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SUSE is forking RHEL

suse.com

21–30 of 307 posts

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#21

1. If SUSE wants to preserve choice, it should offer a systemd-free distribution. 2. Agree with silisili's bafflement at how corporations are sticking to RHEL.

They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution.

Fuck it, let's make a cpu-free distribution whilst we're at it.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#22
> Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said,

According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat.

I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#23
post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

The time (some years back now, it was a 5.10 patch and a 5.8 rpm) they mis-backported a perl patch to work around a bug in a deprecated CPAN module for one of their enterprise customers and in the process caused a 2x-30x slowdown of lots of other newer code (including the library that had replaced it in the majority of production environments by that point) was 'fun'.

Took me a couple years to get together a coalition of commercial support customers to apply sufficient pressure that they'd listen when I got the original author of the patch to break out the small words and crayon drawings and explain what they'd done wrong and how to backport it properly.

Happily, they now generally snapshot Fedora's perl builds pretty directly and the current Fedora team have been fantastic to work with as a downstream but it was a spectacular mess at the time and there are plenty of people out there who still haven't forgiven them (I think I try to act -as if- I've forgiven them but I'm not sure I actually have).

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#24
post #10
post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

"Nobody ever got fired for buying CentOS". Till recently. In terms of actual , material benefits I believe it's simply because transitive "certifications" (hardware, support, continuity, ...) that are implied by Red Hat's corporate presence.

To add to this from personal experience; we sell proprietary software that runs on multiple platforms. Our market is broadcasters, CDNs, telcos, media companies.

We target Ubuntu and Alpine, but also ship CentOS/Rocky/RHEL/Oracle/Alma and Windows. Even though customers rarely ask for the latter targets, we need to offer those simply because we wouldn't be taken seriously if this major market segment were absent on our website.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#25
post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

> I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day.

Because RHEL, and subsequently it's clones, are a really good server OS. You get updates for 10 years, Red Hat or it's employees maintain a large chunk of the generic-Linux stack, large software support, Cockpit, more modern features when compared to the Debian version at the same time (e.g. dracut, firewalld, systemd, NetworkManager, Podman etc).

Then when you want commercial support, converting to RHEL (or vice versa) it's painless and quick.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#26
post #9
post #5

I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?

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…

Many thanks!

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#27
post #23
post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

The time (some years back now, it was a 5.10 patch and a 5.8 rpm) they mis-backported a perl patch to work around a bug in a deprecated CPAN module for one of their enterprise customers and in the process caused a 2x-30x slowdown of lots of other newer code (including the library that had replaced it in the majority of production environments by that point) was 'fun'. Took me a couple years to get together a coalitio…

To be honest it's a pretty good track record if you can only remember one instance of botching a backport, it's many years old, and it didn't have any security impact unlike Debian's ssh key generation.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#28

1. If SUSE wants to preserve choice, it should offer a systemd-free distribution. 2. Agree with silisili's bafflement at how corporations are sticking to RHEL.

They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. Fuck it, let's make a cpu-free distribution whilst we're at it.

So sick of CPUs in Linux distros, the feature creep is insane!

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#29
post #26
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…

Many thanks!

Note that the last paragraph is a supposition that is not rooted in reality. Red Hat is still doing upstream first development and is still mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision).

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#30
post #9
post #5

I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?

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…

> and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back

Yet when commercial entities take code and don't contribute back, it is “just how things work”.

While I appreciate that RedHat has been a good player overall compared to many others, this comes across as the kid at school happy to throw icy snowballs at everyone else moaning because they got hit by return fire. How unfair of the open source world using open source licenses the same way the commercial world does.

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