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What is RHEL compatibility so important and why is it always such a hot topic?
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>Lawyers are not going to look at this coordinated attempt to subvert a EULA and say "oh well, nothing we can do here". Once you get lawyers involved, you lose a lot of goodwill. At that point, who can tell RH apart from Oracle?
Indeed, who can? RH is still leading and sponsoring a lot of Linux development — that's the goodwill part. But maaaann, for quite a while RHEL has not been a very welcoming and inviting distro (unless you're the one checking the boxes on the corporate procurement form).
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There was time today's big distros were small and they mostly took from community, packaged it and sold support for it. Rocky is small now so needs to take more from community. If it becomes big later it can also contribute back. That's one of the benefits of open source. It helps small guys to get started and make it big. Once they become big, they can contribute back.
But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.
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No it's mostly from people with a commercial interest. I can't take Rocky seriously when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle.
> when they are selling support for a thing they don't make, but demand it's readily provided for free and no hassle So just like RedHat and IBM?
What is Redhat demanding for free? They spend more than anyone else on developers for all of the Linux stack.
I originally had a strong anti-RedHat response to this change. When I thought about it and heard RH's response their sharp change makes sense. They sell RHEL. It's from what I gather their main source of income. Revenue from this funds things like SystemD, a lot of work in Gnome, many many things that RHEL customers and other users of Linux and desktop Linux benefit from. Of course many contributions to open source/G…
How did they survive and thrive for 25+ years then? Rebuilders have always existed. They've just dialled the "greed" knob a bit higher, that's all.
Nowadays one could probably lean on staff to manage issues and arbitrage that go-it-alone mindset over paying the RH subscription. Now that loop-hole is closed.
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But that's the thing, Rocky simply can't grow in that way, because they're not trying to do their own thing, they just aim for bug-for-bug compatibility. They are not pushing out new code and helping advance the ecosystem.
But that's a large part of the appeal. "Binary compatible with RHEL" sells Rocky, not "another Linux".
Red Hat has benefited from previous contributors, but then added a ton of open source work of their own.
RH are open source contributors; Rocky Linux are mere users.
What is RHEL compatibility so important and why is it always such a hot topic?
Not RHEL compatibility, because that's what Stream also has, the bug-for-bug similar behaviour is wanted when you have RHEL servers but test on Centos without having to bother with licenses or terms.
I originally had a strong anti-RedHat response to this change. When I thought about it and heard RH's response their sharp change makes sense. They sell RHEL. It's from what I gather their main source of income. Revenue from this funds things like SystemD, a lot of work in Gnome, many many things that RHEL customers and other users of Linux and desktop Linux benefit from. Of course many contributions to open source/G…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, who can? RH is still leading and sponsoring a lot of Linux development — that's the goodwill part. But maaaann, for quite a while RHEL has not been a very welcoming and inviting distro (unless you're the one checking the boxes on the corporate procurement form).
What could be done to improve it (while keeping in mind that Red Hat needs $$$ to continue development)?
Customers may want to pay for training and consultancy, managed hosting, hardware, feature development, hand holding, insurance, productizing, etc. This is the business that RedHat is in, but so are MontaVista, AWS, vmware, Google, to name a few sponsors of Rocky. If everyone agrees to upstream a fair amount of their revenue, there should be plenty for RedHat to contribute into various projects.
Sure will be a bit of hassle to negotiate a fair price. But so far, these companies appear happy with the quote they pay Rocky, whereas the RedHat deal (per seat/per core/per instance/whatever) clearly is not. If RedHat had been more open to that kind of a deal with CentOS (8), there would probably never have been a Rocky Linux.
So yes, there is always the free loaders issue, but mostly people and businesses are open to sponsoring organizations that have a lot of goodwill.
> Moreover, Red Hat’s Terms of Service (TOS) and End User License Agreements (EULA) impose conditions that attempt to hinder legitimate customers from exercising their rights as guaranteed by the GPL. Does someone have more details on this?
I wrote this a couple days ago, sums it up: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/gplv2-red-hat-and-you tl;dr - GPLv2 requires no restriction on free/paid recipients of binaries to also freely redistribute source code. Red Hat EULA says your subscription will be canceled if you redistribute the source code. Is that a restriction? A couple OSS laywers I spoke to said no. Common sense says it feels an awful lot like i…