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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)

#291

Post by Conan_Kudo »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #117
pamhalpert wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Oracle Linux is also not a pure RHEL clone. They customize it as they desire and ship it accordingly. For example, they have an alternative kernel for their distribution with different features.

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

#292

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

microtonal wrote: post #189
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a large majority of CentOS users were not contributing back in any way to CentOS or the larger FLOSS community So what? There is no obligation to contribute back in any way.

Which is exactly what I said. The license does not require you to contribute back. The license also does not require Red Hat to give you the source code, unless they distribute the binaries to you (through their subscription service).

The difference is that RedHat changed the status quo. Perhaps not illegal but worthy of complaint and contempt.

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

#293

Post by jillesvangurp »

Sounds like it is time to fork and own it. Just as legal as what IBM is doing and people might vote with their feet rather than pay the IBM tax.

There's enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I'm guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a few smaller companies there should be enough to pull together an independent fork, a and leave IBM to piece together long term support by themselves. The goal would be to have a stable long term version but I'd say IBM's involvement might be optional at this point. And what's left of Red Hat might be tempted to jump ship. Shape it like a foundation and make sure that there is no single corporate owner that can change their mind and you have a fine basis for decades to come.

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

#294

Post by pamhalpert »

Geezus_42 wrote: post #287
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.

The problem isn't Red Hat getting them, the problem is a Rocky "customer" would have to just wait for Red Hat to release the patch and then wait for rocky to re-build, and re release.

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

#295

Post by vetinari »

ndiddy wrote: post #264
jzb wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"CentOS helped establish and maintain RHEL as the defacto standard" Not exactly. Maintain, perhaps, but Red Hat Linux was the standard before RHEL existed and everybody wanted a clone of Red Hat AS/RHEL to continue enjoying the free ride. Let's also not forget that CentOS had a rocky (no pun intended) few years before Red Hat stepped in later on. A lot of folks gloss over the fact that there were periods of disarray…

A CentOS Stream release only gets updates as long as its equivalent RHEL release is in its "full support" period. In practice, this means that the support duration is cut from 10 years to 5 years. Additionally, CentOS Stream updates often lag behind RHEL updates. This is because Red Hat won't commit an embargoed security update to CentOS Stream until after it ships in RHEL, so the developers responsible for the updat…

> forget to commit it to CentOS Stream until a week or two after it's shipped.

Or months, even. See httpd and php right now, and the CVEs solved this year. CentOS Stream doesn't have it, Alma has.

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

#296

Post by smcleod »

We should be calling Redhat what it really is these days - IBM. It’s not the old Redhat that many of us used to depend upon - IBM chipped away and it and pretty quickly too, they’ll run it into the ground and flog it off at a loss.

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

#297

Post by jzb »

geerlingguy wrote: post #277
jzb wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, and regarding OpenShift, I wonder how well that play has been working for IBM. My guess is they were expecting to 10x or 100x OpenShift revenues as giant corporations standardized on containerized infrastructure... ...but then Kubernetes (sans OpenShift) seemed to do the 10x'ing while OpenShift was just what RH customers used if they weren't already exploring Kubernetes through some other cloud provider's offer…

"I wonder how well that play has been working for IBM."

In January IBM reported that OpenShift is pulling in $1 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue [1]. OpenShift existed as a product before Kubernetes but was rebased on Kubernetes with v3. That was released (I think) in 2016? So that's basically 6 years from $0 Kubernetes revenue to $1 billion.

Red Hat numbers overall are sort of blended in with the rest of earnings for their group, I think, so I don't see exactly what Red Hat's numbers are now overall. When I worked for Red Hat they'd break it out internally but I wouldn't be able to share that unless it was reported publicly...

It took Red Hat something like 12 years from IPO to $1 billion in ARR, as an entire company. Not sure when RHEL alone became a $1 billion ARR business, but you have to remember that Red Hat's numbers included JBoss and other software too when they hit $1 billion.

As far as I know, none of the cloud providers break out Kubernetes numbers alone. I don't know, for example, how much AWS racks up via its Kubernetes. Of course, AWS also gets some of the OpenShift business since some of Red Hat's customers are on AWS, there's ROSA, etc. (Then again, AWS also gets a slice of RHEL too...)

Worth noting that Google Cloud posted its first profitable quarter in April of this year. No idea what Google's market share for Kubernetes is, but if I had to guess I'd say that their distribution isn't #1. (If anyone actually can accurately measure this, anyway...)

If IBM expected OpenShift to have grown beyond $1bn by January this year, I'd say that was unrealistic. I mean, obviously because it didn't, but also because when IBM acquired Red Hat officially the total Red Hat revenue was about $3.4 billion and if I'm not mistaken "emerging technologies" (including OpenShift) accounted for only $225 million. [2] If OpenShift was, say, $100m of that then they have (in fact) 10x'ed it.

And, finally, I don't think OpenShift revenues reflect whatever services IBM has packaged for OpenShift as a standard deployment platform. So - if IBM has made it easier to sell other things because they only have to target OpenShift, and they're successfully pushing OpenShift into major customers, then it's a pretty good deal.

But for now they also need to protect their primary Red Hat revenue stream, and that still appears to be RHEL.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/investor/att/pdf/IBM-4Q22-Earnings-Prepa...

[2] https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/26/red_hat_2019_results/

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

#298

Post by CrLf »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #293

Sounds like it is time to fork and own it. Just as legal as what IBM is doing and people might vote with their feet rather than pay the IBM tax. There's enough of a community to own this. Jenkins is a good role model. So is Libre Office. Oracle was once on the other end; now they are on the receiving end. So, I'm guessing they might be interested in being on the other end this time. Between them, Amazon, and maybe a…

Red Hat has even been making this easier for the last few years...

Back in 2003, when they discontinued Red Hat Linux (RHEL's predecessor) and locked binary RPMs behind a subscription (to similar outrage), the clones didn't have an easy time. RHEL's build process was behind closed doors and doing rebuilds meant reverse engineering the proper build order. This is why CentOS major versions took quite a while to appear after the corresponding RHEL releases (and made CentOS a major effort).

Since Red Hat assimilated CentOS, and culminating with CentOS Stream becoming the upstream for RHEL itself, the build system became unified.

This is highly valuable. That clones aren't taking advantage of this to jumpstart themselves into independence (and ensuring the Red Hat ecosystem has a future, with or without Red Hat) is just sad.

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

#299

Post by jacooper »

neurostimulant wrote: post #215
CrLf wrote: post #172

Why can't AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux drop their bug-for-bug compatibility commitment, and become stable distributions in their own right, based on CentOS Stream? I think this ecosystem would gain a lot from these distributions having their own identity, instead of being just 1:1 copies of RHEL. Change my mind. ;)

Many enterprise apps are distributed as binary release that compatible with RHEL, and people want to run them without using RHEL, especially in situations when it doesn't make sense to purchase RHEL licenses.

Well then these apps now have to support something else if they don't want to lose customers who don't want to use RHEL.

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

#300

Post by christophilus »

christophilus wrote: post #144
freedomben wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with this assessment. Happy Fedora user here, but I am a bit nervous about the I Mification of RedHat and the potential long term ramifications for Fedora.

No idea why iOS corrected “ramifications” to “I Mification”. Too late to edit, though.
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