This confuses me. I feel like we have a good thing going here between Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. If they succeed and kill RHEL profitability are we really better off?
Yes, because everyone else figured it out except Red Hat (IBM)
Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
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Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#22I wonder if this consortium will end up defining "enterprise" Linux in the same way that POSIX forcibly seized the standards for UNIX from the control of AT&T and Sun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
The only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support.
There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear down the monoculture.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
SuSE uses btrfs for the root filesystem, and although this can be quite dangerous if it fills up, it does allow much greater flexibility in rolling back the OS to a working state. It would be interesting if this capability returned to OpenELA. It could be done with rhel7 (and clones). There are likely some users who consider this a must-have.
I can guarantee you that SuSE will only ever support btrfs with their own kernel. There are a ton of fixes backported in theirs. At which point you are running SLES anyway.
Oracle's UEK also has btrfs support, and I use it. It is designed to be installed over rhel.
A further collaboration on an OpenELA btrfs-enabled kernel incorporating both SuSE and Oracle requirements will easily supplant stock rhel.
For one thing, the UEK returns support for a large array of hardware that has been removed from stock. This list is very large.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#24I wonder if this consortium will end up defining "enterprise" Linux in the same way that POSIX forcibly seized the standards for UNIX from the control of AT&T and Sun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
The only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support. There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear down the monoculture.
Rhel does things to their distribution that customers do not want. This is well-known.
Two shining examples are the removal of older SAS controllers in the kernels of newer versions, and the fate of btrfs.
OpenELA could easily grow in influence to a point where rhel will lose customers if they try it again.
It will be interesting if such decisions push effective control of rhel to OpenELA. It could easily happen.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Or are they just planning to ship Redhat verbatim and never make their own stuff?" That is their stated mission.
Anybody can do that with open source as long as they make the source code available. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Source code is free and open.
Did you miss the discussion about RHEL source code being kind of hidden?
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody can do that with open source as long as they make the source code available. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Source code is free and open.
Did you miss the discussion about RHEL source code being kind of hidden?
It's not "kind of hidden"
Redhat (and IBM) are choosing who to release their source code to, and if they don't like you they won't give it to you. Richard Stallman (rms) ain't dead yet.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#27I wonder if this consortium will end up defining "enterprise" Linux in the same way that POSIX forcibly seized the standards for UNIX from the control of AT&T and Sun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
The only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support. There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear down the monoculture.
It's enterprise in that you pay for it, but their support sucks. We had lots of open tickets they never solved. Total waste of money. Instead of fixing the problems they went back and forth with us asking for more log files until they just closed out the ticket because of lack of activity. It was their lack of activity.
At least Canonical/Ubuntu enterprise support stumbles into a solution and helps out.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#28This confuses me. I feel like we have a good thing going here between Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. If they succeed and kill RHEL profitability are we really better off?
But that's the thing, there is no good thing going. CentOS used to be a community rebuild of RHEL, and you could then use that if you didn't want support from Red Hat. But that is no longer the case since Red Hat killed that. CentOS is now more like a beta version of RHEL and not a binary compatible build. At the same time, patches are made for RHEL that are kept secret and not published for CentOS.
And all of this is extra bad since those masses of CentOS installs exist because people don't really want to deal with Red Hat, but some other vendor just happened to not test their application on another distro, and corporate policies then don't allow you to run it on a non-binary-compatible system.
If there would be different packages, i.e. just an OCI image or a single statically linked program, or perhaps a vended virtual machine image, none of this OS vendor BS would exist. You would be able to run wherever you want to run, on whatever you want to run it. And some people and companies would still choose Red Hat, but anyone who has used anything else would probably not.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#29This confuses me. I feel like we have a good thing going here between Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. If they succeed and kill RHEL profitability are we really better off?
In a world where redhat is still an independent company, this would be horrible. In a world where they’re owned by IBM who is just barely better at “extracting maximum licensing value” than Broadcom and qualcom this isn’t just a good thing, it’s a necessary thing.
They will go full throttle boiling the frog if left to their own devices and every company who has done business with them knows it.
Re: Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
#30it's 3000 repositories - one per package- all containing just a spec file and some patches. How is this remotely maintainable? Is this also how redhat upstream works? (I'm coming from nixpkgs where everything is in one mono-repo; which is great for cross-cutting concerns) How do you make cross-operating system changes? Or are they just planning to ship Redhat verbatim and never make their own stuff?
RHEL for each package has both a source-git and dist-git. The dist-git is used to build the package and for the src-git it can be a link to a tag to the upstream + some patches in the dist-git. Check the spec file. These look like copies of dist-gits.
The kernel is unique because RHEL forks the kernel and backports things while keeping a stable interface for testing and people to build upon (you won't see the removal of some drivers 6 years into the RHEL life cycle because upstream removed them).
Strange, I do not see a kernel or linux package.