I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.
Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It's well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.
Again from Ted:
*
IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*
I'm not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.
Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I've stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall 'testing' it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn't seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven't kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.
It's entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn't agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what 'the entire linux community' thinks about this.
For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don't know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the 'entire linux community' are not happy it's not great journalism.
"Now we've heard Red Hat's version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on"
I've not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing....but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I'm confortable dismissing them.
If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I'd want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.
I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.
If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.
TBF someone did say stream 'wasn't a great name' which was the harshest criticism of Red Hat I heard.
If: "The entire Linux community is seemingly latched on to one side" as you say it might not have been too difficult to source someone knowledgeable with a slightly different opinion to that of someone on Red Hat's payroll for at least an interesting debate, or follow up podcast as presumably Red Hat/ IBM don't want employees debating this stuff.
If, as you say, the entire community is seemingly against them, a balanced take doesn't seem to be 2 people just agreeing with an employee about company policy and denigrating "freeloaders".
I've been watching shitty behavior from Red Hat for well over a decade now and am not a fan of the company but I'm happy to be written off as a tinfoil hat wearing relic of the past....but people like Jeff Geerling describing them as sticking a knife in his back, twisting it and abusing the community should at least give a little pause for thought. He explicitly says he doesn't want Red Hat employees patronizing him with exactly the sort of stuff the Red Hat employee is being encouraged to do in the podcast.
Jeff always seemed like quite a reasonable and easy going chap to me and doesn't often use his platform to discuss being stabbed, abused, patronized and made a fool out of.
I use it on my laptop & pi mainly as I'm lazy. Fedora was the only 'just works' option for a 2010 macbook, the kernel seemed touchpad & keymap friendly unlike everything else I tried. The systemd out of memory killer made the system completely unusable and disabling the service doesn't actually disable the service at all which led me to shout some sweary words, eventually found a guide on how to mask systemd services.
Last time I tried Gentoo & Void on my pi I spent a day on it and couldn't get smooth 2160p playback with Kodi so I tried Raspberry Pi OS which, perhaps unsurprisingly, 'just worked' in this department.
I will get round to converting them at some point as I don't plan on upgrading Fedora beyond 37 and the pi4 2160p playback is solvable when I have a little time.
Listening to the podcast at the moment, it's grim. They have a Red Hat employee as the special guest and just agree 100% with the company line. I think I'm meant to feel sorry for poor little Red Hat & IBM being taken advantage of but it just all feels very silly. I'm gonna have to turn it off shortly but so far it feels like a paid advert for Red Hat. Nothing but positivity for Red Hat and being pretty nasty about anyone who doesn't 100% agree with Red Hat.
Debian only support systemd, if you want systemd free Debian there are forks of the project like Devuan...but then you are no longer running an OS officially supported by the Debian foundation.
Red Hat are not losing their minds. A recent post from Ted here makes it pretty clear that IBM call the shots and couldn't give two fucks about anyone other than paying enterprise customers. Red Hat's recent rant about freeloaders and attempts to lock stuff down doesn't help the situation imo.
Pretty sure they are absolutely relying on Red Hat. Red Hat provide the system plumbing for most linux distros, under the lgpl, and are heavily integrated into RHEL, Fedora, Rocky, Alma, Cent, Wayland, Pulseaudio, Pipewire & Gnome development.
If no one relied on Red Hat the whole Cent/Rocky/Alma mess wouldn't be an issue at all and Rocky would have no need for this sort of entertaining gymnastics. Debian would not have had the most publicly painful year I've even seen it go through with the systemd debate and Lennart would not have issued Gentoo with a wakeup call from Red Hat.
I started using linux regularly around 2011 and the communities I joined then were concerned about Red Hat's future plans and putting safeguards in place. Pat Volkerding, Daniel Robbins, Gentoo, Void, Crux and many others are better prepped to manage Red Hat going postal as they have been cautious of their approach for a decade or more.
If Linus goes postal, not to worry, it's foss, we can just fork the kernel, write a new one or get hurd feature complete over the weekend.
IBM/RH have been a major contributor to Gnome for over a decade. Yamakuzure, Dantrell, Gentoo, Drobbins and others have helped ensure it remains portable.
My preference is i3/dwm ,or if pushed lxqt or xfce4.
I don't doubt that relying on Red Hat's code makes life easier.
My needs are minimal. I can get by on openrc, runit, systemd or sysv.
Curious to see where s6 goes.
I lost interest in Arch when Tom Gunderson was aggressively promoting systemd whilst being funded by Red Hat, I was sad when Debian made the decision to rely on Red Hat to take care of the low level system plumbing.
My tinfoil hat from around 2010 still seems relevant.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I'm not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn't being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
I'm not sure there is a need to run linux on bare metal, or carry around a second laptop.