 So if you are a part of the Linux community and you've been paying attention You know that there there has been a lot of hullabaloo about red hat over the course of the last three or four weeks Now I'm not going to be going into any of the specifics in this video Simply because there are many other videos that have done so probably better than I ever could I will link to a couple of those videos in the video description as long along with a couple articles that kind of explain What is going on bottom line is that red has taken the rel source code and put it behind a paywall That's really the very simplest way I can explain it So the question I want to answer today is should it matter to everyday Linux normie and The answer to that question is going to be very interesting So if you would be so kind as to leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it So does the red hat stuff matter to regular Linux users and the answer to that question is Yes, and also no I know I do these videos where I talk about something and then I don't give a definitive answer and it just pisses people off But it's a complicated situation and depending on how you look at it It can be very Influential on the entire Linux community, but in terms of being something that affects you personally probably not So let's talk about Individual impacts first. So really the only way that this is going to impact you individually at least immediately Is going to be if you used roll already? So if you are a rel customer who never paid for it and you Didn't ever want to pay for it, you know, then you're going to have to try to figure out how you're going to get that license So well does have Mechanisms to get rel for free you can get a rel account for free if you're a developer And I think even if you run it like a big developer shop, you can get a whole bunch of licenses for free They have mechanisms for that if you need to do that if you run a small business You're going to be in a little bit different positioning because you're probably going to end up having to pay for it If you weren't already, right? So Honestly, then you're going to either have to pony up the cash in order to get the support contract Or you're going to have to search for an alternative now I don't think that there are many small business owners in my audience who were using rel but I could be wrong about that So in terms of like just individual impact, it's going to be very minimal for most people, right? Most people I don't know if this is a surprise to anybody, but most people who just use regular desktop Linux don't use rel I don't think that's a much of a surprise for most people But they do use things that are impacted by rel so if you know if you use, you know Fedora or you use sent OS or something like that, you know, you could then face some impact from this rel decision now Fedora is a very interesting thing to talk about when it comes to this decision because The way that Fedora works is that it's actually upstream from Red Hat Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux I should say so Fedora is also a community Distribution it is controlled vastly by the community However, the vast majority of people who work on it or at least I should say about 40% of the people who work on it Do work at Red Hat. So Red Hat does have Impact or influence on Fedora in the direction that Fedora goes So I've heard a lot of people in this whole situation say that well, yeah, now because Red Hat has turned into the devil I'm not going to use Fedora anymore. That's a personal choice Personally, I don't think that Red Hat will actually do anything that will negatively impact Fedora But I was also kind of shocked that they put their source code Behind a paywall. So their intentions For fedora itself are unknown and they don't have as much control there as they do with rel because they control all of rel Whereas they do not control fedora. It's a fedora. It's a community project and be much easier for Fedora to carry on if red hat were to pull some shenanigans then it would be for rel Right if some if for some reason they decided to pull back all of their developers Fedora could theoretically carry on with the developers that are outside of red hat Theoretically it'd be probably harder and they'd have to do some working stuff But it could happen if you're worried about how the red hat decision affects fedora I would say that it probably doesn't mostly at all Right because of the position that that red hat is actually in in terms of relationships to rel But also because it's a very community-centric distribution You're going it has much more autonomy autonomy from red hat than rel did So I think as we go forward fedora will be or will continue to be independent But if you've chosen not to use it anymore, you can obviously find an alternative It's not going to you know, nobody's forcing you to use red hat I just don't think that the the negative aspect of red hat is going to impact Fedora as much as we think it is now Now obviously I could be wrong about that because we've talked I've talked about fedora Just a couple days ago trying to add telemetry to the thing and that was proposed by a team at red hat But I will say or at least from the thread I've read that That proposal was in place before it was being worked on before The whole red hat nonsense was actually going on so Whether or not that that's true. We don't know but still it feels like they're not actually connected in any way So in terms of individual impact of the red hat news I think it's going to be fairly minimal now the more interesting aspect of this conversation is how The decision is going to affect the the linux community at you know more broadly and linux itself more broadly So the merits behind open source software rely on everybody playing by the same rules Okay, so when You create an open source project you're not only Putting it under a license so that other people can do things with your code But also so you can do things with your code, right? So that license not only gives rules for people who are going to use your code But also for you to use your code now that also goes for code that you use from other people so the idea here is that it's a community of people who are doing things under A set of licenses that allow the code to kind of flow freely from one place to another With certain very minimal restrictions, right? So if you are creating an open source project You are probably relying on open source code from someone else as well And that's your building from straight from the ground up. Let's just say for example, you're creating a terminal emulator I just pulled this out of my ass. Let's just say you're coding a new terminal emulator You're probably going to be pulling from different open source projects in order to do so, right? You're going to you're going to rely on you know, maybe you're going to pull in some gtk files That you can create the wrapper around it or whatever You know, you're going to pull in from different open source files And you're allowed to do that because of the licenses that All that stuff is under right and when you put your source code out there as well under the same licenses So if somebody could take your new terminal emulator and make it their own, you know That's the way open source is supposed to work The problem here is that red hat has decided to change the rules, right? they've decided to put barriers in front of their source code and while Legally, they probably can do this and get away with it It does change the nature of the way open source is supposed to work And we can bury our heads in the sand, but It's very likely the other companies who have in the past developed their source code openly Will see this and think that it might be a good idea for them to do it too, right? I mean, I don't know that it's actually going to be the case But it's possible that they could the other companies could see this and think that it's a good idea And once one company does it and if especially if it works and they start seeing astronomical profits because of it Which I don't think is going to happen I think that the blowback on them is actually going to be negative in terms of them getting more business But I don't know that much about red hats business to begin with so who knows how how it's going to play out But the idea is if it does end up being successful We could see other companies be much less open with their code which kind of starts a domino effect Of companies who traditionally do support open source being more closed with their with their source code And that is bad for the Linux community in general simply because a lot of Developers rely on source code by other people to do their work, right? That's the whole point of open source There's a broad length of broad pool of code that people pull in from other places You know libraries and all this stuff that are worked on by other people And if all of a sudden some of that stuff, you know goes away or is less Open than it once was, you know, that's going to affect their ability to then not only create their own projects But also share that code with other people So it can filter down and trickle down to The more smaller developers and then all of a sudden Linux is not as Open as it once was now that's the worst case scenario. I don't think that that's actually going to happen I think that the the reaction To red hats nonsense has been so Negative, I think that they were actually quite surprised at how many people actually cared because you know like I can't even tell you how many times I've talked about red hat before this I talked about red hat, you know, maybe once or twice in a podcast somewhere along the line over the course of the last Five years, but definitely not this often this Decision has gotten the entire Linux community riled up not just people who use rel Not just people who use rocky or alma linux either These are regular linux users who have probably never even used rel That are upset about this and the reason they're upset is because it Goes against everything that we've been told about open source, right? It feels like they're I mean You can see it from some of the the YouTube titles that we've seen over the course last week. Oh, no red hats going closed source, right? Proprietary garbage and closed source and proprietary and all this stuff, right? And well, yes, some of that stuff is definitely clickbait I've been guilty of that for sure the only reason why that clickbait works is because it feeds on the fear that Red hat has actually created by making this decision They have when one company can can take their source code and put it behind a paywall And basically say you can't use this code for whatever you want because that's basically what they're saying The yes, you can go pay them the money get the source code and then leave with it But once you do your account's gone, right? They they can shut your account gone And that means that you can't get the next version for free without having to sign up for another account And well, technically you can continue to do that and you could fork it like suzer has done Like oracle has done you could do that It just adds that barrier to it and the thing about open source is that it's supposed to be barrier free Now it doesn't mean that it's supposed to be free as in money So the the one big misconception I've heard from a lot of people is that you're not supposed to charge for open source software Which is bloody nonsense. It's it's not not it's not true at all In fact, we want people to be able to we've talked about money on this Channel before when it comes to people developers actually making money So we want them to be able to make money But for years red hat has been the shining example of being able to make the money that you know A lot of people haven't and still be a shining beacon of open source methodology and theory and ideology and stuff right They have been both And what worries people now is that they're no longer that that way right and and that Has led to a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt not only amongst people who use rel but also the rest of the Linux community because if The corporation that spends so much time actually Developing a whole bunch of the technologies that Linux uses is becoming more Closed with their source code What happens to all those technologies that affect the broader Linux community things like sys and d things like wayland things like fedora You know the more broad topics, you know red hat Supports a lot of open source Projects will that continue as we go on because we can no longer trust Red hat to be good stewards of open source source code Now the thing is a lot of those things are much more community driven than we make it out to be So it's not going to be like uh red hat just decided all all of a sudden system d is going to be closed source Don't think that that's going it is actually possible So I don't think we have to actually worry about that But it is that fear that people have like this is a company that contributes a significant amount to the linux kernel That contributes to all these open source projects that affect every single linux distribution that we use You know and they're becoming more closed source or it feels like they're coming more closed source It's not actually the 100 truth behind it But that's the way it feels to a lot of people and that is worrying now I think that red hat is going to end up regretting this decision I think if they haven't already they will very soon simply because they've basically Instead of drawing in new customers what they've actually done is created more competitors instead of less and Not only have they've created more competitors, but they've done so of With companies that actually have the money to back it up with susa and oracle right now Whether you have opinions on oracle or not or even susa or not You can't deny that those companies have a lot of money and can put forth At least somewhat of an effort to make a competitor to red hat And I don't think that that was their goal when they decided to do this I think that they wanted to snuff out rocky and alma and said what they've ended up doing was creating more So they cut they tried by cutting the head off the hydra. They've actually spawned more heads So yeah, they have some some issues and I think that they will End up regretting it if they don't already so to answer the question How is this going to end up affecting the linux community as a whole? I think that it's going to make people trust it less right especially. I mean you're already seeing this right already People who use linux and opens their software were very distrustful of corporations If you ask most people who outside of people who work for canonical You'd say that most people distrust canonical and always have right Because canonical has over the course of the last 20 years made some really weird decisions when it comes to their project, you know amazon affiliate links and And destroying lib 32 at for about 30 seconds, you know, you get the idea, right? they've made some really weird choices and That has led to a lot of distrust of canonical because their corporation because they work fondly with google and monopoly and monopoly. I I called microsoft monopoly And that was a Freudian slip They work with microsoft canonical works with all these other companies and that leads to a lot of distrust of canonical Right and that has always been there. Uh, there's always been a distrust a distrust of red hat as well because they're a major corporation But they've always had a very large cache of of goodwill simply because they do contribute so much to the Open source community with you know system d and xorg and wailin and all this stuff, right that has gone Right and what you're going to see from now on is a much larger distrust of companies And I think that's probably going to end up being a good thing because if we actually end up if we become less trustful of the companies that have influence over the source code We will watch them more and pay attention to things that go on and try to at least exhibit Some control over the things that go on inside the linux community. Whereas before we might have just been saying well Yeah, red hat's making this decision. Yeah, it's not that great. But you know, it's red hat. They obviously know what they're doing Now we're going to look at much more distrustfully at red hat We're going to look much more distrustfully at you know canonical and susa and oracle and all these Different companies that actually play a big portion of a role in the actual development of linux Even if we don't pay attention to them as much as we should I think that we will pay more attention to that stuff now than we did before and maybe that will end up being The silver lining of this whole situation. So that is it for this video If you have thoughts on the whole red hat stuff, you can leave those in the comment section below I probably won't make another video on this at all. We may mention on the podcast, but we'll see about that If you haven't already leave a thumbs up on this video. I'd really appreciate it It really does help the channel You can follow me on master down on odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linux cast links for youtube And paypal will be in the video description as well if you'd rather support me there Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon and youtube you guys are all absolutely amazing Without you the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are awesome I thank you every single day for your support and truly mean it. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time