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SUSE is forking RHEL

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Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#221

Post by blcknight »

high_5 wrote: post #214

This is just a weak PR statement. Alma and Rocky already revealed that these things are not trivial to maintain and I fail to see beyond pure fork how on earth would SUSE maintain RHEL compatibility and avoid litigation from IBM at the same time. And then SUSE might be sold off again to some predatory company similar to IBM. What's even the point then of not using pure community distros like Debian?

Red Hatter here, but just my personal opinion. I don't think there would be any litigation. We can terminate accounts for people downloading SRPM's to redistribute them but we can't stop the redistribution itself. There is nothing illegal about making a RHEL clone minus our trademarks.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#222

Post by weare138 »

I had a feeling SUSE would smell blood in the water when Red Hat shot itself in the foot. I don't know what Red Hat was thinking. They grievously misread their position in the market and are far more vulnerable than they seem to have realized.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#224

Post by bonzini »

xinayder wrote: post #218
bonzini wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

> Red Hat is contributing upstream of RHEL in three different ways (actual upstream, Fedora, CentOS Stream). Asking for even more is nothing but entitlement. I heard that a lot of RHEL packages are actually built from Fedora repos, which are maintained by voluntary contributors. Did Red Hat ask those maintainers if they are okay with providing the source for their RPMs behind a paywall? They didn't, and some Fedora m…

> I heard that a lot of RHEL packages are actually built from Fedora repos, which are maintained by voluntary contributors

Most RHEL packages are at least co-maintained by paid Red Hat employees. Bring numbers please.

> is now giving a huge middle finger to that same community that made them what they are today

Oh, give me a break. Stop hiding behind open source and just admit that you want the free beer. You want all the beer to be free more precisely. While Red Hat is not only contributing a lot back to the community, probably more than any other company in existence, it's giving away not one but two distros.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#225

Post by jzb »

krylon wrote: post #207
jzb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they used the RPM format with their own tool (Zypper instead of DNF/Yum), but packages weren’t (necessarily) compatible with Fedora/RHEL as far as dependencies and such. But SUSE isn’t just a package of Red Hat.

I have seen independent projects provide rpms that are supposed to work on both RedHat/Fedora and SLES/openSUSE, with some caveats as to what versions of each are supported/tested for.

Sure. Really depends on, well, the dependencies. The rpm command shipped with all those distributions should be compatible with the format of any recently created package.

But you can run into snags if you have a dependency that doesn't exist on the target system or its repos, or if the packages are named differently, the pre- and post-install commands have assumptions about the system that aren't true on the target distro, etc.

But if all the package exists for is to drop a few binaries on the system, it can be fine. Especially for things like proprietary software that's going to just dump a bunch of stuff into, say, /opt and will only break if the kernel or glibc are spectacularly old or too new, etc.

Sometimes you can even get away with using "alien" or similar to convert Debs to RPMs if it's only packaged as a Debian package. Sometimes.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#226

Post by donkeyd »

asoneth wrote: post #174
riku_iki wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ensur…

> worth considering that utility, government, and infrastructure software may be under different kinds of constraints than what you're used to.

I worked on a government project where new software was being built on COBOL because they had those devs available. No commercial company in their right mind would build any new applications in COBOL, but government is a different animal.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#227

Post by aeyes »

themerone wrote: post #195
SSLy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling is that most engineers outside of Germany prefer RHEL to SLES.

My feeling is most engineers prefer Debian. It's managers that tend to prefer corporate solutions.

As an engineer I don't care. In my career I have worked on SunOS, SLES, Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS, Alpine and probably more.

I prefer something that is kept reasonably up to date so that I don't have to fight ancient long-fixed issues or missing features. But I really don't care, if it pays the bills I'll use it.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#229

Post by SoftTalker »

rjzzleep wrote: post #198
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprises don't care what distro they use, and SuSE knows that. Enterprises care about the reputation of their professional services provider. RHEL is increasingly seen as threatening its own place in the market, and enterprises want to be sure their multi million dollar investments will be stable over the long term. Paying SuSE for support makes sense if you believe they will support you better over the long term…

From what I've seen big enterprises have thousands of RHEL or SLES licenses and the whole thing is managed by one guy who can hardly migrate from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 because of the huge backlog of work he has. For the average enterprise switching from SLES to SUSE RHEL means that update will happen in 5-7 years

Had to laugh at that, as I still have a good deal of RHEL/CentOS 7 and I'm the "one guy" managing these systems.

I've been migrating to Ubuntu or retiring systems for the last two years and still not done. Hoping to be rid of RHEL 7 before updates stop.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#230

Post by aeyes »

evasb wrote: post #152

Isn't SUSE devaluing their own distro in entering this RHEL-clone debacle?

SUSE makes money by selling enterprise support. They don't care what they support, they have sold support for RHEL for a very long time.

The SUSE distro exists so that they can sell support for it. And it will be the same for the SUSE supported RHEL clone.

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