I hate the name.
To be fair, CentOS isn't a great name, and neither is 'Red Hat'. 'Rocky Linux' isn't too bad actually.
Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
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Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
The difficulty is that RHEL isn't a GPLed work. It's a mix of free software under various licenses and logos and other oddball things that are protected by trademark or copyright and are non-free (the non-free part is mostly icons and images identifying the system as RHEL). There isn't a lot of that, but it all has to be separated out to be legal to redistribute. If you go through all the work to do that, you wind up with the equivalent of CentOS. But RHEL's customers don't have the incentive to do that work.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#323I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Good to see that CentOS cofonder picked this up and now became a founder of Rocky Linux. This shows dedication and rock solid background. Rocky Linux will be a project to follow, help and use in production environment. Thank you for all your hard work!
People complaining about the name to the extent that they are is such an extreme example of bikeshedding.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#324I'm so glad I build all my servers on Debian.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#325Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. I think Rocky Linux needs to put out a plan how they will make themselves financially viable as we've had 3 high profile RHEL respins go down in the last 10 years. CentOS failed twice, it ran out of money in 2014 and was rescued back then by Redhat sponsership. Again in 2020. Another widely used RHEL respin was Scientific Linux which mothballed when RHEL 7 was releas…
> Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. CentOS did not fail. CentOS was a wild success. Like the vast majority of tech success storeis, CentOS was picked up by a major player and turned against its roots to protect the incumbent moneymaker. But the terrific thing about the GPL, for all its flaws and despite its crazy founder, is that it ensures the health and longevity of a project despite well-funded at…
I don't think anybody is against CentOS being an onboarding ramp to paid RHEL deployments.
CentOS is actually Red Hat's greatest advertisement
If IBM Red Hat wanted to push for RHEL upgrades, they should have changed the CentOS support window from 10 years to 3-5 years. If they had to wind back the EOL for CentOS date from 2029, they should have at least move it back to eg, 2024 not 2021.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#326Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. I think Rocky Linux needs to put out a plan how they will make themselves financially viable as we've had 3 high profile RHEL respins go down in the last 10 years. CentOS failed twice, it ran out of money in 2014 and was rescued back then by Redhat sponsership. Again in 2020. Another widely used RHEL respin was Scientific Linux which mothballed when RHEL 7 was releas…
Maybe it's a bit too obvious to spell it out, but
1. Red Hat Inc. does not want people to build and/or distribute gratis RHEL8 or clones. It would be trivial to just put the actual RHEL8 iso as an unsupported download on their ftp/www server and sell the support separately, like Oracle or Canonical do. Instead, they kept this ridiculous make work project called CentOS around, that involved non-trivial manual labor meticulously rebranding RHEL into RedHat owned CentOS-the-laggard-RHEL-clone, whose users apparently mainly value it for being as close to RHEL as possible without paying. To a distant observer, the whole setup looks quite absurd. I think it's actually good that they finally put an end to it. But they should have either not started CentOS 8 at all or rode it out till the end. Pulling the plug at 20% of it's lifetime is plainly a shitty move.
2. It appears that building a legal RHEL8+ clone is quite a task, and I'm guessing the amount of work involved is largely controlled by Red Hat Inc. I.e., they can make running/maintaining a project like Rocky or others more and more expensive if they choose to. I believe they going to test the limits of how difficult they can make building from their sources within the boundaries of the GPL. If you think I'm wrong, just put up a mirror of the RHEL8 (not CentOS8) SRPMs and see how long it stays up. Clearly they're not acting in the spirit of the GPL, even if they are in the letter.
3. Given the previous points, I believe any project like Rocky is a losing proposition. If the "community" really values enterprise stability so much, better put the effort into an extra-stable-extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu, and preparing for transition away from RHEL. Or just pay up, if you really believes the RHEL stability is so valuable. Clone projects are by necessity extremely dependent on actions of Red Hat Inc which has largely opposite interests. I don't know why people would volunteer for that.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>> I would have thought that the GPL ensures that the customer can then freely redistribute them I'm actually surprised Red Hat has typically shipped SRPMS in bulk to it's customers. I think it's rare that customers would use them, and the GPL allows Red Hat to be far less accomodating. It allows you to charge for each copy of the source code you convey, it doesn't need to be in such a convenient form, it doesn't nee…
The requirement to distribute source means you have to provide the exact source for any binary that you distributed, for three years. And the source is defined as " the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". A pointer to the upstream tarball plus a poorly organized directory with 58 patches in it isn't "the preferred form of the work ...". SRPMs are an easy way to make sure that you got it right, that the source really corresponds to be binary. Attempting to add speed bumps risks getting it wrong and providing a way for pissed-off developers to make trouble.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hard to continually fund any project defined by its users’ abhorrence of compensation.
I think Ubuntu has a decent business plan, charging people $225/yr to extend support from 5 to 10 years. I would happily pay that in order to avoid having to migrate as often. CentOS just gave everything away for free and then is wondering why they're not making any money.
CentOS's 10 year support window was unreasonably long given that there's no benefit to upgrading to RHEL (and it's paid employees at RedHat during the security backporting work).
The free RedHat tier should have a shorter support window that's still long enough to attract users who want a stable platform to build long-lived appliances.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s hard to continually fund any project defined by its users’ abhorrence of compensation.
I think Ubuntu has a decent business plan, charging people $225/yr to extend support from 5 to 10 years. I would happily pay that in order to avoid having to migrate as often. CentOS just gave everything away for free and then is wondering why they're not making any money.
Paid CentOS support is called RHEL - the whole point of CentOS is repackage GPL RHEL stuff without the licensing fee. The only way I see this being viable is them getting bankrolled by a huge cloud provider - but cloud providers already decided that having their own distros was a better option.
Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Redhat acquired it, then ibm acequired redhat and then game over.
There isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that this decision was influenced by IBM (correlation doesn't equal causation).
People are negging this comment with absolutely no evidence to suggest that it's wrong.