Um. No.
Red Hat is not a publicly traded company and has not been for 5 years. They are a division of IBM. What you can know about Red Hat financials comes from IBM’s financial statements.
Red Hat has three primary product lines of which RHEL is one.
Did you read the article?
Being cynical about Red Hat is fine as long as we keep it factual. I enjoy their contributions but otherwise have no skin in their game.
I am not as enthusiastic about Rocky. I cannot see at all how you can compare them to Debian. It seems unfair even to Alma to lump them in with Rocky as Alma is taking the high road. Best of luck with Rocky though. Truly.
Your make a good case that “community” means “cannot be shut down by a corporation”. Thank you for that. Can a “bug-for-bug RHEL clone” be community though? If Red Hat cancels RHEL ( unlikely ), is there still a Rocky Linux?
IBM has to file public financials. Tracking rough Red Hat revenues is not all that hard. They have done very well.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/red-hat-high-growth-streak-151126295.html
I won’t get back into the Fedora thing. I bet the whole dollar though that, if RHEL disappeared, Rocky and Oracle would take no interest in Fedora.
Full disclosure - I do not use any of these enterprise distros anymore although the stance taken by Alma makes them attractive to me. I am looking for ways to use them.
If we had more time and maybe more beer, I would be interested to get into a discussion about what “community” is.
CentOS pre-Stream was not a “community” distro in my view as I do not see “downloads that cost no money” as the backbone of what makes a community.
CentOS ( pre-Stream ) could not innovate their own distro. They could not even fix a bug without breaking their “bug-for-bug” RHEL compatibility promise. All they did was recompile and redistribute RHEL packages with the trademarks removed. What kind of community do you have if you do not produce anything? Everything from CentOS was actually provided by Red Hat. It was just literally “RHEL without paying”. There was no diversity.
CemtOS Stream is managed by Red Hat for sure as its primary purpose is to become the base for a future version of RHEL. However, it is Open Source and developed fully out in the open. Contributions are possible.
Unlike CentOS of old, the “community” can contribute to and debate the future of CentOS Stream. Alma has contributed bug fixes for example. It has been a bit painful as Red Hat is used to being the only one in the sandbox but the process is evolving. CentOS Stream has multiple contributors ( not just Red Hat ). This means that others have some influence on what RHEL looks like in the future. “The community” can build on that.
In my view, CentOS Stream is already a lot more of a “community” distro than the original CentOS was. You do not have to agree of course. Anyway, I hope other projects join with Alma and Red Hat in contributing to CentOS Stream.
For all their flag waving about “the community”, distros like Rocky and Oracle have shown no interest in contributing to CentOS Stream. They continue to clone the distro that Red Hat forks from CentOS Stream. They don’t get involved until all the work has been done. Then they make money off it ( the only reason they are there ).
Not the original commenter but Red Hat took steps a few months ago to make it harder to make complete bug-for-bug clones of their Enterprise product ( RHEL ). Basically, they stopped providing the exact build instructions and exact patch sets ( SRPMS ) to their competitors. You now have to jump through more hoops to do it ( like Rocky does ) or you have to fork your own Enterprise distribution from CentOS Stream ( like Alma now does ).
You still get everything you always did as a Red Hat subscriber ( even if you do not pay them — they have a free tier ). All the actual software is still Open Source for everybody ( subscriber or not ) and available free in CentOS Stream and Fedora. Red Hat is still one of the biggest contributors across the Linux ecosystem and, ironically, one of the biggest proponents and providers of GPL software in particular.
However, if you are a Red Hat subscriber and you share the RHEL SRPMS, Red Hat may not renew your subscription. That is their big evil move.
Many people did not like this change and the most extreme detractors have accused Red Hat of betraying Open Source or of even trying to take Linux proprietary. In my view, this is totally wrong. Read my second paragraph.
What many people do not seem to understand is that Red Hat founded the Fedora Project and, much later, the CentOS Stream Project explicitly to be open, community distributions so that they ( Red Hat ) could pursue their commercial interests with RHEL without friction from the community. I say people do not understand because some people now say they do not trust Fedora to stay Open when the entire reason it exists is to be that ( as an explicit strategy of Red Hat ).
One of the things that is annoying ( to me ) about Fedora is that it insists on being completely anti-commercial ( avoiding patented codecs for example ). The idea that Fedora is for businesses or will be “taken over” by IBM is silly. Red Hat employees have always been the biggest contributors to Fedora. It has always been Free ( as in freedom ).
The most extreme damage Red Hat may eventually do to Fedora is to stop paying so many people to work on it and the important packages it relies on. That has not happened and probably will not anytime soon ( in my view ).
For anybody that does not know, Fedora was founded by Red Hat to be their “community” dostro. Before Fedora, there was only Red Hat Linux and it was trying to be both commercial and community. Red Hat founded Fedora to be an explicitly community distribution and then released the first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( RHEL ). This resolved their commercial / community conflict.
Fedora is explicitly NOT an enterprise distribution. They are annoyingly committed to only free software. They release often and have short release cycles. Fedora is certainly not aimed at enterprises.
Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.
The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream. Alma has rebased onto CemtOS Stream ( which is what RHEL is also derived from ). That makes sense.
I have fewer comments on the health or future of RHEL or Red Hat itself or how much IBM. Ares about it. I guess I will say that I have never seen so many ads for it. I think revenues are at record levels. It does not feel like it is dying.
I don’t use Fedora or RHEL but Red Hat is one of the biggest contributors to Open Source. So, I hope this cynical poster is wrong. GCC, Glibc, Systemd, Xorg, Wayland, Mesa,SELinux, Podman, and the kernel would all be massively impacted by less Red Hat funding.
I actually believe that “GNU / Linux” creates the confusion, even the Android problem you cite.
If we all just said “Linux” to mean Linux distribution and the software ecosystem that implies, almost everybody would agree what that meant. All this “actually what you are calling Linux is actually” and “Linux is just the kernel” stuff confuses people. If Linux is just the kernel then Android and Ubuntu are equally Linux. Most people do not even know what a kernel is until you start “educating” people that “Linux” is not Linux.
An Operating System is defined by the applications that it runs natively. Alpine Linux and Ubuntu run the same software and services. Chimera Linux runs all the same stuff even though it comes without any GNU software by default ( BSD utils, Clang compiler, MUSL ). They are all “Linux”. None of them are Android or ChromeOS. They are not the embedded OS in my thermostat or body worn camera. Of course, all these things use the Linux kernel but they are not all “Linux” operating systems.
There are many examples of the kernel not defining the Operating System. iOS and macOS are not the same thing. Windows and Xbox are not the same thing. Yes, us geeks know the common infrastructure they share.
And if an operating system is defined by its applications, is “GNU” a good label? My distro of choice offers 80,000 packages of which maybe 200 are managed by the GNU Project. Go to gnu.org and look at the list of packages that are actually GNU for real. It may shock you how short the list is.
There are other single sources that contribute more software. In terms of code and base architecture, Red Hat is probably the largest contributor ( and no, I do not use Red Hat — RHEL has fewer than 3000 packages for one thing ). I do not want to call my distribution “Red Hat” Linux but frankly it makes more sense than GNU.
Some of the GNU / Linux folks say that the reason for the label is the C library ( Glibc ). But not all Linux distros use Glibc. For a mainstream Linux user, does it make sense to say that Alpine, Void, and Chimera are not the same kind of OS as Ubuntu or Fedora? A regular user could sit down at any of them and not only use them mostly the same but perhaps not even notice the difference. I could write a Linux app without knowing about Alpine and the it could be built for it easily. They all use the same apps and desktop environments. They all run Docker natively. Even fairly deep Linux knowledge applies equally to them all. As pointed out, freedesktop.org applies to them equally. They have the same driver and hardware support ( including the full graphics and audio stacks ). Most people would agree that all these “Linux” systems are pretty alike and quite different from macOS, Windows, and Android. They are all much more like each other than they are even to FreeBSD.
The GNU name pays homage to the historical contribution of the GNU Project that, while important, is pretty historical at this point. If the goal is to promote Free Software or even the GPL, the right branding would be the FSF. So, even that is confusing.
Clearly, in my view, GNU is a terrible brand to try to glob on to Linux. It is not explanatory. It is not even accurate. It is mostly political and frankly overstates the current contribution of the project. I talked code above. There is more code in Wayland or X11 and Mesa than in all of GNU probably. There are more lines of code licensed MIT than GPL in most distros. Most GPL software available is NOT provided by the GNU project.
Again, GNU is a hugely important project to free software and the history of Linux. That history should be celebrated and acknowledged. Distorting it and contorting it is not the way to do that. Enough with “GNU / Linux” already.