Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rocky Linux 9.0

rockylinux.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 178 posts

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#81

Post by flatiron »

freedomben wrote: post #39
bityard wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Nobody ever got fired for hiring red hat for red hat support. To the other post’s point those may not be the contracts red hat wants. They want big enterprise where there is 0 reason to not go red hat.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#82

Post by awill »

CamJN wrote: post #73
awill wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand "provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is winning." As a user of CentOS looking for a replacement, Alma and Rocky should be 100% identical. The _only_ difference is delay after RHEL launches.

Alma is not as RHEL-compatible as rocky, they use subkeys for signing whereas rocky just uses their signing keys. This is enough that I can’t use alma for building my rpm’s using mock.

I'd love to see a technical writeup of the differences. If Rocky genuinely were better, a 5-week delay vs Alma would probably be ok, at least for the original release, as long as the dot releases are faster. No one wants security vulnerabilities delayed by 5 weeks.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#83

Post by fariszr »

If only RHEL based distorts supported in place upgrades. Its one of the reasons why I stick to Debian.

As for OpenSuse, official support from things like Docker is pretty rare.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#84

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

Your notion of ethics is unequivocally and objectively wrong. Red Hat derives massive value up to and including its very existence and every single penny that passes through its hands from participation in the larger open source ecosystem that comes with the obligation to share their work not only with random bob hacker but with people like Rocky Linux, Alma, and even folks like Oracle.

You cannot acknowledge that they owe everything based on willing participation in an ecosystem where they wherein they openly made a promise and follow that up with the idea that its immoral for anyone to rely on such a promise. It's logically and morally inconsistent.

Gross is just an emotive label you have slapped on after incorrectly concluding that such actions are unethical.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#85

Post by jaboutboul »

CamJN wrote: post #73
awill wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand "provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is winning." As a user of CentOS looking for a replacement, Alma and Rocky should be 100% identical. The _only_ difference is delay after RHEL launches.

Alma is not as RHEL-compatible as rocky, they use subkeys for signing whereas rocky just uses their signing keys. This is enough that I can’t use alma for building my rpm’s using mock.

This is not correct. The issue is trying to use Alma 8’s mock chroot on a CentOS 7 host. The (older) versions of yum and rpm there don’t support subkeys.

There is a Red Hat BZ issue here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2017069

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#86

Post by [deleted] »

CamJN wrote: post #73
awill wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand "provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is winning." As a user of CentOS looking for a replacement, Alma and Rocky should be 100% identical. The _only_ difference is delay after RHEL launches.

Alma is not as RHEL-compatible as rocky, they use subkeys for signing whereas rocky just uses their signing keys. This is enough that I can’t use alma for building my rpm’s using mock.

[deleted]

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#87

Post by gnufied »

js4ever wrote: post #43
tannhaeuser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They also created quay.io and fragmented docker global public repo by asking sponsored FOSS project to publish ONLY on quay. I really dislike redhat and won't touch anything related with them. I really don't understand why companies would pay thousands per server for support. I'm working with Linux systems since 2 decades and never needed to pay a cent in licenses or support.

Hmm, quay came via coreos acquisitions. Can you point me to examples where Red Hat pushed projects to push ONLY to quay.io?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#88

Post by Galanwe »

stonogo wrote: post #30
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place

Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer...

In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created.

In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left when Lance Davis inherited the ownership of the project after Rocky committed suicide.

I'm not sure anyone is calling Greg a "CentOS founding member" except himself, everywhere.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#89

Post by colordrops »

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…

Redhat builds off of a mountain of open source software that they didn't write. To call it gross and unethical is blatantly hypocritical. If Redhat doesn't want others to use software they create in certain ways, then they should change the license of the OS. Oh, that's right, they can't, because it's not all their software.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#90

Post by Galanwe »

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.

> RedHat itself makes money by charging for support on work made by thousands of other coders outside the company

Linux is not developed by thousands of volunteers on their free time in their garage.

At least 85% of commits to the Linux kernel are from corporates (AMD, Intel, Broadcom, RedHat, etc). Linux is free and open source code, but very largely written by people who are paid to do so, by companies that need to somehow make a profit.

RedHat amounts to roughly 20% of these corporate commits, and that's counting in the share of other corporates that frankly mainly only contribute work for their own drivers.

I see paying for RHEL as being 50% for support / 50% for sponsoring Linux development as a whole.

Post reply on HN