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June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

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Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#181

Post by dralley »

tux1968 wrote: post #171
dralley wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's perfectly fine but it shouldn't be cast as "freeing the source code, unjustly locked down by Red Hat", because it's not.

But that is pretty much exactly the contention of Rocky Linux. Well actually, they don't explicitly accuse Red Hat of unjustly locking down the source code, just that there are now some extra hurdles required to legally obtain it. They do contend, that they are exercising their legal rights as enumerated in the software license that Red Hat agreed to, when it started to use and freely redistribute the work of others.…

What I am saying is that the code is not "locked down" in any meaningful sense, that it is already open source, and therefore that Rocky Linux isn't "freeing" it. I'm not making any statement about their legal rights.

As I commented elsewhere, "RHEL" isn't GPL licensed, the kernel is, and glibc is, and systemd is, etc. Individually.

The sources for all of those packages, individually, are available via CentOS Stream just as they ever were - alongside the sources for packages that aren't GPL licensed, for which there is not actually a legal requirement to distribute sources.

What Red Hat has stopped doing is providing a git repo containing the exact combination of package sources which collectively make up one particular version of RHEL. Instead, all of the sources are still available, but if you want to rebuild the entire distro you need to match up the particular versions with RHEL. And that's exactly what Alma Linux does.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#182

Post by orthoxerox »

dralley wrote: post #113
thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Your analysis seems to be ignoring all of the work required to create and maintain the CentOS Stream / RHEL distribution in the first place, which is substantial. Substantial enough to effectively "close source" RHEL? Red Hat's changes ( https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hats-commitment-open-sour... ) effectively converted RHEL from a fully open source Linux distribution to "source available to paying customers o…

RHEL is not "effectively closed source" by any stretch of the imagination. The sources are available as CentOS Stream -- from which RHEL is built in the first place!! It is true that, in order to put together an exact copy of RHEL, you would need to do a bit of work to figure out exactly what versions RHEL uses, and specifically pick those versions out of CentOS Stream. It isn't as simple as downloading the entire tr…

If you provide GPL software to your customers, you have to provide everything they need to build this exact version yourself, not point them at a repo and tell them to figure it out.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#183

Post by bananskalhalk »

tuna74 wrote: post #156
bluedino wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansys for one https://www.ansys.com/content/dam/it-solutions/platform-supp... Veeam doesn't support CentOS stream or 9, there's been a bunch of things here and there. I notice many are moving to Ubuntu. I had to go through all of our vendors last year, and the nice thing about CentOS was almost everyone supported it. Now there's no 'gold standard'.

It says they support RHEL: "Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.8, 7.9, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 (64-bit)"

If you kept your RHEL 8.x server updated, it would have been on 8.7 for over a year.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#184

Post by __s »

I spent a long time preparing for this because for a managed postgres service there's a hiccup: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes

> in glibc version 2.28, released 2018-08-01, a major update to the locale data has been included, which can potentially affect the data of many users

Migrating to rhel8 was being considered, but since locale changes are inevitable, it made an opportunity to have us pivot to ubuntu

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#185

Post by stonogo »

behnamoh wrote: post #25
klysm wrote: post #10

Long live Debian

Does `apt` handle packages as cleanly as `dnf` and `yum`? Last time I tried `apt`, it would uninstall apps without cleaning after itself.

Nowadays you can just pass --autoremove to `apt purge ` and it will.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#186

Post by tux1968 »

dralley wrote: post #181
tux1968 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is pretty much exactly the contention of Rocky Linux. Well actually, they don't explicitly accuse Red Hat of unjustly locking down the source code, just that there are now some extra hurdles required to legally obtain it. They do contend, that they are exercising their legal rights as enumerated in the software license that Red Hat agreed to, when it started to use and freely redistribute the work of others.…

What I am saying is that the code is not "locked down" in any meaningful sense, that it is already open source, and therefore that Rocky Linux isn't "freeing" it. I'm not making any statement about their legal rights. As I commented elsewhere, "RHEL" isn't GPL licensed, the kernel is, and glibc is, and systemd is, etc. Individually. The sources for all of those packages, individually, are available via CentOS Stream…

Okay, so the source is 100% freely available. And with that source, and nothing else, you are able to regenerate RHEL binaries.

Rocky Linux contends they are not doing anything illegal in the methods used to obtain the source code (ie. legally renting an RHEL VM from any number of providers, and downloading the SRPMS).

Maybe Red Hat wishes this was illegal, but I still haven't heard anyone claim that it is.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#187

Post by chromakode »

dylan604 wrote: post #152
michaelt wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a certain practicality in running the same thing on the server as on your developers' laptops. Ubuntu and Debian are pretty similar, and using Debian gets rid of things like snap, which I'm glad to be rid of - but it adds an extra level of "well it works on my machine" which I'm not glad for. If it's going to be hard to get that special different version of Java to work on the server, it should be hard to ge…

If the headless server has a UI process running that is absolutely wasted resources. Having the same environment for the dev's laptop and the server seems like such a waste of resources. The two things are not the same, so don't try to fit the square peg in the round hole. Whatever these differences are, they should be able to be determined and accounted for in the deployment. To me, we've gotten a bit lazy and a bit…

Ubuntu has a bunch of non-GUI server flavors. It's a common base image for cloud VMs, similar to Debian.

https://ubuntu.com/download/server

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#188

Post by mardifoufs »

op00to wrote: post #89
mardifoufs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest issue is that they pulled the rug on the support window. The last release started out with 10 years of support, but they walked back on that when they announced the end of regular CentOS and reduced it by more than half.

> The last release started out with 10 years of support, but they walked back on that when they announced the end of regular CentOS and reduced it by more than half. I thought that the "10 years of support" which was customary w/ CentOS wasn't applied, but neither Red Hat nor CentOS made specific announcements that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support. People believed that CentOS 8 would have 10 years of support b…

I think you are right. I haven't been able to find any direct EOL date from RH even at launch. It seems like it was mostly people just assuming (for good reasons, but still just assuming) that it had the same EOL.

Though there are some gaps on the Wayback machine that makes it hard to find some centos8 related posts at the time it launched, but I'd be surprised if the eol wouldn't have been announced elsewhere too.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#189

Post by dralley »

tux1968 wrote: post #186
dralley wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am saying is that the code is not "locked down" in any meaningful sense, that it is already open source, and therefore that Rocky Linux isn't "freeing" it. I'm not making any statement about their legal rights. As I commented elsewhere, "RHEL" isn't GPL licensed, the kernel is, and glibc is, and systemd is, etc. Individually. The sources for all of those packages, individually, are available via CentOS Stream…

Okay, so the source is 100% freely available. And with that source, and nothing else, you are able to regenerate RHEL binaries. Rocky Linux contends they are not doing anything illegal in the methods used to obtain the source code (ie. legally renting an RHEL VM from any number of providers, and downloading the SRPMS). Maybe Red Hat wishes this was illegal, but I still haven't heard anyone claim that it is.

I'm not claiming that either, so what's your point. I'm just saying that the way Rocky presents it is mostly marketing. The cleverness is to save themselves effort, not to do something they weren't being allowed to do previously.

Re: June 30th, 2024, will bring the End of Life (EOL) of CentOS Linux (2023)

#190

Post by josephcsible »

heywoodlh wrote: post #87
chasil wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, Alma is following the stream release, which is slightly upstream and less stable than RHEL. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/07/29/0214234/almalinux-... Rocky and SUSE Liberty Linux aim to be bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, which has become more difficult.

> which is slightly upstream and less stable than RHEL As a user who almost exclusively uses rolling release OS-es, is this actually something people care about? CentOS Stream is downstream of Fedora -- and Fedora is a rock solid base. It's not like CentOS Stream is riddled with bugs, broken features, etc.

If you wanted a distro that was similar to but not exactly the same as RHEL, then Fedora itself would be a way better choice. And if you care that it's exactly the same as RHEL, then CentOS Stream doesn't cut it.
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