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SUSE is forking RHEL

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171–180 of 307 posts

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#171
It is announced last year [1] called SUSE Liberty Linux . I think priciple converting current RHEL/CentOS repository to own inhouse repository like Oracle did [2] or MS did [3], and get the money from providing subscription for support and security.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699 2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linu... 3. https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#172
post #163

> This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today. Wow, that's pretty rich from a company that has made good money from vendor lock-in. I'm still bitter when they drastically increased our SLES-prices for academic institutions, that was probably around 2010/11, an…

While I agree with you, you do realize that in 12+ years probably 95% of the personnel in the company, including the CEO, have been replaced? :-)

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#173
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat announced that they are no longer providing updates to the downstream repo at git.centos.org and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back, essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code". To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the…

> essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code". I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro. Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream. On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats mov…

> Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.

no, this is not the issue. The issue is that there is a megacorporation behind Red Hat which claimed they wouldn't affect any RH decisions and RH would be the good ol' Red Hat we always knew. And they have shown this to be false.

As you said it yourself, Red Hat has a legacy of contributing to open source and this recent move to somehow paywall access to the updated git repo is literally going against their own legacy.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is there evidence that rhel is more stable than debian? Well, yes Debian versions are supported for 3 years, RHEL for 10+. "Stability" means changes, not crashes (although they can be caused by changes). A piece of software compiled 10 years ago will still run today and the systems can continue to get security updates, without needing to change the rug.

> Well, yes Debian versions are supported for 3 years, RHEL for 10+. if upgrade path is easy and stable, it is obviously more sustainable to upgrade versions every N years, compared to situation when you got 10yo EOL infra far behind mainline with no clear way to support it in the future.

> it is obviously more sustainable to upgrade versions every N years

I've heard this kind of thing before, but it's worth considering that utility, government, and infrastructure software may be under different kinds of constraints than what you're used to.

Testing field upgrades takes years and the rollout often takes a year or more. There are hundreds of different teams involved and every one of them wants to ensure they don't miss the thing that bricks a submarine, satellite, transmission line, or IRS portal. If you can do this half or a quarter as often you can save taxpayers tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

And in a surprising number of cases the software is never upgraded for the ~25 year or so lifetime of the hardware because the cost of the upgrade is comparable to the cost of buying new hardware. Sometimes that means some poor development team backports security patches for antique versions of DOS or Unix, but in more cases than you'd think they just airgap the computers and hope for the best.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#175
post #172
post #163

> This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today. Wow, that's pretty rich from a company that has made good money from vendor lock-in. I'm still bitter when they drastically increased our SLES-prices for academic institutions, that was probably around 2010/11, an…

While I agree with you, you do realize that in 12+ years probably 95% of the personnel in the company, including the CEO, have been replaced? :-)

Of course, but the business model has not.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, part of the reason Linux documentation often isn't very good is that Red Hat doesn't treat documentation work as something that should be submitted upstream. Their incentives favour creating Red-Hat-specific documentation, and this then reduces their users' incentive to improve upstream documentation.

There is a difference between package documentation and system documentation. Red Hat contributes package documentation upstream, but system documentation is by its nature distro-dependent. Red Hat has contributed work that made distros more homogeneous ( cough systemd cough ) and excellent package documentation for that work; but also got flak for that...

They also have soooo many good articles (which are helpful not just to RHEL) behind a subscription wall. If you do a lot of work in the rpm ecosystem, they're like the Experts Exchange of Google search, with how many times you see an exact bug report, then you get to the page with a tease of your exact answer, but it fades into the login required bit.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that was the intended meaning, it's quite an extrapolation that Red Hat is "growing hostile towards open source as a whole", especially since people say that of Red Hat roughly every two years.

They abandoned CentOS, created CentOS Stream which has its own set of issues, mostly you need to send an email to the actual package maintainer to remind them to update the package. And now the package sources are held behind a subscription portal. This is being hostile towards open source. And as someone else pointed out, the reason we're mad at Red Hat is because they were built because of the open source community…

No, that's not being hostile towards open source. It's being indifferent towards people who want all your beer to be free.

Red Hat is contributing upstream of RHEL in three different ways (actual upstream, Fedora, CentOS Stream). Asking for even more is nothing but entitlement.

> there is a correlation here and it's not just a coincidence.

There is obviously a time correlation, but whether it's a coincidence or not you cannot know.

And the correlation becomes a lot more murky if you consider that Red Hae was allegedly causing lock-in or being hostile towards open source when Lennart started systemd (and for multiple other episodes in the systemd saga), when they stopped distributing the broken out patches of the RHEL kernel, when they acqui-hired CentOS, etc. And also people gave Red Hat 3 years of life when IBM announced the acquisition. Perhaps y'all need to tune your crystal ball...

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. A ton of proprietary software (like anything from IBM) supports only RHEL or SLES. If you open a support ticket and say "Hi I'm using Debian/Arch/Nix" they will just laugh and close the ticket.

How about Ubuntu?

For big enterprise software I'm around no Ubuntu is supported.

SAP: https://community.sap.com/topics/linux/supported-platforms

PeopleSoft/Oracle RDBMS: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/1...

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#180
I've always had a fondness for SuSE. My first experience with Linux was a boxed set of SuSE 7.3 (released in 2001 with Kernel 2.4!) purchased at a Borders book store in Glendale, CA. My dad taught me how to quit vim, use make to install software, etc.

I haven't used it since then - Debian convert thru and thru - but I keep meaning to take Tumbleweed for a spin as I hear great things about it.

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