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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)

#351

Post by asadotzler »

ruraljuror wrote: post #329
jlbooker wrote: post #78

The IBM MBAs have finally taken over Redhat. Anything to squeeze another dollar out, even if it's counterproductive in the long term. We knew it would happen. Honestly I'm surprised it took this long.

I hear a lot of this sentiment, but from what I see both internally at rh and news publicly available there is nothing to back up what you are saying. The decision seems to have been made by many long-tenured folk. So what if the opposite of what you’re saying is true?

I work with some long-tenured folks and am myself one (at a different open source company) and let me tell you that incentives are not the same as they were two decades ago -- and we've not sold out to fucking IBM.

Redhat people, as good as they may have been in the past, are now IBM people and if they aren't operating like IBM people they will be replaced by people who do.

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

#353

Post by asadotzler »

olddustytrail wrote: post #238
ynx wrote: post #229

> Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own. I feel like this ignores the fact that Linux's continued success is, in large part, a direct consequence of its ability to compete for government contracts by way of Red Hat pursuing compliance and funding development to that effect, in addition to a massive amount of Linux development that Red Hat does di…

No, not really. Ubuntu and Debian are far more prevalent in the datacentre than Redhat. Linux became popular through grass roots deployments and then companies cashed in on that. There seems to be a new narrative that it was the companies that started the ball rolling but it's not so.

The companies absolutely got the ball rolling. Sure, the grass roots started the ball rolling, but that roll was not going to get Linux anywhere without the kinds of investment that Redhat and others brought in the second half of the 90s.

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

#354

Post by asadotzler »

kelnos wrote: post #118
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.

Apparently not.

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

#355

Post by justinclift »

mattl wrote: post #312
justinclift wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, not sure about that. The wording was along the lines of "There are security updates for package XYZ. If you join (maybe its Ubuntu Pro like you mention?) you'd have access to them." That's not really a message that should be showing up on a box running 20.04 LTS, which is years before its EOL date.

Yeah, I saw it too.. we used a precursor to Ubuntu Pro so I'm sure my message was less obnoxious. I think they're also offering patches for some commonly installed third-party stuff like nodejs via Ubuntu Pro. I actually quite like Ubuntu Pro for the fact I can send a developer a laptop and know that there's 24/7 support from Canonical. I was a little dubious at how good they'd be, but they were able to diagnose the…

> I think they're also offering patches for some commonly installed third-party stuff like nodejs via Ubuntu Pro.

Yeah. That rubs me the wrong way. Like, they're clearly entitled to pay developers money for whatever they want.

However, they're paying developers to develop patches they're not sharing back with their upstream in a timely fashion:

1. Without those patches going through the upstream channel(s), there's no real mechanism to push back on patches and aren't good enough (for whatever reason)

2. It feels like they're taking advantage of the rest of the OSS ecosystem that is writing software / developing fixes and providing them in a timely fashion

:/

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

#356

Post by ynx »

olddustytrail wrote: post #238
ynx wrote: post #229

> Also ignore the fact that Red Hat builds their product on top of Linux, which they didn't build and don't own. I feel like this ignores the fact that Linux's continued success is, in large part, a direct consequence of its ability to compete for government contracts by way of Red Hat pursuing compliance and funding development to that effect, in addition to a massive amount of Linux development that Red Hat does di…

No, not really. Ubuntu and Debian are far more prevalent in the datacentre than Redhat. Linux became popular through grass roots deployments and then companies cashed in on that. There seems to be a new narrative that it was the companies that started the ball rolling but it's not so.

Red Hat did way more than "cash in" considering how many open source projects it has created or funded directly or even indirectly by employing a very large number of their maintainers.

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

#357

Post by bonzini »

vetinari wrote: post #295
ndiddy wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CentOS Stream is on a different httpd patch release, it gets the fixes from upstream instead of backporting them. If you have a specific CVE number that you're thinking about, I can check the status internally.

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

#358

Post by bonzini »

type0 wrote: post #336
ptoal wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my position, I don't feel any IBM influence. In fact, if Red Hat were still a publicly traded stock, I believe the shareholders would have had much more influence than IBM is exercising right now. That said, from the outside looking in, I know that a lot of people have a negative view of IBM, and I can understand how they would come to the conclusion that this has something to do with IBM. Fully agree on the "PR…

> I believe the shareholders would have had much more influence than IBM is exercising right now. Well, you answered yourself why it went as it did. Don't you think answering to your shareholders is what keeps the company competitive and on the right course?

Not necessarily. The economic situation has been tough for everyone and maybe the shareholders could have asked for reducing the work done on Fedora or Stream for a short term benefit?

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

#359

Post by bonzini »

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…

According to Red Hat, CentOS Linux should not have been used in production either.

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

#360

Post by bonzini »

bluedino wrote: post #247
CrLf wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do bug-for-bug with RHEL at all? Why not turn Alma and Rocky into stable distributions in their own right? If this pushes RHEL into oblivion, why should anyone care? The Debian ecosystem isn't centered on Ubuntu, it's centered on Debian. Comparisons between the two ecosystems are invalid because of this simple fact. It would be nice to see the "Red Hat" ecosystem recenter around something which isn't a direct sou…

> Why do bug-for-bug with RHEL at all? Why not turn Alma and Rocky into stable distributions in their own right? Because the whole point is for them to be 'compatible'. Many of the users are running software that needs to be on RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/etc or it won't be supported. Sure, there are users who just want a stable OS, but the real point of Rocky/Alma is to have a 100% RHEL-compatible, but free distro.

There are many levels of compatibility. ABI compatibility is perhaps the least stringent, bug compatibility is the most picky.
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