Raphael

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/straw-poll-on-your-preferences-about-opt-in-opt-out-for-possible-data-collection/85675/2

This poll is a bit hard to understand but essentially you could vote for multiple options, the highest opt-out option is at 26%, meaning 74% of people oppose this idea.

The original proposal is at 16%, for a jarring 84% disapproval rate.

Despite overwhelming negative feedback, Red Hat is currently drafting a revised proposal.

But what about Red Hat?

This is the link to the proposal: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Telemetry#Privacy-preserving_Telemetry_for_Fedora_Workstation

These parts are all interesting and contradict some people who argue Red Hat has no hand in this issue:

Name: Michael Catanzaro Email: <mcatanzaro@redhat.com>

and

The Red Hat Display Systems Team (which develops the desktop) proposes to enable limited data collection of anonymous Fedora Workstation usage metrics.

and

It is Fedora Legal's obligation to ensure our data collection complies with legal requirements in the jurisdictions in which Red Hat operates

and

Occasionally, Red Hat might need to collect specific metrics to justify additional time spent on contributing to Fedora or additional investment in Fedora.

The quotes above were handpicked. There are 7 matches for "Red Hat" in the link above, not counting the email address.

There’s nothing like a good kerfuffle between tech giants, especially when it’s about something as near and dear to developers’ hearts as open source software development.

Which is probably why the ongoing controversy around Red Hat‘s decision to limit the availability of the source code to its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distro. In short: Before, that source code would be available to anybody and everybody, leading to the proliferation of RHEL-compatible alternative Linux distros like Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. Under Red Hat’s proposed new licensing terms — announced almost exactly four years after IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat closed — RHEL’s source code will only be available to paying customers.

For an exact timeline, Tom Krazit offers a play-by-play recap over at the Runtime newsletter. Suffice it to say, however, that Red Hat’s decision was met with hostility from many in the open source community. Specifically, critics argue that taking what had been widely-available code and putting it behind what’s functionally a paywall is antithetical to the open source principles that Red Hat was founded in 1993 to support. The core tenet of open source, after all, is to share and share alike.

Red Hat, for its part, has defended the changes as a way to protect its business and pay its employees: “We have to pay the people to do that work — those passionate contributors grinding through those long hours and nights who believe in open source values,” Red Hat Vice President of Core Systems Mike McGrath wrote in a June blog post. Importantly, McGrath also reiterated that Red Hat will continue to use the CentOS Stream project as a place to share what’s essentially a preview of what’s to come in RHEL, though not the code for the current stable version.

Some evil points:

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (or EPEL) is a Fedora Special Interest Group that creates, maintains, and manages a high quality set of additional packages for Enterprise Linux, including, but not limited to, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS and Scientific Linux (SL), Oracle Linux (OL).

EPEL packages are usually based on their Fedora counterparts and will never conflict with or replace packages in the base Enterprise Linux distributions. EPEL uses much of the same infrastructure as Fedora, including buildsystem, bugzilla instance, updates manager, mirror manager and more.

This initiative is working on enhancing current DNF mirrors-countme script, which is used to provide statistics about number of Fedora installations on machines. This script has few bottlenecks that will be addressed as part of this intiative.

Project is close to complete: Unique IP statistics feature PR is being reviewed, after which the accumulated changes can be released and packaged.

Red Hat is going full evil mode and Fedora, which is largely controlled by Red Hat, is also pushing forward with questionable decisions. At this time, as some Fedora users look for a new $HOME there are many recommending OpenSUSE but before doing this, please read the post below.

Permalink to post: https://lemmy.world/u/unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org

About fifteen years ago, Microsoft felt threatened by Linux’s growing market share, and decided to team up with/outright buy patent trolls and use the new portfolio of around 230 patents to claim that the Linux distributions were infringing on Microsoft’s intellectual property and potentially sue them.

As Red Hat and other FOSS companies entrenched in their positions and geared up for a long and expensive legal fight, SuSE saw an opportunity to displace Red Hat, and threw everybody under the bus by saying something like, “Yes, Linux absolutely infringes on Microsoft patents. We will pay you for using your IP if you shield us from litigation.”

So that threw out the entire argument that Linux did not infringe on Microsoft patents because you had the second biggest Linux company saying it was true and the right thing to do was to pay Microsoft for all of their wonderful contributions. So Microsoft did this kind of mobster thing where they let SuSE pay them for “protection” from lawsuit, and then used this as precedent that the other Linux distributors weren’t playing fairly unless they also paid for patent use. And SuSE hoped that this would result in only Novell/SuSE being the legal Linux to buy in the market and everybody would run to them with open arms. Kind of a dick move.

This emboldened Microsoft, and resulted in lawsuits from Microsoft over things like, accessing the FAT filesystem from a Linux device (TomTom, at the time GPS device company) and is historically the reason that Nexus phones (which became Google Pixel phones) never came with SD card expansion (so they wouldn’t be accessing a FAT filesystem from Linux). So for the next half decade or so, Microsoft decided to just start suing everybody over patent infringement, and this is how the smartphone era was born and why it is really difficult to do things that would be obvious on a computer – smartphone designers had to invent new ways, even if obtuse, to get around patents.

In 2018 Microsoft decided that they needed Linux, and ended hostilities by giving the patent portfolio (now up to 60000+ patents) to a consortium of companies called Open Innovation or something like that, that was originally designed to share patents freely without litigation in response to Microsoft’s aggressive behavior a decade earlier.