> This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today. Wow, that's pretty rich from a company that has made good money from vendor lock-in. I'm still bitter when they drastically increased our SLES-prices for academic institutions, that was probably around 2010/11, an…
SUSE is forking RHEL
261–270 of 307 posts
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish I could upvote this 10,000 times. Documentation isn't sexy or something. I don't know why Linux documentation sucks so much, but Redhat makes it suck must less. It takes lots of effort, money and writer hours to create the kind of documentation that Redhat maintains and businesses love documentation. A HOWTO or a FAQ are not documentation. I actually prefer man pages and I dropped Linux for my personal project…
Because most devs hate writing and maintaining documentation. Simple as that.
Since we're generalizing: most devs aren't great at writing documentation either.
Technical writing is a field of its own and it's important to recognize that. We could ever be so lucky if such writers were as attracted to free software as some developers are.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#2631. 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.
There are already excellent libre systemd-free distros, with release cadences ranging from rolling (Guix) to RHEL-level glacial (Slackware). That's not a hole in the market right now.
It's somewhat of a whole in the market for distributions with commercial-corporate-handholding.
But you're right in that a company like SUSE could, instead of introducing a new distribution, decide they're "adopting" an existing FOSS distribution (systemd-free or otherwise) and offering hand-holding, call-us-any-time support for corporations deploying it.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. It's called FreeBSD. HTH. HAND. ;-) What? Well, it is! It's Linux-free, it has no systemd and no glibc, and no GPL code so it is de facto NU free. But it has a Linux emulator and can run Linux binaries. And there is Illumos, which can also run Linux binaries. If you don't need the Linux binaries part, there…
Actually, are there companies which offer "corporate, RHEL/SLES-like support" for a BSD distribution, or FreeBSD particularly? That's also a niche I wish we could see.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 s…
They contributed because it's in their best interest, and they also took down a route with Systemd that went against the philosophy of nix systems. If we're not careful we'll end up losing control of Linux or large parts of it to profit seeking corporations that don't have the free and open software movement on their agenda at all.
I didn't at all say they had been perfect community members…
Also, they didn't exactly force systemd on everybody. Must as you might not like it (I'm not its biggest fan, but mainly due to being old and familiar with what came before). Other options are still commonly available if it offends you overly.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#266I can't understand how IBM & Red Hat can see this article and the statements from Oracle and not think. "Are we the bad guys?"
Disclosure: I work for Red Hat.
It was only a year ago that Oracle was attempting to argue in front of the Supreme Court of the United States that adopting any kind of preexisting API was copyright infringement, and also shouldn't fall under fair use.
To hear them talking about "freedom" and "openness" only makes me chuckle at their incredible hubris.
If they believed in these words they wouldn't have closed off Solaris (to everyone, including their customers), kept ZFS in licensing purgatory for their own benefit, or attempted to victimize all of FOSS in pursuit of shaking down Google for loose change.
I'm not exactly thrilled with the recent series of events, but I somehow do not find Oracle's attempt at shaming very convincing.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. Hey, here’s a comprehensive guide complete with commands, expected outcomes, and side effects of each command for setting up a Windows Domain using an RHEL domain controller: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_single... Oh, that’s for 7.5? One that’s 15 years old and no longer under standard support? It still works! Wait, but you’re a new custom…
Whereas Nixs documentation is… well. I was looking through nix package code to sort out issues with nix on Hyper-V. I really like Nix so far (just started using it), but damn is the documentation ever shit tier.
When Eelco wrote his PhD thesis 20+ years ago, with the first version of nix, it was just an academic project. Now it's a lot more.
Although nix has a very good community, and plenty of contributor activity, there is way more code contributed than docs.
Additionally, very few people are technical writers in the nix community (there is a lot of expertise tho, but mostly on the code side). Therefore we get today's nonstructured docs.
Finally, RH has WAY more money than the NixOs foundation. RH sells stuff. Nix and NixOs are community projects, relying solely on donations. They probably have people whose job is to write docs.
there is an ongoing, organized effort to help docs tho: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/fundraising-for-the-nix-docume...
In practice, your best bet is just asking around on community channels (https://nixos.org/community/)
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same i've no clue how to solve FOSS funding > "i don't think the clones themselves are the problem, but the commercial support available for clones is taking away business from red hat, and that is where the conflict lies." exactly what i mean when I say 0-value-added-clones because they then turn around and sell support on the clones which seems seemingly unethical to me somehow -- though i am still working through…
0-value-added-clones most of the clones themselves are not selling support, at least not at the scale that would be a problem for redhat. clones do add value because they allow small companies to use a version of RHEL without having to pay for license/support they can't afford. when these companies grow they then can become red hat customers. at least that was my understanding of the goals behind centos and also why…
I can see that as a valuable pre-sale sort of approach... hmm I think my hard-and-fast stance is changing.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
He he, I tried using alien a looong time ago, without success. In retrospect, I was young and naive, only had a rather vague idea of what I was doing. So I can't say for sure if it was alien's fault or if I was doing something stupid.
Re: SUSE is forking RHEL
#270I'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…
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.
This is a common type of reply, and it’s not inaccurate, but it’s also extremely cynical and misses the bigger point. Pay to blame is only a minor benefit, while stability and having a standard snapshot as a target is far more important.