iTWire - SUSE commits to open-source principles in wake of Red Hat move
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Monday, 03 July 2023 09:23
SUSE commits to open-source principles in wake of Red Hat move Featured
By Sam Varghese
Dr Thomas Di Giacomo: "...the freedom to access, modify, and distribute software should remain open to all." Supplied
German open source vendor SUSE says it will not be making any changes to its policies on source code access, emphasising "that the freedom to access, modify, and distribute software should remain open to all".
In a statement issued last Thursday, SUSE chief technology officer Dr Thomas Di Giacomo said the implications for vendors, developers and users from Red Hat's change in policy were significant, adding that the move had caused concern within the open source community.
On 21 June, Red Hat announced that it would make source code for its RHEL distribution only available to those who were customers of the company.
Mike McGrath, vice-president of Core Platforms, said the CentOS Stream — which was set up some two years ago and serves as an upstream distribution to RHEL — would be the only repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.
CentOS was an independent entity until Red Hat bought it and moved it in-house in 2014. Red Hat itself was bought by IBM in 2019.
When Red Hat said it was killing off CentOS, it announced that CentOS Stream would be the future of CentOS and serve as a testing ground for RHEL.
Dr Di Giacomo said the changes made by Red Hat in June were huge. "It’s a big change in its source code access policy and this decision has caused significant concern within the open source community," he said.
"That’s understandable. RHEL’s existence owes much to the collaborative efforts of many upstream projects, including the Linux kernel developed by many different contributors, among them SUSE.
"At the centre of our world is innovating together. We are all working to build something greater than the sum of all our parts. We are all inter-dependent."
He reiterated that SUSE was committed to the principles of open source, saying. "At SUSE, the principles of open source and power of collaboration are dear to us.
"While changes in the open source landscape may shift dynamics, we firmly believe that the freedom to access, modify, and distribute software should remain open to all."
In the past, SUSE has taken swipes at Red Hat when it changed its source code access policy, with former chief executive Nils Brauckmann in 2016 describing SUSE as an "open open-source company".
The obvious inference was that Red Hat's offerings tend to be those where a customer has to use every bit of technology from the same company. Else, things will not work as expected.
"SUSE helps many enterprise customers run and manage heterogeneous environments including CentOS and RHEL," Dr Di Giacomo said. "Our solution for these customers is SUSE Liberty Linux.
"We want to reassure our customers that we remain fully committed to delivering a seamless experience for SUSE Liberty Linux. Red Hat’s decision does not change that.
"We will continue to collaborate with our partners in the open source community and leverage our decades of expertise to provide Red Hat binary compatible updates and security fixes going forward."
SUSE is now more than 30 years old as a distribution and predated Red Hat by more than a year. It is now the biggest independent open-source vendor, but has a small share of the market compared to Red Hat which crossed US$3 billion in revenue in 2019.
Under IBM's stewardship, Red Hat's revenue has gone backwards over the last five quarters. In the first quarter of 2023, the company reported an 8% rise in revenue; for the previous four quarters it was 18%, 12%, 12% and 10% respectively.
Meanwhile, long-time Linux sysadmin and Debian developer Russell Coker expanded on comments he had made about the Red Hat move, saying: 'My experience is that some people will never pay for Linux and having them use CentOS helps red Hat by driving demand for software that works with RHEL.
"For the companies that do pay for RHEL, they do so for the support - which has always been known to be of high quality - and for the perceived risk of third-party software.
"Companies are paying for RHEL because they fear that CentOS etc won't work correctly. I think their fears are misguided, but their money is good.
"I think the smart move for IBM would be to not try and restrict source, but instead offer very cheap RHEL licences to r/homelab types to drive the market for compatible software and training of IT staff who in future may have input into corporate purchasing decisions."
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