Red Hat Is Not Linux (2000)
This issue has gotten a lot of attention on HN lately, but I&#x27;m still struggling to wrap my head around it. If anyone can clarify my understanding I&#x27;d appreciate it.<p>My understanding is that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be thought of as Fedora + stability + patches, and that the patches themselves <i>should</i> be released downstream as part of the GPL.<p>What&#x27;s now changed is that these patches are either (a) not distributed as required by the GPL, or (b) the patches are distributed, but in a way that is intentionally less useful, e.g. by having to get them via the Red Hat portal. This has made it more difficult for &quot;repackagers&quot; like CentOS, Rocky and Alma to keep their disros up to date.<p>Assuming I have the above correct (and I may not), my suspicion is that Red Hat is looking at cloud providers who <i>also</i> have been repackaging, for example, Amazon Web Services&#x27; Amazon Linux has historically been RHEL repackaged and bundled with some aws tools. I&#x27;m not aware of AWS distributing their changes either. From this perspective, it looks like the AWS benefits from the stability + patches without paying RedHat for their development. (I&#x27;m also not aware of whether aws distributes the Amazon Linux sources and if so those are done in a way that is useful for the community... I&#x27;ll do some further research on my own. edit: It looks like the Amazon Linux sources are here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amazonlinux&#x2F;linux">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;amazonlinux&#x2F;linux</a>)