> Red Hat made linux mainstream.

1. In the English-speaking world, mainly meaning North America.

For instance, SUSE is just as old, and brought Linux to the mainstream in Mitteleuropa. Not just in "DACH" (the German speaking world: Deutschland, Austria, Confœderatio Helvetica), but also for instance it was the first Czech-language distro. I worked for SUSE in Prague for 4 years, and it is still big in that part of the world.

Conectiva brought it to LatAm. TurboLinux to Japan. Etc., etc.

2. FSVO "mainstream" -- Red Hat Linux (note, not RHEL) was not really very useful as a desktop OS. I ran it, I used it, but trying to install something as complex as a desktop using raw RPM with no dependency management was nightmarish. That's where Mandrake came from: Red Hat refused to bundle KDE because Qt wasn't 100% GPL, so Mandrake ported KDE to RHL and bundled them.

Caldera was even earlier, and OpenLinux 1.0 with KDE was the first desktop distro I tried that was polished enough to make my primary OS for a while.

RHL was mainly a server OS, and as such, not very mainstream for most people.

I think that's what gp is saying: in the "enterprise" space, Solaris and HP-UX and Irix were kings. RedHat moved into that space by providing businesses the same model of support, while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.

RedHat THINKS they're still doing that with Fedora/CentOS Stream, but everyone disagrees.

But it didn't, not back then. In the 1990s, and for most of the company's first decade in business, it offered a free distribution and made most of its money from selling merchandise. Which is to say, not very much money at all.

It's only around 2003 but its management hit upon the idea of having a premium enterprise distribution, and making the only way to obtain it being to buy commercial support for it. That was a stroke of genius, and over the last 20 years, it's made the company very rich indeed — in stark contrast to its first decade.

> while ALSO having a desktop version/free version for people to learn on.

Again, that split only came after about a decade in business. For its first 10 years or so, there was only the free version.

Also, more to the point, back when Solaris and HP UX were big, Red Hat was still very small and mainly in the business of selling T-shirts and mouse mats.

It's a bit of a generalisation, but to an extent, it was Microsoft Windows which put commercial UNIX out of business, followed by Apple macOS which showed that UNIX on the desktop could be as good or better than Windows.

Windows established a marketplace of COTS high-end x86 kit with decent graphics capabilities and capable storage subsystems. Apple successfully piggybacked on that to make desirable easy to use RISC UNIX workstations for consumers, using their own processors but otherwise pretty much off the shelf PC industry parts.

And those things put together are what created a marketplace in which Linux could thrive and compete effectively.

When Linux was first invented, a high end PC had a crappy VGA card on the ISA bus, and many of them didn't even have mice, sound or networking as standard. I was there. It was grim.

Their enterprise support started around RH6, which was in 1999 and grew from there. It eventually morphed into RHEL because of the enterprise success, but didn't start with it.

MacOS wasn't UNIX based until the big MacOS X rewrite which was around 1999, if I remember right. It felt very much like it was a reaction to Linux, especially with them making a big deal about how it was an Official UNIX(TM), not so subtly reminding us that Linux was not.

What really killed Unix on workstations was NT, and it killed it when the first sgi NT workstations shipped.

In the server space, Linux began to replace Solaris once you could run Oracle on Linux. That was the end of every other Unix.

In addition major new chrome (Cocoa, OS X Finder, etc.) Mac OS X originally included a version of the older Mac OS APIs (Carbon) as well as a Mac OS 9 virtual environment (Classic) for running older non-Carbon apps. It was really a chimera that included pretty complete Mac OS 9 ABI support as well as a Mac-flavored version of NeXTSTEP.

It's a bit of a shame that Apple keeps abandoning its backward compatibility layers (I hope Rosetta2 will be different) but I guess that's what emulators are for.

> What really killed Unix on workstations was NT, and it killed it when the first sgi NT workstations shipped.

'Cos it sure as anything wasn't Windows 9x that persuaded businesses that Windows was a legitimate OS.

And RedHat had previously already displaced Digital Unix for all the webservers by the end of 2001.

They are doing that with the free developer licencing.

That's Switzerland (or if you're particularly pedantic: the Swiss Confederation) for those not brushed up on their Latin and Latin graphemes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_G...

TBH I didn't even consider that anyone might not know where Helvetia was, but you're right, I should have mentioned that.

https://ecommercegermany.com/blog/the-complete-guide-to-unde...

But a lot of people don't know it, and as the terms are in 3 languages, its meaning is not obvious.

(And I didn't in the least find it pretentious)

I only learned the term a few years ago, while working at SUSE, and it fits a need I wasn't aware I had.

"The German-speaking world" is awfully long and yet remains imprecise:

* Are we talking about countries where there are some German speaking people? No -- that's probably every country.

* Are we referring to countries where there's a resident German-speaking minority? No. The USA has the Amish who speak "Pennsylvania Dutch" (among other minorities there among whom old folks speak Germanic languages) and that isn't Dutch at all but a Low Germanic dialect -- or a family of them.

Then there are the Volga Germans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_Germans -- hundreds of thousands of German speakers around the former USSR.

* Are we talking about countries where German is the majority language then, like Anglosphere in English? The Teutonosphere?

* Oh, but hang on, then shouldn't the term be in German?

* Ah, but hang on, I do know a little German, and German speakers love coining new words by ramming existing words together, so it's probably been invented a dozen times. The Deutchsprachigewelt or something.

* Uhoh... maybe there is such a word but non-German speakers don't know it because they don't understand it, or they can't say it?

* And anyway, whose German then? Hochdeutsch or Schweitscherduutsch or Bayerisch or Swabish?

So I looked, and there is, and it's short and easy, and it cuts through the difficulty of two of the countries having different forms of German and the third having a really weird form of German but anyway it's not the standard language it's just one of four...

It's in German and English and Latin! Cool!

In another thread today, there are a lot of people upset and angry that they could not work out that a story about how an AI image generator can't create an image of a single banana, called the "AI lone banana problem" or something, did not say clearly that the problem was that an chatbot can't draw just one banana. And the story was really long at nearly 3000 words, which apparently is a 10-15 minute read and also apparently ain't nobody got time for that.

The HN commentariat does not always pick up on messages I would consider very obvious indeed... :-/

Red Hat itself was mostly fine. I've competed against them and fought against their FUD. They're an enterprise software vendor no different from Oracle in this regard. But besides the sales and marketing knife fights necessitating unsavory tactics (everyone's does it), it was a mostly ethical decent business.

That said, as an old OS/2 fan and former IT executive that had to deal with large strategic outsourcing deals: IBM is not a trustworthy vendor, and plays old school dirty tactics in almost every large customer: from attempting to get people fired for questioning IBM, to near bribery. For this reason, I never want to do business with them or Red Hat unless I absolutely must.

Amen. IBM doesn't believe their customers are "developers" or "sysadmins"; they believe their customers are C-levels who will always come back. They miss the point that C-levels rotate out as previous devs and sysops rise up. That's how they lost the mainframe market, and the desktop market, and now the minicomputer market that they clawed back with RHEL. The cloud they already lost.

Or straight up bribery. An IBM exec in Poland pleaded guilty to bribing an government official to get a contract in 2012.

>the pattern of “commoditizing your complement”, an alternative to vertical integration, where companies seek to secure a chokepoint or quasi-monopoly in products composed of many necessary & sufficient layers by dominating one layer while fostering so much competition in another layer above or below its layer that no competing monopolist can emerge, prices are driven down to marginal costs elsewhere in the stack, total price drops & increases demand, and the majority of the consumer surplus of the final product can be diverted to the quasi-monopolist.

What red hat is doing is commodotizing their complement, it's nothing more than that. One big example is that I would rather be using an OpenRC init system, but because redhat throws their weight around I need to use a systemd-based distro at work, to work on embedded systems (can't use ~~chroots~~ systemd-nspawn unless the host is also running systemd).

By throwing all this shit out for free they're able to destroy any sort of organic competition that might arise. Honestly I wouldn't even be mad, except a big chunk of it enterprise-ey shit and introduce major security issues just from how they're architected.

There's good and bad, but the problem is they make it very hard to just take the good and leave the bad. They bundle things together, like the decision to make Gnome depend on systemd, or the way networkd can't really be seperated from systemd, or renaming gummiboot to systemd-boot.

They also don't do a good job of disclosing what open source projects they have de-facto control over, and you're likely to find a lot of redhat employees in key positions in projects you didn't realize had anything to do with redhat.

I agree with you, Red Hat are a huge contributor to open source. Their business model lets them make money and then they use that money to contribute to projects in the wild. To me, it’s a win win.

I can understand why people would be upset with the changes. I don’t understand why they would be angry though.

The choice of down stream repackage distros has always been at RH’s convenience. This has always been clear since the day CentOS was a thing, and Rocky/Alma after it. Their product model depended on the whims of another product.

Now combine that with its new business leaders that promise explicitly to pare back efforts that don't help or even hurt the bottom line.

Would that make you happy with them? Sure, they aren't under an obligation to drive FOSS, but there is an obvious and notable change in direction here.

What notable change has their been to their contributions has their been? Please point to some reduction or drop in quality.

Without a concrete talking point, the statement is so empty that I could say the same about any distro, for example Ubuntu or Suse which also have commercial components to their businesses

"There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder."

These comments are explicitly about a focus on doing the things that directly drive revenue. Their actions correlate with their stated direction.

We can debate whether the direction is right or wrong for them (I'm explictly not making a judgment here), but the direction and intent are clear.

Whether they are effectively maintaining components for another distro is besides the point.

That does not make their direction or intent clear with regards to open source contributions

Do you think they will keep advancing spice as much as before now that they've deprecated it in their products?

More wood into fewer arrows means just what it sounds like it means.

The Redhat that this last week has been on an anti-neckbeard crusade saying 'we aren't the distro for your type' to those of us who got them in the market is what is disappointing. It's like you help your friend become part of your larger friends group and then they ghost you when they don't need you anymore and are 'too cool' for you. So yeah, fuck off Redhat. They can do whatever they want, but they won't be getting any good will, and the petty anarchist in me will take advantage of any situations that come up to do ill upon them if it has a low personal cost.

Publicly stating you will “do ill upon” a multinational corporation sounds a lot like a threat, and we don’t do that here.

It is very much an open question whether they comply with the GPL by imposing additional restrictions on a license which states that you may not add restrictions.

From the GPL: "For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must pass on to the recipients the same freedoms that you received."

The operative word being recipients.

Redhat may be the devil incarnate now that they apparently are a part of IBM... Though as far as this distribution change I don't see the problem.

To me this seems like a pretty clear cut case of adding restrictions to GPL code and risking getting those licenses taken away. It will be interesting to see if they face any real repercussions though.

That would be a restriction, in your example, but that is not what Red Hat is doing.

> Why is that OK but losing a very expensive support contract not? Does it get better if it's a month to month support contract?

Because in your first example, they are applying a restriction to copies of the software you have already received. That would be against the GPL, but that is NOT what Red Hat is doing.

Red Hat, if they were to terminate their support contract with you, does not affect any of the free software you have already received. You are still free to do with it as you like because there are no restrictions. But, Red Hat might not give you any _more_ software, and they don't have to because the transaction covered by the GPL for the software they already distributed to you was completely fulfilled.

Personally, I am doggone tired of people continually misrepresenting this point. Red Hat is simply __not__ violating the GPL.

>Red Hat is simply __not__ violating the GPL.

a particularly interesting thought to unpack. Because while this event isn't a violation, the 'jury is out' on whether or not Red Hat's entire business model is compatible with the GPL in the first place. One thing that we do know is that Red Hat has displayed willingness to violate the GPL in the past.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...

I have to question that.

Nearly all of my worst experiences when using Linux have involved software that they or their developers have, to the best of my knowledge, been significantly involved with creating.

I'm thinking of software like systemd, PulseAudio, NetworkManager, GNOME 3, and Wayland, for example.

I've wasted far too much of my time dealing with unnecessary, silly, and inexcusable problems involving such software.

What makes it even worse is that despite me trying to avoid their ecosystem, their software has unfortunately still made it into other major distros, including Debian.

After a few painful years though, the bugs got fixed in the "right" places, and that's part of why Pipewire (also developed by Red Hat) was able to come along and replace it so quickly.

And thankfully Pipewire addresses a lot of the actually legitimate issues with PulseAudio

However, whenever I started searching for solutions to the various problems I was encountering, I pretty much always found numerous other bug reports, mailing list threads, blog posts, Stack Overflow questions, forum posts, and so on, from other people running into the same troubles, along with other problems that I thankfully hadn't been experiencing.

It was clear to me that I wasn't alone.

My guess is IBM and some RedHat people decided to be greedier than than they should and by shutting down access to the RH repositories somehow they think they can squeeze as many companies as possible to pay for Linux.

Terrible how good things are ruined by greed.

I disagree. I think the mistake was bringing CentOS in house: legitimising a free version of their own cash cow.

It is virtually Rule No. 1 of business: don't compete with yourself. If you are selling something expensive, don't later start to offer an unrestricted free version too.

I'm thinking a sudden change of view because of internal politics rather than an organic change as part of some master plan.

In 2019 the Scientific Linux developers announced they would stop development and collaborate on CentOS instead.

At that point Red Hat had captured the RHEL-clone world, leaving them in a position to destroy it.

I remember trying out PUIAS for a short time back when CentOS was having a lot of community issues.

I personally used CentOS for systems that I knew had a long lifetime ahead of them and for their use a distribution that could be "supported" for a number of years was the way to go. But since upgrading from CentOS 7 to CentOS 8 was such a PITA, I started slowly migrating to Ubuntu LTS which makes version upgrades painless.

I think they did. Place I worked had explicit direction to replace RHEL with CentOS to cut licensing costs. Most big companies would pay when they are force to pay and no free alternatives available that'd do the job. They won't pay just because it is nice thing to do.

Oracle then forked the distribution, and their presence far outweighs CentOS.

For those who would argue against this assertion, run the command "wsl.exe -l -o" inside a Microsoft Windows command prompt.

You will not find CentOS there, and you will not find Red Hat, but the coverage of Oracle Linux is quite thorough.

Red Hat has a long history of antagonism of their partners and users, and they have paid dearly for it.

Which is what this site and petition is about, at my first glance anyhow.

So I resent them. It's the resentment of personal loss, not some grand philosophical stance.

That's literally the GPL.

> if you are a paying customer you get terminated if you share the code

And that's shit, but also the problem with tethering yourself to a single vendor. They don't have to do business with you.

There are plenty of other RPM enterprise vendors, switch to SUSE.

Go download the source for Darwin.. https://github.com/apple/darwin-xnu

Compile it. Install it on your MacBook. Tell us how well MacOS boots that kernel.