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Rocky Linux 9.0

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Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#151

Post by freedomben »

legalcorrection wrote: post #59
freedomben wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hat employee, but only speak for myself. I'm also going to speak very frankly. You got it. From the customer side support from them is cheaper than Red Hat's (sometimes much cheaper). From the supplier side, they don't have to bear much (or any) of the cost of development (beyond infra hosting and re-branding), so they can beat Red Hat's price very easily. I personally find that gross and…

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Red Hat can develop a closed-source OS and sue people who copy it, but then no one would use their product. If one of your major selling points is open source, not to mention benefiting from all of the non-RH developed code that is in RHEL, you can't complain about the perfectly predictable consequences of that.

what? are you on the wrong thread?

RH publishes all their sources (including the MIT/BSD/etc ones that they don't have to publish). They're the very opposite of "closed source". I don't know of them suing anybody. And nobody is complaining about people using the code, or about the existence of Rocky or Alma or any other rebuild distros.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#152

Post by legalcorrection »

freedomben wrote: post #151
legalcorrection wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Red Hat can develop a closed-source OS and sue people who copy it, but then no one would use their product. If one of your major selling points is open source, not to mention benefiting from all of the non-RH developed code that is in RHEL, you can't complain about the perfectly predictable consequences of that.

what? are you on the wrong thread? RH publishes all their sources (including the MIT/BSD/etc ones that they don't have to publish). They're the very opposite of "closed source". I don't know of them suing anybody. And nobody is complaining about people using the code, or about the existence of Rocky or Alma or any other rebuild distros.

You are confused. Read my comment again. I’m just saying, if you don’t want people cloning your software and competing with you for support contracts, then don’t make it open source. It’s absurd to make your product open source, use open source as a marketing point, incorporate millions upon millions of lines of other peoples code into your product, and then complain when people do exactly what your open source license gives them the right to do.

And you literally said:

>I personally find that gross and unethical, but that's just my opinion.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#153

Post by groovybits »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #17
bubblethink wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are both new. So, this may be a one time thing due to tooling changes or whatever. Too early to jump to conclusions.

It's been close to 1.5 years. I've been using both since the beginning and can see pretty well how quickly both systems pick up updates. But let's just look at release delays (in days since the official RHEL is shipped): ver Alm Rocky 8.4 8 34 8.5 3 6 8.6 2 6 9.0 9 58 Not seeing any patterns here? One of them is being done by a team that's been shipping another Linux distribution for a decade and has the whole proces…

I don't have exceptional experience with either Alma or Rocky, but I've been administering enterprise Red Hat and CentOS for years.

1.5 years in enterprise time is hardly any time at all. Heck, it takes that time to approve a budget in some enterprises. Yeah, time-to-release is an important metric, but software compatibility and industry support is really the magic sauce.

In my industry, we'll be using current CentOS 7 installs until EOL, and watch all derivatives with interest over the long term - given they provide anything over current RH ecosystem (RHEL, CentOS Stream, Fedora).

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#154

Post by michaelmrose »

freedomben wrote: post #150
michaelmrose wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your notion of ethics is unequivocally and objectively wrong. Red Hat derives massive value up to and including its very existence and every single penny that passes through its hands from participation in the larger open source ecosystem that comes with the obligation to share their work not only with random bob hacker but with people like Rocky Linux, Alma, and even folks like Oracle. You cannot acknowledge that th…

You have set up a terrifically easy strawman to knock down[1]. Nice job. But you are "unequivocally and objectively wrong" about what I think. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

You can't argue a position by linking to a Wikipedia article about a logical fallacy.

It cannot be unethical to rely on a freely given promise that the other side has derived substantial value from.

Red Hat received the entire basis of their business by virtue of their side of that promise they cannot and indeed haven't tried to withhold performance of their obligation in that regard.

Under what ethical theory do you propose that creating downstream distros is unethical? Is it likewise unethical for Ubuntu to exist? If your answer differs why?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#155

Post by bonzini »

linuxftw wrote: post #147
bonzini wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody said it was a community choice. Red Hat's own layered products (OKD, RDO, oVirt) needed to be based on a distribution that leads RHEL rather than one that trails it, and that's why CentOS Stream was born. Dropping CentOS Linux was a completely different thing and one should also acknowledge that there are two very different parts of the CentOS community. Those that simply needed a free RHEL, didn't have any be…

> CentOS world that goes beyond "I need free Linux and I don't/cannot use Debian", and Red Hat has been very receptive to the needs of that world. There really wasn't a CentOS world beyond that, because it wasn't a true community distribution. Red Hat never attempted to meaningful involve the community, all board members or whatever pretend org CentOS has are RH employees. There were never any kind of community elect…

There totally was. Facebook had been running CentOS long before Stream, and had several RPM backports to CentOS 7 on GitHub. And guess what, they love CentOS Stream. The default desktop distros for Facebook developers are Fedora and Stream.

Honestly if all you know about CentOS is "download ISOs and report bugs that with some luck will be forwarded to RH Bugzilla", you don't know anything about the CentOS community.

Again: downloading ISOs doesn't make you part of a community.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#156

Post by gnufx »

stonogo wrote: post #30
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been close to 1.5 years. I've been using both since the beginning and can see pretty well how quickly both systems pick up updates. But let's just look at release delays (in days since the official RHEL is shipped): ver Alm Rocky 8.4 8 34 8.5 3 6 8.6 2 6 9.0 9 58 Not seeing any patterns here? One of them is being done by a team that's been shipping another Linux distribution for a decade and has the whole proces…

It's amusing that you're presenting Alma as the veterans, seeing as how several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place. But you're right, they're both RHEL clones, so it's only worth differentiating based on externalities. Rocky is backed by industry veterans and part of the 9.0 delay was so they could dogfood Peridot. Alma is backed by a web company who spent the majority o…

I wonder what is the issue if the company "borrowed" its own stuff to use in a different context. Alma always looked like the more serious operation and, if nothing else, the company supplying kernelcare might be considered useful, even if it's proprietary, unfortunately.

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#157

Post by gnufx »

CamJN wrote: post #73
awill wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite understand "provisioning and longevity issues, Rocky is winning." As a user of CentOS looking for a replacement, Alma and Rocky should be 100% identical. The _only_ difference is delay after RHEL launches.

Alma is not as RHEL-compatible as rocky, they use subkeys for signing whereas rocky just uses their signing keys. This is enough that I can’t use alma for building my rpm’s using mock.

Well, I can do a mock -r almalinux-8-x86_64 bootstrap build on RHEL7. (I can't remember whether there are currently any problems maintaining for RHEL8 on RHEL7, but it has been impossible to maintain packages for RHEL N+1 on RHEL N in the past. I just moved to a RHEL8 VM rather than prat about with 7 more.)

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#158

Post by gnufx »

justinclift wrote: post #114
Galanwe wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> several founding members of Rocky were responsible for starting CentOS in the first place Hum, that's a subjective view of the history of "CentOS" told by Greg Kurtzer... In practical terms, Greg just helped setup the legal structure around the distribution that Rocky McGough created. In the 20 years history of CentOS, Greg Kurtzer stayed 2 years at the beginning, doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff, then left wh…

> doing mainly PR/legal/community stuff Why are you not considering PR/legal/community stuff as being worthy?

It would frighten me having Kurtzer doing legalities, given his bizarre legal theory on copyright specifically (no longer recorded in the issues of a deleted github repo for me to reference).

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#159

Post by gnufx »

Elv13 wrote: post #109
awill wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this a concern? If Alma and Rocky are essential identical, speed is the only/main differentiator, and it matters. If an urgent vulnerability gets patched in RHEL, and I'm using Rocky or Alma, I want the one that gets patched sooner. Right now, that's Alma.

Would you rather have `.rpm`s build by someone on the command line using `rpmbuild` or `mock` or something built by a CI with proper bootstraping and "nearer" to reproduceable builds. Also, by cutting corners on the CI, you risk introducing mild ABI problems which wont crash, but causes instabilities and potential security vulnerabilities. If they say they needed time to do it properly, I respect that.

I don't know how RHEL packages are built exactly, since I'm not an employee, but mock is what the Fedora infrastructure runs under koji for builds. I don't see how "a CI" can make the process "nearer to reproduceable builds", whatever that means. I'm not aware or serious efforts on reproducible builds for Fedora/EL, in contrast to Debian, though there has been talk of it. You obviously should never use rpmbuild for binary rpms outside a chroot.

The Alma infrastructure appears to be in their github space, though I don't know anything about it. What's wrong with it?

Re: Rocky Linux 9.0

#160

Post by gnufx »

trimir2022 wrote: post #125
silisili wrote: post #115

Not to rain on this parade, but what specifically is the target user for Centos/Rocky these days? I've been a Linux user for more than 20 years. I absolutely saw the value of Mandrake/RedHat/Debian for years. Boring, stable. Got it. Those are important qualities. And Centos gave a free, easy to acquire and use taste of said stability. But today... everything is so different. I run rolling release, have a billion rand…

Supercomputing centers and all the servers are prime candidates, where the hardware and software stack never change for the lifetime of the computer (which is around 7-8 years at least). Do note that what users can use on that, and what system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months. The stability is more for the hardware drivers and things like that, where things are sti…

Supercomputing... Note that Summit changed from RHEL7 to RHEL8 mis-stream. (IBM insisted the system I work on had to do the same on similar hardware because the RHEL 7.9 distribution I could see didn't exist. It allowed more recent CUDA, but that wasn't the rationale.)

I don't know what "system admins use is a completely different stack. Users get an update almost every 3 months" is about. Infiniband is fine, and typically quite up-to-date in RHEL, but you end up having to deal with the Mellanox nightmare, at least for Nvidia GPU support; roll on RoCM. That area is a good demonstration of the practical evil of proprietary software.

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