Redhat
In the last chapter, I already documented a lot about redhat, but that’s not enough. Redhat is disgusting and must be documented. Before I start I’d like to show a warning: This is quite possibly the worst corporation in the history of open source
Redhat is born
In 1993, Bob Young incorporated the ACC Corporation, a catalog business that
sold Linux and Unix software accessories. In 1994, Marc Ewing created his own
Linux distribution, which he named Red Hat Linux (associated with the time
Ewing wore a red Cornell University lacrosse hat, given to him by his
grandfather, while attending Carnegie Mellon University). Ewing released the
software in October, and it became known as the Halloween release. Young bought
Ewing’s business in 1995, and the two merged to become Red Hat Software, with
Young serving as chief executive officer (CEO).
Source: Wikipedia
Why Redhat is so bad
As I explained in “Oligarchy and corporate interest”, big businesses are slowly trying to ruin FOSS by replacing homemade and actually FOSS projects with their own corporate projects. They can also buy out other projects by donation. Redhat is quite possibly the worst offender of them both. They’ve created projects including (but not limited to)
- CentOS
- Ceph
- OKD
- Project quay
- Pulp
- RHEL
- Wildfly
And they’ve also donated to many projects, for example Godot. For a full list on all of their “ventures” (with “venture” meaning “project that redhat can invest in and make a profit while still pretending to be a non-greedy FOSS-corpo.”), see “Redhat emerging technologies”. Also, redhat. If you’re trying not to look like an evil supervillain, maybe work on your logo so that it doesn’t look, pfft! Comically evil!
Pictured: Comically evil logo for a comically evil corporation. I’d go as far as to call them neo-fordist (AKA greedy and dystopian).
Also… Redhat subscriptions? Really? A while ago redhat, – get ready for something stupid – locked RHEL source code behind a redhat subscription! Yet, one of the only people I was able to find criticizing redhat was some random guy named Jeff Geerling, so that should put into perspective how little criticism the recieve. That is insane! But I don’t mean to criticize Geerling, he has very good arguments against Redhat, so I guess his blog post will take over the narration now:
I’ve had a busy week, so I didn’t have time until today to read this news about Red
Hat locking down RHEL sources behind a Red Hat subscription. I repeat the title: Red
Hat, are you dumb? When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into
a leading-edge distro instead of basically “Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but free”, users
like me were justifiably angered. I don’t contribute to CentOS or Red Hat development
much, if at all. But I have, for over a decade, provided software and tools that were
compatible with RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, and sometimes other more exotic distros.
I could test my stuff against CentOS Stream… or UBI… or Fedora. Those are mostly like RHEL.
Or I could try linking a Red Hat Developer subscription to my test runners and build tools so
I could use a licensed copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, because that would be required for…
actually ensuring compatibility. But that’s dumb. So at this point, I have to say: fool me
once, Red Hat—shame on you. Fool me twice? At this point I’m determining whether I want to
continue supporting just Fedora, or just dropping all support for RHEL and RHEL-like
distributions on my open source projects. It’s not worth the hassle if I’m not even sure
projects like Rocky or Alma Linux can fill in the gap left by CentOS’s demise for users
like me. And no, please don’t post “but you can use your Red Hat Developer Subscription!”
I don’t have to with Debian. Or Ubuntu. Or Arch. Or… you get the point.
- Jeff Geerling, Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? (2023)
“Red Hat, are you dumb?” is a really good question to ask. Because yes, redhat is dumb. And greedy. And a big corporation (For why that’s bad see the wikipedia page on the USA).
Red Hat was always a company of B and C players. It’s a company staffed by
idiots, for idiots.
- “Annatar”, comment on Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb? (2024)
Oracle
“But hey, at least Redhat isn’t ORACLE!” is a statement I agree with. Because there is one corporation more neo-fordist and more greedy than Redhat: Oracle.
Oracle rises from the pits of hell
Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates co-founded Oracle in 1977 in Santa Clara,
California, as Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Ellison took inspiration from
the 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database management systems
(RDBMS) named “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks.” He heard
about the IBM System R database from an article in the IBM Research Journal provided by Oates.
Ellison wanted to make Oracle’s product compatible with System R, but failed to do so as IBM kept
the error codes for their DBMS a secret. SDL changed its name to Relational Software, Inc (RSI) in
1979, then again to Oracle Systems Corporation in 1983.
Source: Wikipedia
Oracle’s many sins
Okay, okay! So, big corporations like Redhat are bad, but at least they don’t bribe foreign officials!
Oracle will pay about $23 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly
providing impermissible benefits to government officials in several countries, regulators
announced Tuesday, marking the second such multimillion-dollar fine for the American software
giant.
- Forbes, SEC Fines Oracle $23 Million, Says Company Bribed Foreign Officials
(2022)
That is… It is… Hmm… That is… Certainly something. Oh, and there are many more. WAY TO MUCH, at least for me to cover. See this for more.