I haven’t been really keeping up with this RHEL drama, so I’m probably going to regret making this comment. But about this bug merge request in particular, you have to remember that RHEL’s main target audience is paying enterprise customers. It’s the “E” right there in RHEL. So stability is a high priority for their developers, since if they accidentally introduce a bug to their code, then they’ll have a lot of unhappy paying customers.
The next comment that was cropped out of that screenshot basically explains exactly that. While the Red Hat developers probably appreciate the bug fix, the reality is that the bug was listed as non-critical, and the Red Hat teams didn’t have the capacity to adequately regression test and QA the merge request. But the patch was successfully merged into Fedora, so it will eventually end up in RHEL through that path, which is exactly what the Fedora path is for.
The blowup about this particulat bug doesn’t seem justified to me. Red Hat obviously can’t fix and regression test every single bug that’s listed in their bug tracker. So why arbitrarily focus on this one medium priority bug? if it were listed as a critical bug, then yes, the blowup would be justified.
In its blog post Red Hat specifically called out downstream distributions for not contributing anything to the development of RHEL and that they should be making fixes to CentOS Stream. Well, this is a fix for CentOS Stream and Red Hat still doesn’t care. They just don’t want community contributions.
CentOS Stream is the staging ground for RHEL. It isn’t a bleeding edge distro that can accept any merge request willy-nilly. For the reason why, reread my original comment about the nature of enterprise support.
Fedora is the distro that is more bleeding edge in the RHEL realm. This merge request was more suited for Fedora, and the fix was successfully applied to Fedora. So, I fail to see any irrational actions from Red Hat here.
Sounds to me like they messed up the communication between them and the devs. If they directed the PR submitter to Fedora, I think there wouldn’t be as much fuel to the fire.
Granted, all the chaos surrounding RHEL does make me a little worried for Fedora. Fedora is not a bad distro by any means, and I don’t want to have to not recommend it because of the drama.
The only thing Red Hat has power over Fedora is its name and infrastructure. Red Hat can’t decide for Fedora. Do they have Red Hat employees working for Fedora? Yes, they do, but the employees decide for Fedora, not for Red Hat. Besides, all the telemetry drama is being sorted out in the most open way possible over on Discourse (Fedora Discussion). It is still a 100% community distribution despite a lot of people saying “it is already decided” “Fedora is doomed” etc.
I stopped recommending it. It is a pity, but there are alternatives
Why would they accept PR at all if they don’t have a robust testing process and approvals are dictated by customers needs?
The message as it is now to potential contributors is that their contribution in not welcome, unless it’s free labor that financially benefits only ibm.
Which is fair, but the message itself is a new PR issue for red hat
They do have a robust testing process, but their main focus at the CentOS Stream stage is more about preparing for the stable RHEL build than it is about adding a ton of new features and bug fixes. Testing takes time so it would be physically impossible for them to test everything if they didn’t have a limit on the type of contributions they accept. For bug fixes, their limit is that the bug has to be critical. For bugs lesser than that, the correct place to contribute those fixes is in Fedora.
That has been adequately explained in the merge request at this point, if you click in that link at the top of this thread amd read through it to get the latest info. The Red Hat devs have also made no indication that they’re not welcome to contributors. Anyone who’s saying that is blowing this merge request issue out of proportion.
I read it, and I read the messages from the devs. The communication issue I am trying to point is also highlighted in the comments: if the decision on merging a PR is uniquely dictated by financial benefits of IBM, ignoring the broader benefits of the community, the message is that red hat is looking for free labor and it is not really interested in anything else. Which is absolutely the case, as we all know, but writing it down after the recent events is another PR issue, as red hat justified controversial decisions on the lack of contributions from downstream.
The Italian dev tried to put it down as “we have to follow our service management processes that are messy, tedious and expensive” but he didn’t address the problems in the original message. The contributor himself felt like they asked his contribution just to reject it because of purely financial reasons without any additional details. It is a new PR incident
Not having resources to test it right this second isn’t “doesn’t care” it’s just a lower priority.
That could have been better communicated though. What you said is reasonable, what Michal said isn’t as much.
Fedora is where this sort of thing is supposed to go. That’s been Red Hat philosophy since forever. Patch as high upstream as you can. Sounds like this is a non issue.
The Apparently is already patch on fedora… Just reporting other comments in this thread. But why do they accept contribution to centos of they don’t want patches that are not economically beneficial to the company? It is a pretty bad message written as this
It will get to CentOS through Fedora. Always patch as far upstream as you can.
Agree on point of detail, but the “drama” is the reason for the fuss. Redhat’s communication, especially to the community that helped build and support it, has always been patchy, but over the past few years it’s been apalling. As others have pointed out, they’ve insulted a lot of us, specifically for not contributing upstream - so it’s not unexpected for them to be called on it when someone does.
I think the EL sphere as a whole (including RHEL and all up and downstreams) is getting drastically weakened directly because of Redhat’s poor decision making, and that’s a shame for all of us.
Maybe you should familiarize yourself with CentOS Stream and its purpose.
But it is also another stab in the community, they took centos that was a community project for them, then transformed this project that was downstream to upstream, then called all other downstream distros a negative net worth cause they don’t engage in the process of RHEL, then blocked the acess to this distros to the downstream, then reject the work of this ppl they called net negative without a decent process.
What actually red hat wants?
Centos now is only a beta branch? Ppl who wants derive from centos should be fixing everything downstream and duplicate work cause centos now is just an internal beta from red hat? If yes, why they took the project from the community? I’m not a rpm based distros user but I totally understand why ppl are pissed.
I’m making no comment on CentOS being absorbed and repurposed by Red Hat. I’m just saying it makes sense why Red Hat would rather have this fix in Fedora than CentOS Stream.
I’m making no comments about you making or no comments on centOS being repurposed. I’m just saying that this blown-up is probably caused by a mixture of miscommunication between RHEL and a community that feels like being tossed aside, I just said that because you said that you felt unjustified.
I’m getting downvoted on my comment about not making a comment on CentOS, so now I feel obligated to reply to this.
I don’t know, dude. I don’t really care about the miscommunication. I was just focusing solely on the merits of the merge request’s code changes.
For the miscommunication, it seems like a two way street to me. That was GitLab, so the Red Hat dev was probably operating under the assumption that people there already understood everything about their testing process. But obviously that’s not the case, so Red Hat should create better boilerplate responses for these scenarios. But on the other side of the coin, whoever took this screenshot and posted it to reddit or wherever did so prematurely, imo. They should’ve asked around a bit to make sure it was a legitimate thing to blow up about before they sent a lynch mob to the merge request.
I’m still getting downvoted, so I’m just going to put this here and be done with this:
RTFM about DevOps
I’m getting downvoted on my comment about not making a comment on CentOS
I don’t think so, you are probably getting downvoted because you said exactly this:
The blowup about this particulat bug doesn’t seem justified to me.
And seems somehow offended that I replied to this statement trying to explain (not necessarily justify)
I’m getting downvoted because I’m not conceding that the miscommunication was a legitimate excuse for that blowup. And I’m going to continue to not concede that. I found this whole situation to be embarrassing, and I think instead of getting mad at the miscommunication, you should all be getting mad at the moron who took that screenshot and whipped up the mob frenzy to swarm that merge request, because ultimately Red Hat was 100% justified in not accepting that merge request, and it made you all look like morons.
It’s fine to get mad on social media, but if you’re contributing to GitLab or someplace else, then you need to slow your roll. There’s always a process involved when contributing to a project, and you have to learn that process in order to contribute effectively. You can’t blow up and whip up a social media frenzy at the slightest inconvenience.
Edit: Sorry, @angrymouse@lemmy.world. I should also add that I’m not mad at you personally or anything, or calling you a moron. I’m more talking about the collective response to this situation. And I’m pretty bad at words, so I feel like I accidentally made it too angry.
What actually red hat wants?
All the control and all of the money.
Besides that, I suspect they have no clear vision. And if they do, they are absolutely terrible at communicating that.
Wasn’t Red Hat just complaining that Alma and Rocky didn’t add value because they weren’t submitting fixes upstream?
Its funny how podcasters and commenters seem to have taken Redhat’s spin about “contributing value to the community” seriously, while to the rest of us the whole thing was obviously only about money (same as all the follow-ups from other parties… I would say “including Alma” but that would probably deserve its separate debate).
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— “we don’t like people ripping off our work without any added value”
— “Here, let me push this to your staging environment, totally breaking your quality process”
— “No”
— “Well, what the hell do you want broo?”
I don’t think they have ever hidden the fact this is about money. I don’t like the fact this is about money, but the fact that others were cloning and selling their efforts for a cheaper price is awful.
Bro, do you even FOSS?
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they are not breaking any law. This is totally allowed. You can use FOSS to create a commercial product.
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they are major contributors to the Linux space. And they’ll keep contributing.
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It’s their effort, they created a business around it, and it cycles back to push Linux forward.
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this isn’t even going to affect average users. This is going to take money from companies that probably have the money to pay. For other companies, there are other distributions available.
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Well, the re-builders would be breaking the law now that the source code isn’t available for non-paying customers. They weren’t breaking the law before.
So, do you expect every company to release the source code of their products just because they used a FOSS web framework or a FOSS programming language like Python? Or by the same logic, for companies to release the source code of their products if their developers use Linux in their development machines? Or if they use Linux to deploy their applications in the cloud? That’s such an unreasonable position.
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OK, so is Redhat breaking any license? Do you really think a company like Redhat would open itself to thousands of lawsuits like that. The CEO already explained that this is totally legal and covered by GPL. They are in fact distributing the source to the people receiving the product. This is exactly what GPL says. They are not forced to open the source code to people who aren’t getting the distributed software.
What is your complaint then? They are not breaking any law and they are following the GPL license.
I was using the webframework/language as examples because you said this wasn’t a matter of law but a matter of principle. So why does the principle apply to Redhat but not the million other products that totally depend on FOSS on their core?
So many projects do in fact distribute the FOSS, but they use more permissive licenses like MIT, Apache or LGPL. BUT you’re saying the law is not relevant, what matters is the principle. So why don’t everyone release their code if they depend on FOSS on their core products? Because they aren’t breaking the Apache or MIT licenses? Well, that’s great! Redhar isn’t breaking the GPL license either. Why must Redhat follow whatever subjective principles you have?
— “hey there’s this company creating a commercial product around FOSS. They aren’t breaking any license.”
— “Nice, as long as the licenses aren’t compromised”
— “It’s Redhat”
— “Those mofos! How dare they!”
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Alma should use this as advantage for them. Now market it as “Alma Linux is more secure than RHEL”.
Fuck it, let’s go Alma!
It still requires a substantial amount of time to review the fix. Depending on the circumstances it might require more time to review a piece of code than to write it.
I mean obviously for the community this is bad, but I 100% get that doing anything for free is best effort. They don’t even need to have this policy 100% of the time to make large orgs using FOSS with no SLA for vulnerability patching sweat. Which frankly they should.
For real, I’m gonna use this as a tactic to say “we shouldn’t rely on software without warranty and support, FOSS or proprietary.”. Just to get money flowing to devs, because for it’s for real reckless to contribute nothing to keeping pieces of your critical infra secure
And this is why I use Ubuntu server.
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“Your code has an issue here’s a fix for that”.
Corporate: no.
Alright, at first I was like okay red hat wants to make money to keep IBM happy. Now I just realize it’s not red hat anymore. Fuck that I’m moving to suse
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Nobody has a problem with Red Hat keeping the lights on and people paid. IBM just wants to increase profit margins because capitalism is a flawed system about abusing whatever you can for personal gain.
Just the good old stock market gently asking for infinite growth. You can´t just be profitable these days, shareholders prefer to kill a profitable business that does not grow constantly.
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Not bringing anything of value to the discussion but just want to say - fuck 'em.
Red Hat literally became the first ever billionaire FOSS company (iirc), their pre-selling out business model was working perfectly fine.
2023: The Year of the Assholes
That’s too much effort. Just advertise the CVE fix and let a paying customer do the effort.
Free market at work!
Everyone is going to have to accept that RHEL is over and done. Since paying customers are not allow to release the code publicly, overtime it could turn into its own ooerating system that happens to use the Linux kernel, similar to Android.
Forget about Red Hat, they’re gone, they’re not an option for any small company. Individuals should never have been using Red Hat, but companies are going to have to find something else like Debian/Devuan, FreeBSD, something with a stable branch that gets 3 to 4 years of updates.
RHEL ultimately comes from Fedora (plus Redhat has a great say in where Fedora is headed), so… RHEL won’t become sort of an AIX or HPUX anytime soon.
That said, Redhat’s move opens up the position of “enterprise-like distro for scientific/technical shops and other people who do their own support” (think, from CERN to small software houses) that so was the reign of RHEL clones (together with Ubuntu, of course).
Those are people who will probably never buy RHEL licenses for all their machines no matter what, so in a sense it stands to reason that RH doesn’t care about them (if you think their move is about money rather than falling for the “value to the community” PR spin), but those same people are also trend setters whose choices, in time, trickle down to universities and then companies, and to me it looks like there’s a huge opportunity there (and that Alma is currently in the best position to harvest from it in the long run).
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That’s exactly what’s already happened. Rocky and Alma are already no longer an option for a free version of Red Hat since Red Hat code is not allowed to be shared, it can only be viewed. Read their own words from Alma and Rocky, what they themself said about oing forward.
Red Hat can also change the license agreement further to include anyone proven to have published source code of Red Hat branded material agrees to pay a fee to Red Hat of no less than $10 million, or whatever price they want to put on it.
Everyone can scream about Red Hat, all they have to have to do is change some wording in agreement that includes fees(fines) for multi millions of dollars, BOOM! Red Hat becomes a proprietary system built on open source software.
SUSE says they will fork RHEL, but Alma and Rocky are over in terms of being a clone. People have asked for years why there is no free 1 to 1 clone of SLES and SLED. IBM is free to choose to turn all of RHEL in a proprietary development and lock it down, unless you can get a court order that says Red Hate’s code must be made public, but I don’t dare test IBM lawyers over any code that is not released under AGPLv3, only then I would.
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The GNU/Linux GPLv2 does not apply to any software developed and owned by Red Hat like all of the Red Hat security programs, that is not covered by the Linux license. If Red Hat never modifies or changes a single line of code in GNU/Linux, they are free to run closed source programs on top of it. They own .rpm file format so they have the legal freedom to make the system and all RH software proprietary.
That’s how Rocky and Alma are now permanently locked out from accessing the code.
As someone interviewing for Canonical’s Security team (they make you do like 10 interviews, I’m like 5 deep over 3 weeks), I cannot imagine anyone security-minded writing that comment. It either:
- Comes from higher up
- Michal doesn’t think security is important
Can you prove that your joining Canonical (picture proof), as you know, people can be anything in the internet while they’re in their parent’s basement.
If you are, what type of interview questions do they ask?
Vim or emacs?
Butterflies
Nano
M-x butterfly
Micro gang here. There are at least two of us!
represent
cat
Vim and nano
@MrOzwaldMan first you attack someone then want an answer, interesting strategy
I mean anyone can be behind a username with or without a pfp.
How would I know NoobMaster69 is a Google Software Engineer or a part time Janitor or a 9yo using ChatGOT
Are you this obnoxious to people you meet offline?
I mean sure, here you go. I’m in stage 3 of 4 right now:
Congrats, I hope you excel in your journey with canonical.
He has not joined yet. What is he supposed to prove?
Proof that he is being interviewed by canonical, which he did send, which I am grateful for.
Ain’t nothing wrong with asking for proof and you shouldn’t be mad as anyone can be behind a username with or without a pfp.
