I have no illusions that this message is going to change anything at Red
Hat. But I feel I need to get this off my chest. I'm speaking strictly
for myself, not for my current or any former employer, not for the GCC
project and not for any other group/organization I might have some
affiliation with.
--
First a bit of background. I came to Red Hat via the Cygnus
acquisition. My combined service spanned nearly 30 years. During that
time I had the opportunity to be involved in the formation of Fedora,
strategic planning for RHEL while at the same time being able to spend
much of my time on optimizing compilers.
I left Red Hat in 2021 to refocus on what I really enjoy in a small
company where I can make a clear difference in the company's direction
and success. It was, by far, the most difficult decision in my
professional career. I left many friends and colleagues behind.
The point being I had a fantastic career at Cygnus/Red Hat. I got to do
and learn things I never could have imagined. I got to work with many
amazing people spanning many organizations within the company
(engineering, sales, marketing, legal, product management, executives,
etc). By no means do I consider myself a disgruntled former employee.
--
What Red Hat has done recently is depressing, but not a huge surprise to
me. Red Hat struggled repeatedly with how to deal with "the clones".
The core idea I always came back to in those discussions was that the
value isn't in the bits, but in the stability, services and ecosystem
Red Hat enables around the bits. Arguments for protecting the bits were
met with something like "if that's what we need to do to be successful,
then we're failing to provide real value".
At some point in the last 20 years (I forget exactly when) Red Hat was
looking to codify its values. Naturally the topic of open source came
up during those discussions. When open source didn't make the cut, one
could say the writing was on the wall -- open source was a means to an
end. In my mind that opened the door for numerous changes we've seen in
subsequent years.
One could see signs of where this was going with the adjustments that
were made to the exposed RHEL kernel sources some time ago. Then the
dissolution of CentOS a couple years back and most recently with the
lockdown of the RHEL sources.
What Red Hat has done may be technically legal and perhaps good for its
business. However, to me it's ethically unconscionable. Those who
know me know I'm not an zealot, but I do have a baseline set of ethical
values and Red Hat crossed that line.
--
Back in 2002 or 2003 when we were trying to figure out how to salvage
the ill-fated "Red Hat Community Linux Project" resulting in what we now
know as Fedora, one of the key concepts that we pushed to the
executive team at Red Hat was that it was strategically important for
both Fedora and Red Hat to have a strong association with each other. I
think we largely succeeded in building that close association.
I've been a Fedora user since before FC1. I run Fedora on my laptop.
When I need a docker image for something, I start with a Fedora image.
When I need to spin up a server (say to run the GCC CI/CD system) I load
it with Fedora. It's an ecosystem I'm technically comfortable in and
easiest for me to utilize.
That will change across the board this summer. That's a bit hard for me
to swallow, but I can't get past that association we built between Red
Hat and Fedora and Red Hat's recent actions.
I'll still have to deal with the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora ecosystem on a
professional level. Obviously, I'll do what I need to do to help make
my employer successful -- but when a choice exists, Fedora/CentOS/RHEL
won't be where I land going forward.
I wish it hadn't come to this, but I also can't say I'm terribly surprised.
Thanks for your time,
Jeff
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