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Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

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Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#191

Post by jzb »

jmclnx wrote: post #39

I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope the Linux Foundation weighs in, but it seems to have been bought by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and many other large corps. All the drama in Linux with Wayland, RHEL sponsored init, snap/flatpak and now IBM/RHEL has been causing me to seriously evaluate the BSDs. I have been doing that for a couple of years. I would be fully on OpenBSD now, but the hardware I…

"I find it hard to believe RHEL will get away with this. I hope the Linux Foundation weighs in"

I'm curious what role you think the LF plays here, or what they'd do to prevent Red Hat from "getting away" with doing something that is entirely within Red Hat's rights to do.

The Linux Foundation is a trade organization. It was created from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and Free Standards Group. The OSDL was funded by several large corporations - including IBM, Intel, HP, Fujitsu and others.

LF wasn't "bought" by IBM and others. It was literally created by them. Granted, Microsoft is a newcomer (relatively speaking). But the LF is and always has been a trade organization that supports the interest of companies that want to do business with open source.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#192

Post by ghaff »

jamiesonbecker wrote: post #174
ghaff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. It was certainly needed over time but capabilities from things like RCU out of Sequent weren't that important in the 2000 timeframe. And a…

And who can forget "peace, love, Linux" ;) https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-gets-100000-fine-for-peace...

Or the "prodigy" series of TV ads that were pitched for CEOs and Prime Ministers according to the then-head of IBM advertising.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#193

Post by bonzini »

jake_morrison wrote: post #187

The problem is that RHEL is too expensive for people who don't need support. IBM is getting greedy and screwing up its pipeline. Our dedicated servers are about $100/month for pretty serious hardware (2 x 8-core CPUs, 64 GB RAM, 2 x 8TB HDD, 30TB transfer). Paying $349/year is a significant percentage of that. It is worse for smaller servers, and ludicrous for small virtual machines in the cloud. I would not mind thr…

Red Hat's model is to only ship what they know they can support. For the rest there's EPEL which is community managed.

Canonical's model is to ship the kitchen sink and wing it in case a customer wants support on something that is in a sorry state.

Different customers, different requirements.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#194

Post by jabl »

PAPPPmAc wrote: post #168
ghaff wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. It was certainly needed over time but capabilities from things like RCU out of Sequent weren't that important in the 2000 timeframe. And a…

I was mixing up where the big multiprocessor changes that went into the 2.5 series in that 2000-2005 era came from. I was thinking of the the basic kernel preemption stuff and sched_setaffinity syscall + userspace plumbing like taskset that is _extremely_ consequential on little multicore/SMT machines, but the prominent name on a lot of that was Robert Love and he was at MontaVista at the time. The Dynix parts that a…

SGI also did a lot of scalability work in that time frame, as part of their migration from MIPS+Irix to Itanium+Linux. In the end they got Linux working on IIRC up to 4096 processors.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#195

Post by jzb »

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #162
jzb wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CentOS was also huge towards allowing a lot of larger companies to just run CentOS in production instead of RHEL and avoid paying anything at all. However you may feel about Red Hat's actions, I'd trust that folks at Red Hat have done enough legwork to figure out that "CentOS as a loss leader for RHEL" wasn't working out the way people like to imagine it would. (Note: I am a former Red Hat employee, but I do not have…

And I'm not sure I'd agree with their analysis, but they're clearly free to make the decision. If larger companies can run CentOS in production, they also can run Debian or any other distro without a support contract. They could even use a competing loss leader distro like OpenSuse Leap.

Yes, they could. But they (often) don't. The certification / training ecosystem that exists around RHEL has a lot value, even if a lot of folks like to handwave it away. The engineering that goes into RHEL and the very predictable lifecycle has a lot of value, too. I'm not going to say that Debian or SUSE aren't equally good, engineering-wise, but it seems like a lot of large companies have chosen RHEL clones over Debian. (Not all! I am sure plenty of companies do as you suggest with Debian.)

Don't get me wrong - I think it'd be great if Debian became the standard, assuming that meant that companies helped develop Debian and poured resources into it as a commons. That'd be much better than depending on Red Hat to do all the work and then not paying for it.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#196

Post by Shorel »

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…

The complementary relationship is also true.

RHEL became the enterprise Linux distribution because it was the one used and supported by Oracle, back then, when many companies still used Oracle as their database.

I am talking about 15 years ago.

Even nowadays at work, we all use Ubuntu in our workstations, but the servers run CentOS (another repackaging of RH).

Without the support of Oracle, we all would be using SUSE in our servers, instead of a Red Hat based distro.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#197

Post by ilyt »

cookiengineer wrote: post #144
xyst wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also in terms of security, Oracle's "forks" are decades behind. They managed to make RedHat unsecure with their own dogshit changes. There are so many CVEs for Oracle specifically that are just bad default usernames and passwords, where they still dispute the CVE reports because it is "intended behaviour". So ridiculous...

RHEL also introduced some.... interesting changes few times, like re-enabling ciphers removed from upstreams because their clients needed them for something.

I remember our amazement on how we failed audit on having a cipher enabled in OpenSSH version that had that cipher removed in upstream...

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#198

Post by jzb »

NegativeK wrote: post #185
jzb wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not going to call Rocky or Alma "dirtbags" (does anybody use that phrase these days?) but comparing what Red Hat does to Rocky is misleading. RHEL Clones: Take finished source code, rebuild, test, release. RHEL: Work upstream to develop features / submit features upstream before inclusion in RHEL, maintain specific versions of upstream, test hundreds of upstreams together to make sure they can be shipped together…

Rocky and Alma are doing exactly what CentOS pre-Stream did for _six_ years. Now they're frustrated that their decision to kill the CentOS idea didn't stick? Red Hat might have the legal right to gate their product, but it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative. I don't really like reductionist blaming, but…

"it seems really slimy to build RHEL on the work of who knows how many people that publish it for free and then to put road blocks around their derivative"

I'm always curious that people get angry at Red Hat profiting on the work of others, but few people get angry at the companies that use a RHEL clone to run their business and pay nothing and contribute nothing.

Red Hat is still releasing source code. The only thing that it's not doing is making it super-convenient to rebuild exactly its product.

Seriously - for most purposes CentOS Stream is just fine if what you want is a distro that feels like RHEL. Its one drawback is that it's not a one-for-one clone of RHEL, which generally only really matters if you are using it to run your business. Which gets me back to - why are people so pissed at Red Hat but not all the organizations that make money using RHEL but don't pay towards its development?

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#199

Post by ilyt »

dijit wrote: post #93
xyst wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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=2…

My Oracle free tier VM got destroyed without any info with no prompt or anything.

Then my account was put in such state where I couldn't even pay to upgrade it to paid one

> 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.

Who you gonna trust, billion dollar corporation, or man that sold that DB off to them then started making a fork ?

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