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I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#111

Post by jmclnx »

systems_glitch wrote: post #75
keeler wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I use Slackware at home. Slackware was my first distro decades ago, and I have lots of fond memories learning Linux with it. How is it these days? What makes it your distro of choice at home in 2023?

Not OP, but: stable, with up-to-date packages. Configuration and maintenance does not change drastically between versions (there's a paper manual, it's on its second revision). I can be heads-down on something for months and not run updates, and then run them and they apply fine and don't hose anything. Long support for releases, both officially and on slackbuids.org

Plus, IIRC, Slackware may provide custom support for unsupported releases for a fee.

>If for some reason you are unable to upgrade or handle your own security patches, limited security support may be available for a fee.

From https://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-11.0/ChangeLog.txt

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#112

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

edgyquant wrote: post #82
gtirloni wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red Hat is a for-profit company ... built on top of software and labour contributed by others. What you're missing is how the open source ethos works.

Red Hat is a huge contributor to Linux. They also are responsible for making it a trusted OS for people coming off traditional Unix in the 90s. They aren’t doing anything on the backs of others.

Most of the code they ship isn't written by them, whatever metric you choose.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#113

Post by freedomben »

kkielhofner wrote: post #85

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would wa…

So you tried to run your app on it and ran into trouble, and you conclude that Fedora is an unstable hunk of shit?

Also, this attitude that Fedora is just a tester for a commercial product is absurd. I suppose this is the same logic that makes CentOS Stream just a "beta" of RHEL (but strangely, these same people don't consider RHEL a "beta" for old CentOS even though consistency would demand this).

Anecdotally, I've used a lot of distros over many years, and Fedora has been by far the most stable and "just works" of any of them. There were a couple of rough years with the Nvidia driver, but I blame Nvidia for that.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#114

Post by pamhalpert »

CAP_NET_ADMIN wrote: post #87
criddell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RESELLING without contributing anything I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.

You mean, the valuable support they are increasingly shifting to Colombia, Philippines and India?

Who cares? Every country has skillful, qualified information technology individuals. Additionally, a quick google search shows it looks like RH does offer US only support if a customer is willing to pay.

https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/security-strict-data-han...

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#115

Post by fariszr »

freedomben wrote: post #113
kkielhofner wrote: post #85

Why not extend to Fedora? At the risk of starting a distro religious war… After many years away from the RedHat ecosystem I recently tried to stand up Fedora 37 and 38 to test it with Willow Inference Server. After hours and hours of poor and conflicting docs, random stability issues, various additional software repos of questionable quality, etc I gave up and proclaimed it officially unsupported. Why anyone would wa…

So you tried to run your app on it and ran into trouble, and you conclude that Fedora is an unstable hunk of shit? Also, this attitude that Fedora is just a tester for a commercial product is absurd. I suppose this is the same logic that makes CentOS Stream just a "beta" of RHEL (but strangely, these same people don't consider RHEL a "beta" for old CentOS even though consistency would demand this). Anecdotally, I've…

Old CentOS wasn't downstream from RHEL, it was a clone. While stream is upstream for RHEL.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#116

Post by Double_a_92 »

zamadatix wrote: post #61
xt00 wrote: post #40

Could somebody who maintains a particularly important open source software change the license to say basically “you must release your source code to anyone who requests it free of charge whether they are a customer or not”? Yes Redhat is a for profit company, but them deciding to make a business off of software that has licenses that might change to their detriment is their problem. Oh wait is that what they are doin…

You can just as easily change your license to one which does not allow corporate use. This has the same result, the last previously licensed version of your project is forked by corporations. I.e. if your goal is to stop providing free use of your future work you're always welcome to it, but don't hold your breath that these companies will suddenly clamor back as a result.

It won't be exactly the same result. If the license is just not compatible with commercial use, the software just won't be used ever.

But yeah that clause would make it the same, because it's insane to demand that a company has to release all its source code just to use some open source library.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#117

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

pamhalpert wrote: post #96
criddell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RESELLING without contributing anything I think you are underestimating the value of providing support to commercial users.

So, what Red Hat already offers.... Was Alma and co doing upstream development where they can prove it? Was Oracle patching upstream first or only in oracle linux? Was Rocky offering anything unique, value adding, or were they just copy pasting and selling? It may sound loaded, but I'm genuinely asking, because from what I've seen the answer in regards to value add is pretty ambiguous.

https://lwn.net/Articles/929582

AFAIK Oracle employs major contributors to btrfs and XFS. I'm mostly interested in filesystems, so I can't speak for other subsystems (seems like they do a decent amount of work on core kernel development — the really important stuff like schedulers and the memory subsystem — second place just below Google).

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#118

Post by kelnos »

pamhalpert wrote: post #9

Not going to touch the hair on fire tone of this in general... but one thing worth mentioning is I believe the "freeloader" comment meant Rocky, Alma, Oracle and the likes are the freeloaders who are repackaging and RESELLING without contributing anything. If you read between the lines in 2020, this was the next logical step coming. I think they should have done both changes back in 2020 and put a wider emphasis on t…

If you build your business on top of GPL software, then this sort of repackaging/reselling is just something you have to live with. Want full control? Build your own OS and license it under the terms you want.

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#119

Post by barbariangrunge »

freedomben wrote: post #89

I don't think this sort of emotional, loose-facted "hot take" style response is real constructive. I'm unhappy about this decision by Red Hat, and am also very concerned about the trajectory RH is on. For the first time in well over a decade I'm re-evaluating which ecosystem to base all my work (and the company(ies) for who I make decisions). I don't believe that Red Hat's leadership cares a whole lot about open sour…

I'm personally impressed that Fedora is fully open source while being released by a for-profit company. I would have expected, when learning about this ecosystem, for Red Hat releases to be proprietary for 5 years, and then have those versions switch to a FOSS license, just as a way to ensure they can monetize their work. But Red Hat, at least in the past, sounds like they did something amazing, being able to go foss at the same time as making money.

I understand the red hat distro itself has stricter terms

Not sure how they will fare under IBM, but the history of this company is pretty cool. I'd love to read more, if somebody knows of a really good article or writeup

Re: I'm Done with Red Hat (Enterprise Linux)

#120

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #112
edgyquant wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat is a huge contributor to Linux. They also are responsible for making it a trusted OS for people coming off traditional Unix in the 90s. They aren’t doing anything on the backs of others.

Most of the code they ship isn't written by them, whatever metric you choose.

If that's the bar to being a good open source actor then who is?
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