Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?

I was wondering when Red Hat enshittification would began the moment IBM announced the acquisition. Turns out it begins today.

Please don't fuck up my beloved fedora. Kind regards.

sigh Do I have to go abandon Fedora now too? I really hope they don't pull a CentOS on that one

I highly doubt this would affect Fedora. Thankfully, it's community driven and self-goverened so Red Hat execs can't go and tell them what to do. (Though I don't know how many ties the Fedora council had to Red Hat)
- All of Fedora’s funding and IP comes from and belongs to Red Hat, this would be very persuasive. At least openSUSE has more sponsors than just SUSE.

What may this cause to a casual fedora user?

How is this supposed to work with GPL ? Because anyone owning a copy is free to redistribute sources

The plan is to give the source Code to paying customers. This is gpl-compliant.
- The concern is that Red Hat terminates your account if you redistribute the source to another party. This feels like an additional restriction placed on the source code, which if it is, would indeed violate the GPL.
I haven't seen this in person so I can only speculate, but I bet they'll only provide the sources as a tarball or something instead of a git repo, which will make it a PITA for anyone do actually do anything useful with it. I mean, you could potentially still build a full distro from it, but you wouldn't be able to feasibly maintain it without the ability to do a sync and merge from upstream. So this way, Red Hat achieves their goal of being able to kill any spinoff distro, whilst still remaining compliant with the GPL.
- It’s not a “they will.” Red Hat customers are able to download source rpms from the repository or the site, this has been the case for a very long time. It is possible to clone / sync the repository, this is how airgapped networks can still host their own.

It's most probably IBM forcing it, but yeah it's dumb.

I don't know about that. IBM is traditionally stupid, yeah, but they wanted Red Hat for a reason. The CentOS debacle altogether was Red Hat, not IBM, and I don't think they are doing too much day to day operational mandates for stuff like this. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing. I know it's easy to blame IBM, but I don't think it's that simple.
- . I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.
  It's a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.
  But this new one is QUITE the departure. It's not 'red hat' stupid but a little further on the spectrum.
- they wanted Red Hat for a reason.
  They were dying and they needed a cash cow to milk. The only way that was gonna work is if they didn't kick the cow and spoil that milk like they've kicked every cow before it. And they can't stop, so they're just kicking away.
- Lol, redhat is just butt hurt they lost the NASA Linux contract to rocky

Fuck, I really hope this doesn't turn the tides for other Red Hat projects.

Not even my Linux distros can escape the enshittiness. WTF man.

It's ultimately because of capital. Capital controls resource allocation, so any project that requires resources will have to align with capital interests

Wow what the hell, this is the first I'm hearing of this change. I use Rocky Linux for my server atm and I was thinking I liked it for server use quite a lot more than Fedora, but if they're going to do this then I'm going to have to jump ship unfortunately. Maybe I'll go back to Debian. Or even better, maybe I'll try using Devuan in a prod server setup for once?

I'm super not happy to have to jump ship again though when I JUST settled into something I'm comfortable with that works near perfectly well for my usecases, after multiple years of jumping around undecided.

E: Although I did just read that statement from the Rocky Linux team, and maybe it'll be fine? But I'm still gonna prepare to move just in case this fucks over the Rocky Linux ecosystem anyways

@REdOG

IBM: We poured money and resources into Linux before 99% of the business world had even heard of it. We helped make it great. Why shouldn't we require a return on that investment?

PLEASE UNDERSTAND, I think IBM/RH is bone-headed as heck and are now inexcusable violators of the GPL, and other licenses.

I knew they were going to break RH and make it something abominable.

But they were there at the very beginning of the 2000s, promoting Linux heavily. (Not altruistically, of course)

This is not a violation of the GPL. They are allowed to charge for access to the source. If you provide binaries/images to a customer, you also must provide source. However, anyone who doesn't pay isn't entitled to it.
However, this is still a total bonehead move.

Not surprised. A for-profit corporation wanting more money. Especially as we enroach further into late stage capitalism where corporations struggle to find more territory to profiteer from and squeeze more profit out of us.

The era of free services being profitable is ending rapidly, and we see this across many areas in the world.

You're right. I should say "profit growth" which is what corporations look for. You can have solid growth, but unless it's growing, they don't care.
I wouldn't say they aren't profitable, I would say the greed outweighs profitability.

Yeah fuck this move. Seems incredibly short sighted and a huge fuck you to the community.

@FrankTheHealer @REdOG I guess Debian based distros win.
- Is there even a Debian based distro that is up to date like Fedora, does not have snaps and does not have "Unstable" in its name?