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.
Maybe you should familiarize yourself with CentOS Stream and its purpose.
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.
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.
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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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!
“Your code has an issue here’s a fix for that”.
Corporate: no.
2023: The Year of the Assholes
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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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?
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.
