a chance to play with a 1:1 binary compatible RHEL OS and also has more people involved in contributing to RHEL's betterment (bug submissions, etc.) and that is in my opinion an undeniably good thing. But I also understand that having companies like Oracle take that same 1:1 source code and complie it themselves and sell Oracle Linux and support also undermines Redhat's goals as a company after all.

Since this announcement Alma has said that'll try to remain application binary interface (ABI) compatible with RHEL which I like as I feel its the best path forward for them. I appreciate that stance. My opinion is as much as I like that that is Alma's take I can't help but feel like Redhat's decision has made me re-evaluate the OS choices I use in my homelab and elsewhere. I'll probably end up migrating my RHEL flavored VM's, LXCs. and servers to Debian when I can.

Previous Post