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Rocky Linux 9.0

rockylinux.org

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Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#21

Post by arsome »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

The commercial support being offered is from 3rd parties, not from Rocky Linux itself.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#22

Post by tjader »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Is it more unethical than any other entity selling consulting for CentOS and Red Hat support?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#23

Post by freedomben »

arsome wrote: post #21
freedomben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

The commercial support being offered is from 3rd parties, not from Rocky Linux itself.

Yes, this is a good point to make explicitly, thank you. The support is from 3rd parties. Those 3rd parties are probably kicking some funding back, but I don't think Rocky is doing anything unethical by offering their rebuild or by accepting that money.

I think overall Rocky is a net positive for the world and for Red Hat.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#24

Post by freedomben »

tjader wrote: post #22
freedomben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Is it more unethical than any other entity selling consulting for CentOS and Red Hat support?

No, it's the same. I think the amount of upstream contributions (i.e. patches) that the entity sends offsets some of the ethicality deficit. At some point it would even go positive if they send enough upstream fixes.

Obviously this is entirely my opinion :-D

There's also an impossible-to-measure factor in the form of eco-system benefit though. For example, I would never have paid for RHEL had I not entered into the eco-system through Fedora and CentOS. So while RH didn't make money from my CentOS usage, it did eventually make them money because I bought RHEL later when it was worth it. I don't know how you would calculate that, but it does offset ethicality deficit somewhat as well

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#25

Post by freedomben »

chomp wrote: post #3

I'm super excited about this because it's being done in tandem with the release of Peridot, Rocky's internal tooling to build and maintain distro forks. https://github.com/rocky-linux/peridot

Oh neat, thank you I didn't realize they had released that. That's really a great value for the community! It increases my opinion of Rocky

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#26

Post by mistrial9 »

freedomben wrote: post #24
tjader wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it more unethical than any other entity selling consulting for CentOS and Red Hat support?

No, it's the same. I think the amount of upstream contributions (i.e. patches) that the entity sends offsets some of the ethicality deficit. At some point it would even go positive if they send enough upstream fixes. Obviously this is entirely my opinion :-D There's also an impossible-to-measure factor in the form of eco-system benefit though. For example, I would never have paid for RHEL had I not entered into the e…

hi - thank you for speaking plainly to a large tech audience. Isnt there some "market correction" due though, overall, since OSS and Linux have become so central, so deeply performant, while the engineers and other "community" repeatedly get zero money.. Although the point of simply cloning and re-selling the work of RedHat, perhaps with support claims, might look bad, we overall have to allow some growth for non-centralized players right?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#27

Post by bogwog »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

You're forgetting to mention the part where Rocky Linux is not just a rebrand of RHEL, it's a revival of CentOS, which IBM killed off in what's effectively a bait-and-switch, forcing customers to go through the painful/expensive migration process to another distro, or the less-painful but still expensive migration process to RHEL.

Rocky Linux is a shining example of both a free market and the open source community working to the benefit consumers. I don't see how that's unethical.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#28

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

freedomben wrote: post #18
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #16

What's the thought process behind buying commercial support for a free, binary-compatible RHEL clone, instead of just paying for Red Hat support? Is the calculation that the once-in-a-blue-moon call to a commercial Rocky Linux support vendor when your server catches fire would still be cheaper than the cost of a normal RHEL license?

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Well, it's the classic "We don't need support until we need support" perspective from the CFO or CIO or whomever that's looking to cut costs. I've had clients who always had some excuse for why their mission-critical production box still couldn't justify the cost of a proper RHEL license ("No! If build my PROD box on RHEL, then my DR box will have to be RHEL, and my Test box will have to be RHEL! So you see it's really three licenses I'd have to buy!") and always insisted on CentOS. But despite needing everything to work correctly 100% of the time and mandating several levels of redundancy, they were curiously okay with being up the creek if they ran into an OS problem. Go figure.

FWIW, clients I dealt with were universally thrilled with RedHat support, the ones who had it. I had one tell me over the phone once, "Oh yeah! Red Hat is amazing! If an issue gets assigned to an engineer, it will be resolved by that same engineer. Unlike you guys."

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#29

Post by freedomben »

mistrial9 wrote: post #26
freedomben wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the same. I think the amount of upstream contributions (i.e. patches) that the entity sends offsets some of the ethicality deficit. At some point it would even go positive if they send enough upstream fixes. Obviously this is entirely my opinion :-D There's also an impossible-to-measure factor in the form of eco-system benefit though. For example, I would never have paid for RHEL had I not entered into the e…

hi - thank you for speaking plainly to a large tech audience. Isnt there some "market correction" due though, overall, since OSS and Linux have become so central, so deeply performant, while the engineers and other "community" repeatedly get zero money.. Although the point of simply cloning and re-selling the work of RedHat, perhaps with support claims, might look bad, we overall have to allow some growth for non-cen…

Yes, I agree there's value in decentralization. And to clarify, I don't think there are is anything unethical about offering a RHEL clone like Rocky and Alma do. I think that's a net positive for everyone, even Red Hat. My beef is more with the people that sell support which directly undermines Red Hat and ultimately hurts all eco-system users because it means less development, less QA, etc.

That said market competition in general is a good thing, and I don't doubt for a minute that Red Hat prices would be a lot higher without the competition. It's a complex equation that's impossible to calculate since the inputs are immeasurable and in many cases theoretical.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#30

Post by stonogo »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #17
bubblethink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.

It's been close to 1.5 years. I've been using both since the beginning and can see pretty well how quickly both systems pick up updates. But let's just look at release delays (in days since the official RHEL is shipped): ver Alm Rocky 8.4 8 34 8.5 3 6 8.6 2 6 9.0 9 58 Not seeing any patterns here? One of them is being done by a team that's been shipping another Linux distribution for a decade and has the whole proces…

It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place.

But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority of the past couple years Valley-washing their Russian origins. A while back I watched their CEO beg their executive team to cut ties with Russian media sites. Rockey had a community governance model first, they had a distro-dedicated SecureBoot solution first (Alma 'borrowed' CloudLinux's), and so forth. If your metric is 'get package releases to my AWS fleet first' then Alma is winning. For all the rest of the provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is the winner. It's all a matter of priorities.

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