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Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

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Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#221

Post by Spivak »

gvb wrote: post #204
electrotype wrote: post #163

Someone care to explain why did CentOS switch from downstream to upstream builds? I guess there is a reason.

Money. RHEL requires expensive licenses. CentOS was RHEL without the RedHat branding and without the expensive licensing. By design, there was a nearly complete overlap between RHEL and CentOS. By "repurposing" CentOS into a "rolling release", RedHat (IBM) has broken the overlap so CentOS (free licensing) no longer competes directly against RHEL (expensive licensing).

This is so misinformed it's funny. CentOS and RHEL will now be down to the compiler flags compatible since RHEL minor releases will now just be point-in-time forks of CentOS with security fixes and backports from, you guessed it, CentOS.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#222

Post by soperj »

em500 wrote: post #190
hnarn wrote: post #124

The fact that a majority of the comments are whining about the name really shows you the worst part about open source: the non-contributing but highly entitled part of the community. If you don’t like the name, launch your own CentOS replacement. There’s no better time than now. If there’s one thing this project does not need right now, it’s armchair marketing experts. If you do care about a viable CentOS replacement…

I share your disappointment. Out of 150+ comments so far, I believe there has not been a single technical comment about the actual work involved in building a version-pinned RHEL clone. Without any experience myself (beyond some kernel build maybe 10 years ago), I gathered (from https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8 ) that the majority of work involves manually de-branding the RHEL sources. This apparently can't b…

>1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/, but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones?

How'd they used to do it then? I assume they just became a subscriber?

Edit: just thought about it, couldn't they get them from CentOS? Would be pretty funny.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#223

Post by mkovach »

hnarn wrote: post #124

The fact that a majority of the comments are whining about the name really shows you the worst part about open source: the non-contributing but highly entitled part of the community. If you don’t like the name, launch your own CentOS replacement. There’s no better time than now. If there’s one thing this project does not need right now, it’s armchair marketing experts. If you do care about a viable CentOS replacement…

Don't know if it has been mentioned, but the name Rocky is from Rocky McGaugh, co-founder of CentOS. He passed away and they named the new effort after him.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#224

Post by niea_11 »

bayindirh wrote: post #211
kondbg wrote: post #179

Devil's advocate: why should I choose this yet-to-exist distribution over something already existing, such as Oracle Linux? The most common argument (Oracle is evil and litigious. Therefore, using Oracle Linux will result in me being sued) honestly seems like FUD. All RHEL downstream distributions rebuild the same SRPMs that RHEL provides. Doing a quick comparison over some common packages (kernel, httpd, openssl, et…

> Devil's advocate: why should I choose this yet-to-exist distribution over something already existing, such as Oracle Linux? Because there's a whole ecosystem (HPC and Scientific computing to be exact) which depends on CentOS (not RHEL, not Oracle, not Ubuntu, not Debian) primarily. A CentOS compatible distribution is not some FOSS pride thing. IBM and RH really blew a sucker punch in this regard.

When you say that they depend on CentOS, are they using something CentOS-specific. Centos is supposed to be compatible with RHEL (minus the logos/trademarks) and shouldn't have additional fixes or features. ("bug for bug, feature for feature" <= centos wording :)). No?

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#225

Post by igotroot »

Looking forward to give this a spin at home to see if it'll be the future of non-RH based linux servers, although it'll take a long time before people are willing to throw it in prod like they do with CentOS. No way to change that except time.

Also it's interesting that some people defined Rocky as being 'unstable' when others read it as being 'solid as a rock'.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#226

Post by ernst_klim »

mmrezaie wrote: post #3

I am really interested to know why should anyone go with this when Debian or Ubuntu LTS exist. The two later have not changed their policies in the last decade, and they have a clear path for upgrading. CentOS was always a clear choice for device drivers support, but I never understood the stability claims.

> when Debian or Ubuntu LTS exist

I'm not familiar with Debian, do they have same infrastructure and documentation quality as RHEL? For example do they have anything like Koji [1] for easy automated package building?

[1] https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#227

Post by duxup »

mumblemumble wrote: post #162
duxup wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It maybe shouldn't but it always amazes me by how much developers (assuming that is who they are) will subject other developers to the same bikeshedding and minutia type hassles ... that suck for everyone. It's all grounded human nature I'm sure, but man it is terrible. We all are frustrated by that behavior ourselves, why do it to other people?

It's even more fundamental than human nature. Bikeshedding is better understood as an emergent behavior of groups of people than it is a thing that individuals do. Bikeshedding-type comments come to dominate conversations because they take less time and effort to compose and express, and therefore tend to get in ahead of and (especially in a synchronous communication medium) crowd out more substantive contributions.…

Yeah the effort issue is huge.

I was reading some discussion where someone was writing some part of a website for a product. They chose a framework and the whole thing was spammed with 'why does it have to be x' type contributions. No help, no technical discussion, just these empty one off sentiments spewed at the person who has to actually do the thing. It was just sad.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#228

Post by em500 »

soperj wrote: post #222
em500 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share your disappointment. Out of 150+ comments so far, I believe there has not been a single technical comment about the actual work involved in building a version-pinned RHEL clone. Without any experience myself (beyond some kernel build maybe 10 years ago), I gathered (from https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8 ) that the majority of work involves manually de-branding the RHEL sources. This apparently can't b…

>1. Where do the upstream RHEL sources live? CentOS sources are in https://vault.centos.org/8.3.2011/BaseOS/Source/SPackages/ , but where do they get them upstream? I believe they're only available to RHEL subscribers, does this give RH a way to block clones? How'd they used to do it then? I assume they just became a subscriber? Edit: just thought about it, couldn't they get them from CentOS? Would be pretty funny.

From what I understand[1], up to RHEL6, Red Hat released their sources on public ftp, but after that they became customer/subscriber-only.

I would have thought that the GPL ensures that the customer can then freely redistribute them, but I've read that companies can still make that option very unattractive through other means (e.g. terminating the customer contract, mingling sources with proprietary stuff and making them hard to disentangle). I don't know if RH is playing such games, but the complete lack of non-gated RHEL7 and 8 source code on the web gives some strong hints.

edit: relevant thread: https://github.com/rocky-linux/rocky/issues/4

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/603865/

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#229

Post by area51org »

mmrezaie wrote: post #3

I am really interested to know why should anyone go with this when Debian or Ubuntu LTS exist. The two later have not changed their policies in the last decade, and they have a clear path for upgrading. CentOS was always a clear choice for device drivers support, but I never understood the stability claims.

Debian/Ubuntu are great. However, there are people and companies that prefer the Red Hat way. That's also great.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#230

Post by Fnoord »

wwright wrote: post #159
nertzy wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty funny that anyone would complain about a Linux distribution being named after a developer’s given name. I mean, it’s Linux .

Debian also did this.

Irony being they (Ian and Deborah) split up, Ian quit Debian and worked for Sun (arguably a competitor back then), Docker, ..., and unfortunately committed suicide.

The good news? Debian's still going strong.

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