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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

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Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#91

Post by brightball »

xyst wrote: post #80
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #34

The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusi…

Yup. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. I avoid anything Oracle. Their licensing model is hell. Their products are usually terrible compared to competition. Cloud products are subpar. Products tend to require a support contract since it’s proprietary dogshit. Some tidbits of Oracle and Larry Ellison (founder, CEO): - in the early days of Oracle DB, it was benchmarked and compared against other RDBMS and Oracle DB…

SQL Server did something similar too. There’s a famous Reddit post that goes deep comparing it to PostgreSQL but can’t name it for takedown reasons.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#92

Post by vbezhenar »

Vogtinator wrote: post #55
tw04 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It only takes a single customer with a RHEL subscription to republish the source, so this is really just a middle finger out of spite to Centos competitors. That is a violation of their terms of service and will result in a termination of your subscription unless I'm misreading it (section d): Unauthorized Use of Subscription Services. Any unauthorized use of the Subscription Services is a material breach of the Agr…

How does this not violate the GPL?

Why should it violate GPL?

RHEL is obliged to provide source code for their GPL packages.

You ask for source code, you'll get it.

You distribute the source code, RH will terminate the contract with you because they don't want to see you as a customer anymore.

They're free to do business with whoever they want, peeking people who will not distribute RH sources.

Every party is in their right here. That's my understanding.

Red Hat did that for many years. They maintain extended support branches for RHEL which provide fixes for very old software. Those fixes AFAIK were never "leaked" despite the fact that every customer could receive it. If it was as simple as crowd-funding single subscription and then publish all the sources, someone would do it and we would have CentOS Extended LTS.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#93

Post by dijit »

xyst wrote: post #80
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #34

The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusi…

Yup. One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison. I avoid anything Oracle. Their licensing model is hell. Their products are usually terrible compared to competition. Cloud products are subpar. Products tend to require a support contract since it’s proprietary dogshit. Some tidbits of Oracle and Larry Ellison (founder, CEO): - in the early days of Oracle DB, it was benchmarked and compared against other RDBMS and Oracle DB…

Yet people are really happy to buy into Oracle because they have a free tier[0] (which, you probably should avoid anyway[1])

Or they argue to exhaustion that MySQL (not MariaDB) is totally fine for production, despite decades the company who now owns MySQL strangling companies to near death over minutia.

It boggles my mind.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34503883

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29514359

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#94

Post by mroche »

bonzini wrote: post #36
chasil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CentOS stream is not RHEL, and that is what will be needed by Rocky, Alma, and Oracle. I don't think it will be much more difficult to obtain.

IIUC (I work for Red Hat but not on how sources are distributed), there is absolutely no change in practice. CentOS Stream RPM sources are stored in GitLab therefore the whole history is available including past minor releases of RHEL. The only change is that the repositories will not be mirrored to git.centos.org.

Some clarification is needed here.

git.centos.org (g.c.o) has been the historical canonical local for RHEL sources that have been exported out of Red Hat. On any given package you would see several branches, one for each major release and other organizational artifacts (e.g. c7, c8, c9, etc). Initially CentOS Stream 9 was exported to g.c.o as it wasn't a true upstream in the full sense of the word, but with CentOS Stream 9 that changed. c9s is developed in full on GitLab, and now c8s as well, while the final RHEL sources for those packages are still output to the c8 and c9 branches on g.c.o.

What changes here is that Red Hat will no longer be exporting the c8 and c9 content to any git platform (c7 will continue as exists until its EOL). Customers can access sources as needed via the Customer Portal and CDN repositories, but sources in git form will not be publicly available for those artifacts. Moving forward, only c8s and c9s sources will be available, and g.c.o will not see any updates for EL8 and EL9.

While most (I'd estimate at least 95%) of the platform will match in terms of NEVRA between versions available in CentOS Stream and their RHEL counterparts, there are some packages that will not due to the way they are developed.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#96

Post by raincom »

krylon wrote: post #50
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #34

The comments there are insightful and actually make me think this is the right move: > Since the earliest days of Linux or MySQL, there were companies set up to profit from others’ contributions. Most recently in Linux, for example, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux both promise “bug for bug compatibility” with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while contributing nothing toward Red Hat’s success. Indeed, the natural conclusi…

I thought that was well known, it's not like they were secretive about it, in fact they openly advertised it. Their sales pitch, I think was, that many customers ran Oracle software on RHEL, and this way they would have a single provider of support for both the OS and the software running on it. Given Oracle's rather well-earned reputation, that does not sound like an attractive proposal to me, but there's a chance o…

When Oracle started offering support for the oracle db on RHEL, whenever there are performance issues and other issues, Oracle used to blame RHEL. So oracle DBAs are trained to go back Redhat for issues. Usually, these support issues bounce back and forth: Oracle blames Redhat, which says it’s an oracle issue. In the mean time, oracle support folks just buy sweet time. Then came Oracle enterprise linux: oracle supporting the whole stack, OS and databases. Which enterprise customer doesn’t want that. Not only that, many corporate customers of RHEL switched to Oracle Linux, as oracle charges way less for each installation.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#97

Post by klooney »

soraminazuki wrote: post #75

I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones. There are certainly cases where the stability of RHEL makes sense. But too often teams use them when they need latest versions of software, resulting in pointless packaging work. The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age. RPM macros, the language for describing packages, is…

RHEL gives really good audit. They're very good with security updates, they support things for a very long time. And if you wander into Federal Government land, it's hard to use anything else.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#98

Post by m463 »

zaphar wrote: post #89
m463 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't redhat profiting from all the software upstream to themselves? I'm reminded of the definition of a linux distribution: a package manager and a source repository. (that said, unbreakable linux, yeah)

Redhat contributes back to upstream in a lot of cases. I don't know if Rocky and co do or not but Redhat definitely does.

I'm not denying that important point.

But imagine being a contributor to a package which redhat incorporates and using it via centos/rocky.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#99

Post by a_subsystem »

barbariangrunge wrote: post #52
a_subsystem wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is slowly ruining everything they produce. Their systems are incredibly secure because it's extremely difficult to even run them normally as an operator, much less hack in. The byzantine/circular documentation and downloads pages on their site are woefully inadequate in enabling developers. Web searches reveal little information if you have a problem, as not many people run these systems. You generally have to pa…

When I think of ibm, I think of how my wife had to attend special training on how to get paid at her government job due to how unreliable and chaotic the phoenix payroll system is. How it’s sometimes like a part time job sorting through it, and how they are all given time each month as needed to spend days on the phone trying to get somebody to manually fix issues that come up > By July 2018, Phoenix has caused pay p…

Maybe it's still going through the turning into ashes part.
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