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SUSE is forking RHEL

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Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#281

Post by FireBeyond »

mishagale wrote: post #158
tw04 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US market is primarily RHEL. Historically the EU market and SAP shops were SLES. I admit I’m far enough removed today that I’m not sure if that still holds true.

I remember that way back when, Deutschebank standardised on SuSE because they were a major shareholder in the company. DB had an IT department bigger than most entire companies, so I'm sure that had a pretty big effect on the ecosystem.

Interesting - Deutsche Bank is one of the flagship OpenShift customers.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#282

Post by abrookewood »

binary_ninja wrote: post #142

Don't get me wrong, I am very happy with this announcement, however it bothers me slightly when I see these kind of announcements with the tone of "we love open source and we want to give this to the community" when the rationale for this probably was "RHEL is going to lose a bunch of customers and we can profit off of that". If it was a non-profit they might convince me but as a Linux for enterprise-kind of company…

When you see Oracle making similar claims, you just KNOW that the reason is money, not any sort of care for Open Source.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#283

Post by LeFantome »

bonzini wrote: post #137
jsiepkes wrote: post #22

> Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said, According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat. I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.

They're admitting that the Linux that enterprise people want is RHEL (or RHEL-based) and not SLES. Also, if CIQ follows them and SUSE bases this on CentOS Stream (at least for RHEL9; CentOS Stream 8 is admittedly a bit messy), this is exactly what Red Hat was hoping to achieve.

I think they are positioning their own professionally supported enterprise distro as “the best” while positioning this Red Hat clone as the free-est ( both in the free beer and freedom sense ).

It is a good move. They siphon off customers from the competition to a free option and dramatically raise awareness of their paid service.

If it turns out that they still cannot make headway in North America with SLES, they can create paid support options for Liberty. Just like Red Hat, they will have the credibility of being the distro maintainer.

Given the staffing and infrastructure they already have to maintain for SLES, maintaining a RHEL-a-like may not even be that much work.

Really smart.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#284

Post by LeFantome »

tyingq wrote: post #184
Conan_Kudo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rocky Linux is trying to specifically recreate RHEL exactly . That adds a new set of challenges that most people shouldn't care about. If you want to create a derivative of any Fedora/CentOS distribution, that's not hard. But if you're trying to recreate , that's a different story. You have to care about things like build sequencing, NVRs, etc. For example, if I'm creating Kudo Linux as a RHEL-compatible distribution…

I would guess Suse is trying to do the harder one. I could be wrong, but I think the intended audience is people that want to drop RedHat and the associated cost, but with minimal changes to everything in their ecosystem other than the OS itself. If Suse thinks they are going to make money in this space via support contracts rather than licensing, it's sort of a "commoditize your complements" thing...commoditizing th…

I expect they have three objectives:

- damage and embarrass Red Hat, their direct competitor - enhance their own brand, brand awareness, and reputation with customers of their competitor. Sell more of their own existing enterprise offerings as a result. - create an alternative distribution that they can monetize if it turns out to be more popular than their own offerings ( even if only in one geography )

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#285

Post by LeFantome »

kijin wrote: post #120
jacooper wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what?

Doesn't matter. IBM/Red Hat has deep pockets, they can drag competitors into meritless lawsuits for as long as they want just for the sake of deterrence. Having hired a former VP who probably knows a trade secret or two sounds like a good enough excuse to cry wolf.

What lawsuits? Over what?

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#287

Post by LeFantome »

kijin wrote: post #147
skissane wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM/Red Hat has deep pockets, they can drag competitors into meritless lawsuits for as long as they want just for the sake of deterrence If IBM sues SUSE, Oracle might try to intervene, on the grounds that a ruling against SUSE could negatively impact them as well. I'm not sure if IBM vs Oracle is a lawsuit either would want to have. Both have very deep pockets, and substantial corporate experience with litigation.…

I really hope that you are right. Never thought there would come a day when I must root for Oracle to help defend open source, but here we are.

Oracle will never second Open Source, I assure you. They will defend themselves. Occasionally that may benefit you accidentally. If so, I would not bet on it continuing.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#288

Post by LeFantome »

grey_earthling wrote: post #130
Dalewyn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is otherwise known as "industry standard". Changing an industry standard isn't impossible, but it will be a paradigm shifting challenge akin to moving mountains.

If I were Rocky, Alma, Oracle and/or SUSE, I'd be collaborating to define our own point-release schedule off CentOS Stream*, and trying to make our blessèd commits usurp Red Hat's as industry standard. * with blackjack! and public git repos!

SUSE might do that.

Rocky, Alma, and Oracle cannot do that because they are never going to write the documentation, do the testing, or provide the certifications that make a RHEL release a RHEL release.

The point releases of a RHEL fork are meaningless unless they are identical to RHEL. If you cannot get real RHEL, your better off with CentOS Stream than an incompatible point release.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#289

Post by pelasaco »

ZeroSolstice wrote: post #248
pelasaco wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. If you cannot figure out, then you are not working with Linux, despite 30y+ of experience. Big Companies need certifications, maintenance, support and compatibility is necessary. Specially companies running linux in mainframe, or for instance, delivering embedded devices like storages or medical devices

Why would you be dependent upon CentOS(RHEL compat) if you are in those industries? If you need certification and LTS then pay for it by purchasing RHEL licenses. It seems very silly for people to be getting upset now that a free OS hasn't taken their business considerations to heart. Unless of course you were going for the model of charging everyone enterprise rates for your devices/software/work/etc and pocketing w…

One scenario that I can imagine, is for development environment. People had CentOS as dev environment and deployed RHEL. Or ran CentOS guests on RHEL hosts (VM or Docker)

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#290

Post by nottorp »

bonzini wrote: post #135
nottorp wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision). Right, they only pressured them to make more money, didn't tell them how exactly.

Even if that was the intended meaning, it's quite an extrapolation that Red Hat is "growing hostile towards open source as a whole", especially since people say that of Red Hat roughly every two years.

They're completely within their rights as stated by the GPL to do this.

They're also placing themselves into a niche; not sure if they care. Aside from production RHEL installs using the clones and not making them money, they're also trying to prevent people from running their distro for free to learn it. That will raise the price of RHEL admins, certified or not. And maybe reduce even paid installs.

That's their problem IMO. What I really don't like them for is supporting Poettering. Only yesterday I had to disable parts of systemd because it insisted on using dhcp on a network card I wanted a static IP on.

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