Rocky Linux 9.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#31

Post by Dracophoenix » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:01 PM UTC

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…

I appreciate your candor, but what makes this "gross and unethical" exactly? RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of other coders outside the company (i.e. Linus et al). It's hypocritical if you ask me.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#32

Post by freedomben » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #28

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…

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 real…

absolutely, I saw that quite a bit as well. I was really glad to see Red Hat change their policy so that non-prod machines are free now. That makes it a lot more affordable for people doing CI/CD with staging and dev environments. The old model disincentivized good practices.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#33

Post by tannhaeuser » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

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…

I'd say it's a two-sided sword. There's no question RH employs/founds large parts of Linux development, with only Suse being remotely as involved (maybe historically). OTOH, RH has pushed "innovations" such as systemd purely in their own interest, fragmenting a once-strong and user-centric F/OSS Unix community also including the BSDs into a Linux-only cloud slavedom. Plus, it was IBM/RH who cancelled the CentOS roadmap (after having bought-out the CentOS project and community); they can't now expect to be treated as trusted bona-fide Linux steward or something.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#34

Post by freedomben » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:14 PM UTC

Dracophoenix wrote: post #31

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…

I appreciate your candor, but what makes this "gross and unethical" exactly? RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of other coders outside the company (i.e. Linus et al). It's hypocritical if you ask me.

Good point, there's some hypocrisy at play here. I think overall though the "taking" done by RH is on the whole much less than most of the 3rd party support vendors. But my original language was a little harsher than I really feel.

Red Hat funds an enormous amount of the development of projects (like the kernel), and makes Fedora one of the best (IMHO the best) distros for personal computing, so is one of the top contributors to the community at large. Their support also actively fixes bugs and sends them upstream.

Contrast that with many of the cheaper 3rd party supports, who rarely if ever send contributions (beyond bug reports, which are sometimes a positive contribution, but frequently are net drain because the bug reports don't contain enough info to be reproducible or actionable). They also don't do much or any development.

Of course this is a broad stereotype. I'm sure you can find 3rd party support providers that do contribute to the community.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#35

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

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…

and RH doesn't have to bear much of the cost of the development of Linux, GNU, and many other products. This is the spirit of OS.. If you think that's unethical, you should find another employer ;)

edit: ah.. former employee.. so that part was already done :)

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#36

Post by bubblethink » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

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…

>I personally find that gross and unethical.

Where does the code come from ? All in the game yo.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#37

Post by bityard » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:20 PM UTC

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…

I think (or at least I hope) that anyone who buys a support contract from a third-party company for a third-party distribution understands that they are not getting the same level of support that they would from Red Hat.

There is lots of room in the enterprise sector for third-party support. This is, for example, what almost all consultants effectively are. The third-party vendor can solve a lot of problems that the customer may not have the experience to deal with and can be well worth the price paid. But at the end of the day if there's an actual bug all the way upstream in RHEL, only RHEL can (permanently) fix that.

I've dealt with Red Hat in the past and one good thing about their support is that if you have a particularly thorny problem or a genuine bug, you will often eventually end up talking directly to someone who is either wrote the code or sits next to the person who did.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#38

Post by freedomben » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #33

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…

I'd say it's a two-sided sword. There's no question RH employs/founds large parts of Linux development, with only Suse being remotely as involved (maybe historically). OTOH, RH has pushed "innovations" such as systemd purely in their own interest, fragmenting a once-strong and user-centric F/OSS Unix community also including the BSDs into a Linux-only cloud slavedom. Plus, it was IBM/RH who cancelled the CentOS roadm…

IBM had nothing to do with the CentOS decision. It was long time Red Hat people who made the decision. I don't agree with everything about the decision, but I don't think it's as bad as most people say it is[1].

You are definitely right that RH has pushed things in their own interest, but if those things don't offer value to the broader community, then the community won't adopt them. Red Hat can't force Debian or Ubuntu or Arch to adopt anything. They can push it through Fedora Cent and RHEL, but that's it. The other distros adopted systemd because it offered benefits/improvements over existing things like Upstart. I like firewalld, but that's a good example of something that is only on RH despite RH pushing it. If systemd was really such a negative, then you'd see distros like Devuan take off. A frequent criticism is things like, "Red Hat made Gnome dependent on systemd" which isn't wrong, but they didn't just do it because they could. There were real benefits there.

I think the reality of life is that there will always be people who want things to change, and those who don't want the change. To succeed you have to find a balance.

Also important to remember when decrying "fragmentation" (which I decry also btw), in a massive heterogeneous community like open source, you're gonna have users who have completely different needs and use cases, and both are valid. The beauty of it is the code is open and free, so people can serve niche use cases as well as standard.

[1]: Query string gets you past the "monthly limit" paywall that sometimes pops up: https://freedomben.medium.com/centos-is-not-dead-please-stop...

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#39

Post by freedomben » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #37

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…

I think (or at least I hope) that anyone who buys a support contract from a third-party company for a third-party distribution understands that they are not getting the same level of support that they would from Red Hat. There is lots of room in the enterprise sector for third-party support. This is, for example, what almost all consultants effectively are. The third-party vendor can solve a lot of problems that the…

You make some great points, thanks (side note: I love HN for conversations exactly like this one). You've won me over somewhat. As long as the support vendor isn't misrepresenting what they offer and how it differs from Red Hat, it doesn't seem nearly as unethical as it felt initially. I've only had experience with a handful of vendors, but all of them marketed themselves as "same support as Red Hat, 1/4 to 1/2 the price." I find that gross, but if it were "we'll help you setup and configure your machine" rather than "use us instead of Red Hat" I don't really have an issue with that.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#40

Post by freedomben » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

bubblethink wrote: post #36

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…

>I personally find that gross and unethical. Where does the code come from ? All in the game yo.

Yep, definitely not illegal, although IMHO there things that are legal but still unethical. And the line of ethicality is highly subjective. There is sort of a limiter in place in that if it got too bad RH could kill it pretty quickly by not publishing all the SRPMs. Although if they did that, I think the ecosystem would fall apart. I would bail. Part of my irritation is definitely a bad taste in my mouth still from Oracle.