probably stemming from the recent news on how redhat was treating centOS and community versions rockylinux/almalinux …
I was curious on how likely people in the Ansible Community find it to happen that at any point in the future we might wake up with a statement from RedHat that they do not feel it justified any longer that anybody would profit from their investment put into a product called Ansible and therefore a subscription for using it was required in x days/weeks/months from that day onwards?
Or is there even (ideal scenario) anything in place which legally or practically would make such a move impossible?
It’s not something I’m worried about, (most?) the code is GPL’d and if the worst ever came to the worst the community could therefore fork and rename it.
FWIW I switched from using Fedora / RedHat to Debian / Ubuntu not long after I passed the RHCE in 2005…
I’m also not worried about this. All parts of Ansible I use (I’m not sure about AWX since I don’t use it, and all the galaxy_ng parts) are GPLv3+ licensed. Also there’s on CLA, so they cannot simply change the license without getting approval from every contributor in the past.
Obviously they can still try to make the community live a lot harder, and already right now several collections have more than one name, where one name is reserved for the certified and officially Supported (with capital s) version that’s only available via the paid subscription, and the other is the community upstream that can be freely used. I guess also there nobody can stop you from taking an upstream version, apply the renaming procedure yourself, and use the result. You simply cannot download it read-to-use from galaxy.ansible.com.
I don’t think they’ll try anything like that with ansible-core, though. That would both make their and our lives a lot more complicated, for not too much gain.
I am past that point when it comes to large cooperations to be honest.
They will do anything their stakeholders will demand them to do, or some xyO might feel like any given day. Neither do I believe many people would have thought they’d do what then happened in regards to CentOS.
things like licensing, etc. is more like the things I’d cling to.
I followed the same path, Chris! If memory serves me right, the initial shift wasn’t just philosophical but also practical. Fedora’s rpm dependency management back then was quite a hassle (no pun intended, red hatters!). However, these days, Fedora has me contemplating a return to Red Hat-based Desktop distros. Admittedly, my KVM home server runs flawlessly on CentOS9 stream
Regarding the main discussion, I echo @chris’s point: the Open Source Community is robust enough to take charge of Ansible if Red Hat were to ever cease support (though in my opinion, that would be a grave mistake).
