Red Hat and the Open Source Community

Red Hat has a pretty interesting business model, which is offering support for software that is a decade old, and which its maintainers want nothing to do with. This post isn’t about whether maintaining old software is a good or a bad idea. It’s about the effect it has on the community.

The Python core developers have ceased providing any support for Python 2.6 as of October 2013, but Red Hat will continue to support it in RHEL 5, until 2020. 1

Many Python projects (such as Django, Twisted, and PyCA Cryptography) are therefore looking to drop 2.6 support, to lighten their maintenance burden and because offering support for an unsupported platform is misleading to users.

This is where we hit an impasse; inevitably users of these projects ask for some level of support for a version of the library that supports 2.6, because they are using RHEL which has them pinned on Python 2.6. Red Hat supports their Python, but not the Python libraries they use.

While Python is a nice language, without the libraries of PyPI it is useless: no scientific computing, no machine learning, no websites, no access to your production database, no AWS bindings, no timezone database, no SSH automation, the list goes on.

Red Hat’s business model fundamentally relies on the open source community offering free labor to support them. Red Hat does not continue to support Python 2.6 by working with the Python core development team to extend its life cycle. This means if something like PyCA Cryptography were to support Python 2.6, the entire stack would only be supported for Red Hat’s customers, other individuals who had Python 2.6 would be on an unsupported platform.

This assumption of uncompensated labor to support Red Hat’s business is inequitable. Open Source projects should not feel compelled to support older versions of software which are only supported commercially. Red Hat itself needs to consider ways it can continue to offer its support services, without them becoming burdensome to the open source community. Lastly, Red Hat customers who wish they could use newer versions of software, should consider either compiling it themselves, complaining to whoever procured RHEL for them, or complaining to Red Hat itself, but please don’t demand support from already overburdened volunteers.

  1. Technically, RHEL 5 actually comes with Python 2.4, which was last updated in 2008. However, Python 2.6 can be installed via EPEL, which isn’t officially supported by Red Hat, but is usually maintained by Fedora developers who work for Red Hat. RHEL 6 officially supports Python 2.6, and Python 2.7 can be obtained via EPEL for it. ↩︎