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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

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Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#101

Post by pjmlp »

Timon3 wrote: post #68
pjmlp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me attacked, not all. HN loves to hate Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and friends, without getting the point that many startups that go through HN programs never achieve half of what they produce.

What do startups have to do with IBMs business direction and processes? How does this relate to my point? Not every startup being successful somehow means that I shouldn't comment on IBMs recent business decisions?

A matter of perspective into actual influence into the capitalist US society.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#102

Post by acatton »

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…

> I wish this encourages companies to look for more alternatives to RHEL and its clones.

The issue is that there is no alternative. I'm not aware of any distro with its base and all its packages working seamlessly with SELinux enabled.

Setting up SELinux in any other distro is, in my experience, an uphill battle. You need to become an SELinux expert to do so.

> The worst part about the packaging work is, the tools used to create RPM packages is showing its age.

Most people don't really create RPM packages, they just install them. And in this area dnf[1] is cutting edge: file-level dependency solver, delta-package downloading, parallel downloading, ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNF_(software)

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#103

Post by pjmlp »

josefx wrote: post #73
pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many startups can only dream of being as long and influential as IBM is. Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000, was one of the reasons it actually took off.

> IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000 That was quarter a century ago.

In fact, now they own most relevant projects.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#104

Post by StillBored »

phpisthebest wrote: post #64
znpy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Red Hat didn't yet provide free download and free hobbyist licensing for their SO CentOS is what allowed me to learn the RHEL way and learn enough to pay 560 euro to get RHCSA certified. I can see their problem with Oracle, but Rocky linux is probably bringing them business. If my job wouldn't mandate a specific distro, I would use Rocky Linux where the management doesn't want to pay for support, and RHEL whenev…

I know there move to CentOS Stream cost them my business, Since that announcement 2 years ago I have replaced all Licensed RHEL servers with Ubuntu Servers...

Which is an odd choice when comparing RH and Canonical. The former has been almost religious about living to the open source ideals, going so far as open sourcing products they purchase, and making sure new products they create have opensource upstreams. I don't think the same can be said of Canonical which seems at every turn to in need of $ so they try desperate ploys to monetize new projects they work on by developing them in house and dropping releases, or trying to lock up markets and charge for features not available in the open source version.

So, while they definitely aren't ideal, its hard to point to another company that does more across as much of the opensource ecosystem. Maybe google these days? But one needs only look at some of the google projects governance model to see the difference between RH and Google.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#105

Post by gtirloni »

I've been using Red Hat and Fedora since the early RH4 days when the video driver only supported monochrome for my GPU. I'm now going to start switching to something not controlled by a corporation. Yes, I'm not happy about it but it's necessary. The days of being naive about Linux are over.

I still consider Fedora one of the best distros out there (bleeding edge and polished as much as possible) and I prefer to use the same-ish distro on my personal computers and on the servers but this is another nail in the RH-based distro coffin for me.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#106

Post by freedomben »

jaclaz wrote: post #66
LordShredda wrote: post #40

NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech contracts

If the info in this thread is accurate, it is for 3 (three) workstations, I would call it a tiny deal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417968 Shouldn't be of relevance.

Yeah this decision had to have been in discussion for 6 months or more, maybe even 2 years back to the CentOS Stream decision. It didn't happen because a few days ago NASA bought support for 3 Rocky licenses

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#107

Post by PAPPPmAc »

ghaff wrote: post #21
pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many startups can only dream of being as long and influential as IBM is. Also note that IBM contributions to Linux kernel in 2000, was one of the reasons it actually took off.

I'd argue that IBM's contributions in that timeframe were more about about validating it from a large business perspective than about technical contributions (that tended to focus on large system performance which wasn't actually that important for Linux taking off).

"Large" wasn't a very big standard at the time.

Linux's multiprocessor support was ...lackluster at best... prior to IBM contributing all the Sequent (Dynix) derived multiprocessing stuff. Hyperthreading/Multicore started to get "normal" even in consumer systems only a couple years later, so that injection was pretty critical.

Likewise, a lot of Linux's development inertia and cultural acceptance came from being a cheap and consistent alternative to screwing around with the profusion of expensive and mutually incompatible proprietary Unixes in the Server and (as clusters co-evolved) HPC market.

On the broader issue, the tension here is that IBM thinks the value proposition of RHEL is "Supported" and (I suspect) almost everyone else regards the value proposition of RHEL as "standard base." I think it's more likely that the "standard base" for srs bsns Linux in the markets where RHEL is the standard would rebase than IBM having any success trying to squeeze customers, and if that happens the value of "Owning RHEL" suddenly shrinks dramatically. Honestly, all it would take is the RHEL-likes like Alma and Rocky to agree on a coordination mechanism that isn't matching RHEL - could be through a major public interest like CERN, could be through an existing commercial interest like coordinating with Oracle (ew), could be via one of the several entities that does commercial support for RHEL-likes ... there are options.

Oracle being a gigantic litigious parasite on society is a broader issue, and I understand regarding commercial RHEL-likes as more of a problem, but even they have been funding a lot of backport-to-LTS type work.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#108

Post by cmiles74 »

LordShredda wrote: post #40

NASA recently made a deal with Rocky Linux, which is literally just RHEL with branding replaced afaik. Probably pissed IBM real bad since they're usually the government's darling for tech contracts

I believe NASA does use RHEL, I remember a story last year where they were moving some systems from SUSE to RHEL.

My guess is that IBM was so difficult to deal with that they decided to move away from RHEL wherever they could. Perhaps getting the actual support they purchased was too much of a challenge.

If IBM is pissed, they should take a good hard look in the mirror before they malign other distributions.

https://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/support/kb/news/transition-to-...

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#109

Post by geerlingguy »

znpy wrote: post #47
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…

When Red Hat didn't yet provide free download and free hobbyist licensing for their SO CentOS is what allowed me to learn the RHEL way and learn enough to pay 560 euro to get RHCSA certified. I can see their problem with Oracle, but Rocky linux is probably bringing them business. If my job wouldn't mandate a specific distro, I would use Rocky Linux where the management doesn't want to pay for support, and RHEL whenev…

Yeah... had it not been for CentOS, I would've never touched anything in the RHEL-side of things after I discovered Ubuntu in the 10/12 era.

Because CentOS existed, I made sure most of my open source work would run just as well on all RHEL derivatives as it does on Debian.

If Rocky didn't exist, I would quickly drop all my RHEL support because operating thousands of test machines and containers based on UBI and having to keep up with their licensing game would cost too much of my time.

Rocky and Alma are the only reason devs like me still build anything for RHEL.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#110

Post by lost_tourist »

gtirloni wrote: post #105

I've been using Red Hat and Fedora since the early RH4 days when the video driver only supported monochrome for my GPU. I'm now going to start switching to something not controlled by a corporation. Yes, I'm not happy about it but it's necessary. The days of being naive about Linux are over. I still consider Fedora one of the best distros out there (bleeding edge and polished as much as possible) and I prefer to use…

If you like the glacial pace of Redhat you'll probably be happy with Debian stable.
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