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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)

#281

Post by tcmart14 »

redundantly wrote: post #201
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…

> But that said, as far as I know, one guy used the term "freeloaders" and the context wasn't clear at all who he was talking about One guy? The sentiment of CentOS users being freeloaders is shared by a lot of people, inside and outside of IBM. I remember when the original announcement came out that CentOS was being killed in favour of CentOS Stream. Lots of IBM (Red Hat) employees were defending the change by paint…

The sad part is the short nearsightedness. I know tons of RHEL engineers who only got into RHEL because they could essentially learn large parts of RHEL for free on CentOS and then go on to work professionally on RHEL. I also understand that a lot of courses to become official RHEL engineers/sysadmins use CentOS for the classes.

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

#282

Post by crabbone »

I'm a "second generation refugee from XIV". XIV was a storage company started by Moshe Yanai, it pioneered many things in storage world. It was the catalyst that created many talented storage programmers that created their own successful companies: Infinidat, XtremIO, Weka, Elastifile, and many more.

IBM acquired XIV... and ran it into the ground. To anyone who had this kind of experience with IBM the possibility of RHEL dying under the guidance of IBM was almost as good as certainty.

My guess is that RHEL in not such a long time will take it's proud place somewhere between zLinux and AIX, and most will never hear from it again.

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

#283

Post by dark-star »

JeremyNT wrote: post #125

I'm sympathetic to Jeff's position, but this is I believe the third post from this individual about this topic to reach the HN front page in the last week. At this point I feel like there's no more blood to be wrung from this stone. Jeff is free to take his ball and go home with it - just like Red Hat, in fact - but I think we're past the "this is notable news" phase and another post from Jeff about his frustrations…

Exactly, who is this Geerling guy anyway? ;-)

(I'm kidding, of course, but a few days ago I had to google him...I don't follow many Tech YouTubers' channels anymore)

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

#284

Post by houseofzeus »

error503 wrote: post #255
microtonal wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but that doesn't mean that Red Hat does have to give you the source code. They only have to provide the source code to customers to which they distribute the binaries. Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. AFAIK, the current kerfuffle is about providing RHEL source packages through git.centos.org. They currently only provide RHEL through a subscription and they fulfill th…

>Of course, for GPL code, their customers could redistribute the source code. The fact that the subscription agreement does not allow this is exactly what we're discussing here.

It doesn't prevent you redistributing what you have already been given (binaries or source), it does however allow Red Hat to not give you future iterations.

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

#285

Post by mfuzzey »

jzb wrote: post #252
geerlingguy wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could also shrink down to a more manageable business unit... except IBM paid $34 billion for Red Hat, and you can't ever decrease revenues or the axe drops :(

Well, remember too that IBM didn't pay $34b for just RHEL - a big part of the purchase was OpenShift which has been coming up in revenue and has RHEL as its underpinning. And I have a lot more to write and say about that in a series for my own blog, but certainly IBM isn't looking for RHEL revenue to go down... And to be very fair to all involved, that's not even remotely unique to IBM. IBM is a public company and th…

>There's no more room for long-term thinking if that doesn't involve "numbers go up, every quarter."

That is obviously unsustainable. I get that they need to make a profit but there's no fundemental reason numbers have to keep going up and at some point they won't be able to go up anymore, even if the business remains profitable.

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

#286

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

freedomben wrote: post #272
evan1107 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what I can tell Red Hat agrees with that and has gone through great efforts to invest in and evolve the CentOS project. The current state of the project is CentOS stream which is still a LTS enterprise distribution and has an efficient dev cycle that prevents the delays seen in years past. Doesn’t centos stream fill the niche you are describing?

It comes close, but doesn't fill the niche because according to Red Hat, CentOS Stream should not be used in production. People do and for the most part they have no issues, but as long as the maintainers themselves are telling people not to run it in production, I would never recommend somebody to use it for serious workloads. And if you can't use it for serious workloads, then you should invest your time into a dif…

What do they do there so it’s suddenly not suitable? Introduce bugs on purpose? Break dependencies just so? Put in insecure defaults? If you are not an organization that requires an actual compliance department to be able to work for governments and the military, how is it different?

People have been doing this, or running Ubuntu LTS without Pro or other forms of paid support from Canonical.

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

#287

Post by Geezus_42 »

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…

Is there anything to stop RedHat from pulling patches from Rocky? Is Rocky's code not available? Rocky isn't doing anything that CentOS (and RedHat project) isn't as far as I know.

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

#288

Post by garenp »

nine_k wrote: post #181
cturner wrote: post #161

RHEL has a major ecosystem advantage related to drivers that they may not be aware of. They risk ruining this, as I will try to explain. At the time industry started to take Linux seriously, RHEL was the dominant distro. As a result, and by accident, RHEL+derivs became the primary target for commercial hardware drivers. As an example - it's easier to get obscure low-latency network and packet-capture cards working on…

If you don't mind, what makes more niche hardware drivers work / build better against RHEL? I suppose RHEL uses basically the same kernel, with patches that don't alter its interface too substantially. So I presume that a driver in source form, or even partly in binary blob form, should build and work approximately equally well with any stock kernel. Beside the driver developers apparently using RHEL / CentOS (so on…

In my experience RHEL has been better at backporting patches and maintaining a relatively stable kernel. This means that third-party software that targeted it is more likely to work over time. Canonical by comparison is absolutely terrible, and seemingly just blindly imports whatever is thrown over the wall from kernel.org even in their so-called "LTS" versions, and now after running an innocuous "apt-get upgrade" command your frobnitz device no longer works and/or you can't rebuild the driver for your frobnitz device due to incompatible kernel changes.

Some vendors also explicitly detail exactly which distro and versions they support ("RHEL or Centos x.y"), so even if you can get things to work on another distro, a vendor can easily deny your support request with the usual BS line: "that configuration is not supported. Switch back to RHEL x.y or SLES and let us know if you can reproduce the issue! La-la-la have a nice day, buh-bye! phone click".

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

#289

Post by TillE »

strangescript wrote: post #268

I will never understand why someone would choose to use RHL over Debian flavored distro unless you want the enterprise support they provide. In which case, you reap what you sow.

Honestly surprised to see so much chat about RHEL here. I'm sure there are reasons to use it, but it seems so niche. Like 90% of cloud stuff is running Debian or Ubuntu.

Given their customer base, I certainly wouldn't be putting any special effort into supporting RHEL unless I was being paid for it.

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

#290

Post by Conan_Kudo »

indigodaddy wrote: post #190
bvrmn wrote: post #99

Some reasons why Stream is not replacement for Centos alike (Alma, Rocky, ...). 1. Stream can't be used as base to build el-compatible packages. There is no any guarantees Stream doesn't break ABI compatibility. 2. Stream has no large (several years) support cycle and can't be used as a stable system. Yes, there is a big community who don't need a paid licensed support from a RH and ready to help with bug reports and…

How long typically do packages percolate in Stream before making their way to EL?

The time delta to the next minor version, usually. RHEL has a release in the spring and the fall. The last pair of releases were in May and November. If something landed in CentOS Stream in between May and November, it will probably be part of the November release. If it's after that, then it'll be part of the next spring release.

It's not particularly complex, in my opinion.

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