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Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

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Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#391

Post by reader_mode »

cpncrunch wrote: post #387
reader_mode wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed, but most of us don't need support. We just need security updates, ideally for 10 years.

AFAIK there's a licensing tier for RHEL that gets you that - don't know how it compares to Ubuntu.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#392

Post by bigbubba »

cashsterling wrote: post #371
webmobdev wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Cockroachdb - I don't like that name at all.

I love it... Cockroaches are survivors. When I was in grad school my lab was in a subbasement in a 100 year old building. We had huge cockroaches... One of my colleagues caught some and put them in one of our lab freezers and forgot about them. Months later we remembered the jar... took it out of the freezer. Cockroaches thawed out and seemed to be fine... very active, almost like nothing happened. Other experiments…

Diatomaceous earth is very effective at killing them. It's fascinating that they're so robust, but just a little inert powder can kill them. Though to be fair, at their scale, it may as well be a pile of razor blades.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#393

Post by bigbubba »

p1necone wrote: post #381
em500 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

> better put the effort into an extra-stable-extra-LTS fork of Debian or even Ubuntu I've always thought of Debian LTS as basically the end all be all of Linux server OS stability (let's ignore the BSDs for this exercise), is the main draw of CentOS over that just the longer LTS period or is it also meaningfully more stable?

From what I understand, it's not just a matter of longer support, but also training. A lot of companies have/had mixed RHEL/CentOS environments, with RHEL on the machines they really want RH support for and CentOS on everything else to save money. Having a mixed RHEL/Debian environment would probably be a pain in the ass for all your sysadmins.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#394

Post by bigbubba »

mbreese wrote: post #376
em500 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ftp site does not contain sources for RHEL 8 (it's just sources for a bunch of add-on packages). The RHEL 8 sources are in git.centos.org, though not in SRPM form. I know that GPL only requires Red Hat to provide sources on request to those receiving their binaries. But in principle the receiver can then legally redistribute those sources. Now AFAICT nobody's actually doing that redistributing. I don't know wheth…

RedHat has to permit the redistribution per the GPL. But there is nothing stating that your support contract can’t be cancelled if you do it. (I don’t have any first hand knowledge of this, just a guess).

Grsecurity also uses this 'loophole.' Seeing this scheme go mainstream is really disheartening; I feel that it really undermines the intent and social value of the GPL.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#395

Post by reactor »

hackerbrother wrote: post #366
Keverw wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me about how people don't even give CockroachDB a chance because of it's name. Every time it's mentioned on HN, people can't help but to bring up it's name.

But.. why did they have to name it that?

Not sure if there are solid evidence established to prove this, but Cockroaches are believed to be capable of surviving large amount of radiations (like from nuclear bomb), hence they thought it would be apt for a geographically distributed DB.

https://sciencenotes.org/can-cockroaches-survive-nuclear-bom...

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#396

Post by paul_f »

syshum wrote: post #113
paul_f wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using Cpanel, you have no choice but to use Redhat, CentOS or Fedora.

That is changing, they are going to Support CloudLinux, and Ubuntu now https://blog.cpanel.com/centos-8-end-of-life-announcement/

Glad to see, but worry that Cpanel on Ubuntu coming in late 2021, corresponding to the end of CentOS 8, is cutting it close.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#397

Post by bigbubba »

ralph84 wrote: post #383
nickysielicki wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most frustrating thing about this is that Redhat was making a profit before IBM bought them. They had existed for 20 some years on a business model that business people didn’t understand, and they were able to do that because they understood what open source would become and how they could play a role in that. One of the things that YC is always talking about is that founders looking for ideas should look to iden…

But Red Hat ended up being the exception that proved the rule that selling support for open source isn't a very lucrative business. There was room for one player in that space and Red Hat was it. Now with cloud providers selling support for open source bundled with the infrastructure to run it on, there isn't even room for one standalone player.

Sqlite devs have funded their development decades into the future by selling licenses to public domain software. It may not have made them a billion dollar multinational corporation, but must every company have such conqueror aspiration?

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#398

Post by filmgirlcw »

Shared404 wrote: post #319
Shorel wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully. Canonical needs the profit.

> Canonical needs the profit I'm fine with them getting more profit, as long as they stop ripping up the desktop.

I mean, I hate to say this, but have we considered that a big part of the reason RedHat has been profitable is because it doesn’t care about the desktop? And no, Fedora really doesn’t count.

Ubuntu’s big thing back in 2004 was that it was a well-heeled founder (and company), coming in to actually put time and money into the desktop experience on Linux in an opinionated way (obv. not everyone agrees with those opinions, but I would argue that being as opinionated as commercial/proprietary software was Ubuntu’s biggest strength in the beginning). Over the last 16 years, nearly all of the big bets on desktop development have failed. Ubuntu One (the cloud personal cloud service)? Failed (though in retrospect it was a really good idea. Too bad users didn’t pay.). Ubuntu Software Center? Failed and discontinued. Unity? Failed and discontinued. Ubuntu Phone/Touch (and Canonical had invested massively into mobile)? Failed and given to the community. Mir? Failed, probably for good reasons, but failed.

Where has Canonical made money? Enterprise and in the cloud.

I totally understand the attraction to Linux on the desktop, but every company that has approached it in a way that is focused on end-users and not the enterprise in a way that isn’t either volunteer driven or as a very small company has failed to make it any money off of it. I imagine Canonical will continue to deemphasize the desktop even more as time goes on.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#399

Post by mjcohen »

geerlingguy wrote: post #377
wfuser wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the name and the logo is good. Don't listen to the people who just keep talking and not helping! Agreed. It's funny that people here are complaining "Rocky Linux" isn't a professional name and they won't be able to convince corporates clients to use it. Yet, there exists a billion dollar revenue company named "Red Hat" which clearly is a "professional" name.

Same here. Things that come to mind: Rocky, the champion boxer who can "go the distance" and never gives up... the Rocky Mountains, which are, well, rocky and strong... Rocky Road ice cream, which tastes good. A zillion times better than trying to explain what a "Suse", an "Ubuntu", or a "Manjaro" is, and that's before talking about the various types of hat-based distros.

And, of course, Rocky and Bullwinkle.

I want Bullwinkle Linux.

Re: Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

#400

Post by l2dy »

evol262 wrote: post #334
em500 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

> 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 Cen…

* The free download is only "for Development Use".

* Debranding is much more work than a single RPM. https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8

    No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)
    There are times when you do replace and times when you don't.
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