Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#201

Post by ilyt » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

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…

> 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?

CentOS wasn't selling support contracts tho.

Not that I think anything they are doing is in any way wrong mind you.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#202

Post by rodgerd » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:56 PM UTC

a2tech wrote: post #3

I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat. I was under the impression they were profitable prior to the acquisition so I’m not sure why they’re squeezing so hard and ruining the great brand and good will Red Hat had built up.

> I don’t understand what game IBM is playing with Red Hat.

IBM is doing the thing IBM knows how to do, which is have their internal politics, honed over a century or so, dictate the customer experience.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#203

Post by ilyt » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #136

reidrac wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you mean anti-copyleft. Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, despite the philosophical differences. The issue here is against the copyleft (GPL and AGPL).

>>Free Software and Open Source are essentially the same, No ... no they are not >>despite the philosophical differences. And those differences are HUGE and make them incompatible

Yes, not making it ridiculously easy for corporate to make money off someone's else work without giving anything back is a huge difference.

I don't really get why people are for non-copyleft licenses. LGPL is fine license.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#204

Post by dijit » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:58 PM UTC

ilyt wrote: post #199

dijit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

Oh, that’s easy. neither.

I use postgres predominantly.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#205

Post by progmetaldev » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

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.

Especially distributions such as Debian Stable LTS.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#206

Post by ilyt » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #43

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…

It has a few add-ons. The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs, extensive device support (that is removed from the stock kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always more current. There are several scenarios where it is very attractive. Oracle bought K-Splice several years ago, which was the first rebootless patch solution for Linux. It's only available with a premium license; Kernelcare…

> The "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" includes full btrfs, extensive device support (that is removed from the stock kernel), is tuned for the eponymous database, and is always more current. There are several scenarios where it is very attractive.

I'd never go for btrfs in anything enterprise.

But it does annoy me how RHEL moves normal open source software to the separate repos that are available with extra support packages, it just makes managing it annoying

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#207

Post by rodgerd » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 9:00 PM UTC

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 hope the Linux Foundation weighs in

The LF who fought attempts to hold VMware accountable for alleged GPL breaches?

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#208

Post by ilyt » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 9:00 PM UTC

Phrodo_00 wrote: post #112

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…

> 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. CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments, startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump on "real RH" when they got bigger. Alma Linux is the same. Rocky Linux does sell support, but even then…

> CentOS was huge towards equipping smaller IT departments, startups and student on the RHEL ways, allowing them to jump on "real RH" when they got bigger.

And it turned out near-nobody did so they turned it into stream so you could no longer have "same as RHEL" version.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#209

Post by ilyt » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #196

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…

We just use Debian for everything (sooo much less issues than with RHEL or Ubuntu ), but the RHEL bias is high in enterprise clients we support.

Re: Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability

#210

Post by progmetaldev » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 9:04 PM UTC

awill wrote: post #163

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…

There's a huge difference between Rocky/Alma, and Oracle. Oracle actually tries to steal RHEL business. They offer support, which I think is ludicrous when they don't even build the product. Alma/Rocky aren't to my knowledge offering any support (and if they plan to, they shouldn't). Are customers cross-shopping RHEL with Alma? You either want support, and buy RHEL, or you don't, and you use something else (Alma/Rock…

Rocky does offer support, but your comment about Oracle still stands. I believe Rocky works with Red Hat.