"It appears that the upstream kernel endeavor on Rocky Linux may be gated to their commercial customers as opposed to making all the assets freely available and just gating their commercial support."

Where is my surprised face... oh, here it is: 😯

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocky-Linux-Upstream-Kernels

I'm sure @gordonmessmer will like this. 🙂

@sesivany outright copying the business model they criticized. I wonder if they will copy and paste our legal language on terminating support too.

@sageofredondo @sesivany maybe they'll use the same sed s/RHEL/Rocky Linux/ command they use for their release notes.

@sageofredondo @sesivany I was trying to parse the article and was wondering, is this exactly what Red Hat is doing?

@purpleidea @sageofredondo this goes beyond what Red Hat is doing. Everything that goes to RHEL ends up in CentOS Stream, they critised us for not making exact backport patches to existing RHEL streams available to public.
This kernel thing doesn't seem to be public at all.

@purpleidea @sesivany indeed.

Keep in mind our main development branch is still open to the public. CentOS Stream. They can pull in code from that.

Source: was a kernel maintainer that worked on Stream and still a contact for Stream.

@sageofredondo @sesivany I'm sure once the dust settles rocky will comply similarly.

@sesivany @sageofredondo I mean, we all know it will have to be public by GPL, eventually, so it doesn't at this outset look to be materially that different. I'm not advocating for this but maybe it's not that different from what a big "open source" company is doing?

@purpleidea @sageofredondo GPL doesn't dictate it has to be public. GPL says the source code has to be available to the users of the software. If you only provide the software to your customers, you can only provide source code to them, too.
Legally it's all fine. It's the hypocrisy I'm pointing to here.

@purpleidea @sesivany are you sure you are not confusing public with a requirement to distribute the source code under the GPL? Red Hat is complying with that.

What the clones were upset was is that we were providing debranded access to the source code for them for the main release of RHEL to easily repackage and we stopped. They criticized us for that, claiming we went closed source. They are now doing the exact same thing. Only providing source code to those that got binaries.

@sesivany Let me summarize: They used free speech as an argument to get free beer, but they no longer intend to share the beer for free. Am I correct? Hmm... I am not completely sure this is how Stallman meant it 😉

@trilobyte Everything Red Hat does is everyone's. Everything we do on the top of it is ours and our customer's. 🙃

@sageofredondo @sesivany I'm not claiming Red Hat isn't complying. I'm saying that I think they are probably playing the same game that Red Hat is playing, so one shouldn't throw shade unless they're not going to do it either...

@purpleidea @sageofredondo Yeah, but it's them who critised it so vehemently. They called themselves the guardians of open source with the quest to keep the Enterprise Linux source code always available to the public etc. And then they just silently started doing the same. My post is not about the fact that they're doing it, but about the hypocrisy.

@me @trilobyte it was not meant as a state of things, but as sarcastic statement because they want us to make all our changes public while they don't do the same with their changes.

@sesivany @me @trilobyte This kind of GPL abuse was not normal before RedHat started it :-(.

@sesivany @purpleidea @sageofredondo RedHat started this commnity abuse, and they are responsible for it. Let me just point the hypocrisy here :-(.

@pavel @purpleidea @sageofredondo I fail to see the hypocrisy here. Red Hat has gated exact backport patches to its customers for years. We've always admitted it and certainly never ostracized others for doing so.

@sesivany Edit: I've been proven wrong! Keeping the toot for the record.

more and more convinced the whole thing is a scam.

The other day i saw an article suggesting they "restored support for hardware unsupported by RHEL". what they did is that they just patched in PCI IDs to their kernel so that the drivers bind to those devices. Something that could be as easily done with regular CentOS kernel with an oneliner from userspace.

(disclaimer: a hibernating Red Hatter here)

@lkundrak @sesivany it was AlmaLinux tho, not Rocky

@vadim @sesivany oh no, bro, i've seen them only do good stuff!

My apologies to both!