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CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

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Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#151

Post by LaSombra »

anyoneamous wrote: post #146
bonzini wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't pay for the support requests, you pay for the work of letting you update to the next minor release at your own pace, having those updates be rock solid, and having security fixes even on older releases. In other words you pay for not having to open support requests.

When a free alternative (CentOS, Rocky) exists, you can get those benefits without the cost. The only real differentiator RH has is support. Being an open source company means that RH has a non-standard business model and should expect non-standard profits. Their business model is inevitably doomed, but rather than innovating they are going with the "lock-in and gouge" model, exactly like Oracle.

Those benefits that CentOS, Rocky offer, as you said, are without cost because the cost is shouldered by Red Hat. If you're a 1:1 rebuild, you can't introduce your own fixes, so CentOS, Rocky rely on Red Hat to write and produce a fix that will then be rebuilt "free of charge" as you mention.

How is that lock-in from Red Hat's part?

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#152

Post by anyoneamous »

bonzini wrote: post #150
anyoneamous wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a free alternative (CentOS, Rocky) exists, you can get those benefits without the cost. The only real differentiator RH has is support. Being an open source company means that RH has a non-standard business model and should expect non-standard profits. Their business model is inevitably doomed, but rather than innovating they are going with the "lock-in and gouge" model, exactly like Oracle.

No, CentOS/Alma/Rocky only supports one minor release at a time (that's up to four major releases for a 10 year lifetime). You can stick to a major release but you have to update every 6 months or you'll skip the security updates too. Red Hat supports 15-ish release streams at this time between RHEL7, RHEL8 and RHEL9. A lot of customers need that because validating a base system update takes months and they cannot af…

The subtlety of different support levels for minor releases is something I hadn't come across before, thanks. I'm surprised RH haven't made more of that recently.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#153

Post by bonzini »

anyoneamous wrote: post #152
bonzini wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, CentOS/Alma/Rocky only supports one minor release at a time (that's up to four major releases for a 10 year lifetime). You can stick to a major release but you have to update every 6 months or you'll skip the security updates too. Red Hat supports 15-ish release streams at this time between RHEL7, RHEL8 and RHEL9. A lot of customers need that because validating a base system update takes months and they cannot af…

The subtlety of different support levels for minor releases is something I hadn't come across before, thanks. I'm surprised RH haven't made more of that recently.

In fact the recent change basically consisted of going from 1 to 0 shipped stable branches (CentOS Stream is the mainline of RHEL). But most of those stable branches have never been public in the first place.

In my opinion 99% of end users would be served well by CentOS Stream, but the strong marketing of bug-for-bug compatible distros on part of Rocky (and to be honest it's a fig leaf to pretend CIQ is not behind that) hampered the adoption of CentOS Stream and the users' perception of its stability.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#155

Post by lproven »

lemper wrote: post #132
mulmen wrote: post #12

I am SUSE-curious after all the drama and lost trust with RedHat and IBM but any partnership with Oracle makes me uncomfortable.

to be actually honest and without any speck of trolling, I am at the opposite. I am actually planning to build a workstation and get a redhat enterprise workstation license. the only problem, though, they only have annual subscription. what I want is: one off license (just like windows desktop) and supporting a business entity's ongoing effort to curate and improve Linux ecosystem. why not donating a certain amount o…

Leaving aside any question of "why?", you miss the core point here.

> they only have annual subscription

You are not buying the software. You cannot buy the software. All you can buy is a support subscription. That is what RH sells, not software.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#156

Post by lproven »

Espionage724 wrote: post #43

Why would anyone use a server OS that's a fork of another server OS, provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros? I'm sure there's a reason for it with all the discussions, but if I want to use CentOS, why wouldn't I just use CentOS Stream that RH is providing? If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. If I want to see the future of RHEL, there's Fedora Server. And i…

> provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros

Only SUSE has its own distro, or rather, whole family of them: SLE, openSUSE Leap, and openSUSE Tumbleweed.

The others are rebuilds of CentOS Linux source.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#157

Post by lproven »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #44

I like this solution way much better. Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux. Maybe it's not too late to make a U-turn and join this new group so that Redhat alone can be responsible for contributing to RHEL as intended.

> Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux.

Just FWIW I can point to a dozen other CentOS Linux rebuilds, at least one backed by Huawei and another backed by HPE.

So no, this is badly wrong.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#158

Post by lproven »

zzzoom wrote: post #105
pygar wrote: post #86

Probably a dumb question, as I'm not really on the enterprise side of Linux but: Isn't Canonical in the same business as Red Hat? Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"? Come to think of it, why is SUSE considered as a serious replacement for RHEL and not Ubuntu?

> Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"? Ubuntu is downstream from Debian. They get a lot of packaging for free.

Um. They get a lot, but packaging is not part of it.

I don't think I know a single package in Ubuntu that is a Debian package. That is what Ubuntu _does_ -- it takes Debian, repackages and tests and integrates it.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#159

Post by lproven »

davidw wrote: post #20

Hrm. Just going to keep sticking with Debian and Ubuntu like I've been doing since ... wow, 1997.

The first version of Ubuntu was 4.10 "Warty Warthog" in October 2004.

I used Warty myself. But while Debian was around in 1997, Ubuntu was not.

Re: CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

#160

Post by lproven »

BossingAround wrote: post #134
pxc wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably YAST¹ and the Open Build Service². I think the latter is especially great. There's a public instance of it hosted by openSUSE³, and you can use it to build packages for almost any distro and get a feel for it. -- 1: https://yast.opensuse.org/documentation 2: https://openbuildservice.org/ 3: https://build.opensuse.org/

As far as open build service, Fedora has https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/

You seem keen to promote this, as you posted the same reply twice.

It's not the same thing at all, or even very comparable, AFAICS.

Your site produces a Fedora COPR. One of the people on the COPR team spent 10 min trying to explain to me what COPR meant at a Flock conference a few years ago. The actual answer is:

"It's a PPA but for Fedora instead of Ubuntu."

SUSE OBS does not build repos and it does not build openSUSE packages. I am running native Debian packages on Ubuntu right now built on OBS (Waterfox, notably.)

OSB builds anything for any OS. It's basically a free public CI/CD server, and it's platform-neutral.

I have not checked but I believe it can also build Windows and macOS binaries as well.

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