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SUSE is forking RHEL

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Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#251

Post by ROTMetro »

blcknight wrote: post #221
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.

Correction, you're legal team thinks you can terminate accounts that choose to exercise their rights. That theory has yet to be put to an actual legal challenge. Will be interesting to see the ultimate outcome.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#252

Post by ZeroSolstice »

znpy wrote: post #12
silisili wrote: 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…

[flagged]

So if stability is a strict requirement why are you dependent on an OS that you have no contractual obligation with? I mean if the community OS model was working for the CentOS team why go under the RedHat umbrella? My guess is going to be people demanding enterprise support without enterprise licensing costs[1].

"In 2014, the CentOS development team still had a distribution with far more marketshare than resources."

[1]https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/12/centos-shifts-from-r...

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#253

Post by Thetawaves »

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

You struck a nerve on this one ;)

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#255

Post by ZeroSolstice »

coldtea wrote: post #67
silisili wrote: 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 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. Why, did dependability and enteprise long term stability needs go out of fashion?

How exactly is the dependability and stability determined? By back-porting you are already changing the original version of software. What then becomes the difference at that point verse tracking the actual project version? Assuming both go through regular testing.

It seems more straight forward to be able to look at a change log from the application, lets say httpd, then to go search for cherry picked back-porting changes.

https://downloads.apache.org/httpd/CHANGES_2.4

verse

https://centos.pkgs.org/7/centos-updates-x86_64/httpd-2.4.6-...

I just picked httpd since its a common application and as far as I can tell all the updates are minor release numbers. If you have another example that would be useful to see for consideration as I'm genuinely curious which applications change so much that people are dependent upon back-porting for stability.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#256

Post by SSLy »

zvmaz wrote: post #51
imiric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat offers corporate support contracts, while other distros have community or consultant support at best. This is attractive to executive managers in corporations, as they can be seen as investing into a mature technology, and the systems are contractually guaranteed to keep running by a 3rd party, so shifting blame is easy.

> so shifting blame is easy. But are the contracts actually useful? I wager that to have support from Red Hat is really useful beyond what you may view as "corporate politics".

We've submitted bugs related to IO, and had them promptly fixed.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#257

Post by ZeroSolstice »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #45
silisili wrote: 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…

Some software vendors - e.g. major engineering applications - only support their products on RHEL.

Right, but I think the OP's question is why are you using RHEL compat instead of just getting licensed RHEL. In your example a company is already fine with paying full price for major engineering applications why wouldn't you do the same for your underlying OS.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#258

Post by sgift »

evasb wrote: post #152

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

Companies using RHEL or SUSE and paying for support usually don't switch. This is one of the rare moments where SUSE has a real chance to expand their market share in this space.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#259

Post by BizarroLand »

SoftTalker wrote: post #229
rjzzleep wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've done a few of those RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu moves myself, and even though it was a pain I'm still somewhat impressed over how painless the actual move was when I had good documentation and also still terrified of what it feels like to try to transition undocumented boxes.

I dislike windows and the M$ ecosystem but as far as server management for undocumented servers it's much easier to deal with them than for Linux stuff. For an undocumented Windows server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, shut it down and listen for the screams.

For an undocumented Linux server, you send out an email, wait 2 weeks, prep the fire extinguishers, batten the hatches, and wait for the mob of angry villagers to storm the DC with pitchforks because thanks to you their print server for their paper checks is now printing in Klingon and it can't be fixed without resurrecting the guy that wrote the software 6 days before he died of terminal terminal disease.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#260

Post by kriberg »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #114
tyingq wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RHEL is designed to make forks difficult to do without infringing on trademarks.

The community has a large amount of experience with debranding RHEL. CentOS did it for decades. If there is a left over of Red Hat branding, you'd have a hard time proving any kind of purposeful infringement.

Redhat debranded RHEL for CentOS. It was one of the things CentOS compalined about, so RedHat made it easier for them. Maybe it saved RedHat money overall by avoiding trademark protection (IANAL).
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