Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rocky Linux: A CentOS replacement by the CentOS founder

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 555 posts

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

#461

Post by chousuke »

deckard1 wrote: post #181
chousuke wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really about running servers for 10 years. It's about having a platform to build a product on that you can support for 10 years. RHEL software gets old over time, but it's still maintained and compatible with what you started on. Consider an appliance that will be shipped to a literal cave for some mining operation. Do you want to build that on something that you would have to keep refreshing every year, so…

The "don't touch it if it's not broken" philosophy is fundamentally at odds with an internet-connected machine. You either need to upgrade or unplug (from the internet). There are still places out there that are running WindowsNT or DOS even. Because they have applications which simply won't run anywhere else or need to talk to ancient hardware that runs over a parallel port or some weird crap like that. These machin…

The point is the amount of "touching". Applying security patches to RHEL is still a change, but it's significantly less risky than upgrading a faster-changing system where you might not even get security patches at all for the versions of software you're using unless you switch to a newer major version.

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

#462

Post by simonh »

playcache wrote: post #444
commandertso wrote: post #409

One thing to consider, for the folks that assume everyone on CentOS is a parasite allergic to paying for software... CentOS is heavily used in the HPC academic organizations, in part because paying licensing fees for an OS on 2k+ nodes isn’t workable in academia.

Don't they use scientific linux (CentOS clone?)

Scientific was discontinued and the sponsoring organisations switched to CentOS 8. It looks like the work involved in rebuilding RHEL 8 was too much to deal with.

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

#463

Post by corty »

fifnir wrote: post #455
commandertso wrote: post #409

One thing to consider, for the folks that assume everyone on CentOS is a parasite allergic to paying for software... CentOS is heavily used in the HPC academic organizations, in part because paying licensing fees for an OS on 2k+ nodes isn’t workable in academia.

Indeed we're running CentOS on the cluster at work. I always wondered, why not Debian ?

Support. Commercial software packages that you may want to run often come with a list of supported operating systems which usually only includes RedHat and maybe SuSE. Ubuntu and Debian are rarely officially supported. And although you usually can get things to work somehow, your application software support will be useless because all tickets get closed with "unsupported OS, use RedHat". With CentOS you at least might have a chance to get a non-useless answer from you application's support team.

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

#464

Post by kakwa_ »

dralley wrote: post #355
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…

> 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. The GPL doesn't require you make the sources public to everybody , just the people to whom you are distributing your software. But Red Hat does provide sources, to everybody . They go above and beyond what the GPL actually re…

Also, RHEL is packaging pieces of software that are not under GPL/LGPL. With permissive licenses, they could probably heavily restrict source redistribution and availability.

If half the userland is not available as source (patch and packaging included), a CentOS-like project would not be possible.

Effectively, if RedHat/IBM wanted, there are a lot of dick moves which could effectively kill Rocky.

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

#465

Post by nps1 »

bonzini wrote: post #184
nps1 wrote: post #90

The next CentOS will be where the core developers who are actually contributing to project will move. However, branding does matter if you want enterprise following. Rocky does sound unprofessional.

Core developers and infrastructure is moving to CentOS Stream. However the software that is running on said infrastructure is all open source.

That is concerning. How is Oracle Linux compared to Rocky Linux. Why not people use Oracle Linux which is a decent company backed product.

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

#466

Post by johannes1234321 »

garyrichardson wrote: post #430
bigbubba wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On top of this I also believe that companies prefer the RHEL opinionated implementation of a linux system vs Debian's. RedHat is a company that sells to other companies. Therefore it has to implement their linux and make decisions in a way that works well with how other enterprises think. Big companies aren't comfortable depending on "the community" to do the right thing for them.

On top of all these companies want to run (commercial) software from other vendors, which sometimes is certified only on RHEL.

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

#467

Post by johannes1234321 »

playcache wrote: post #441
znpy wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whats missing is an analysis of why CentOS failed. nah, it's not missing. Red Hat bought the project and more importantly the trademark, domains etc. And it was mostly fine. Then IBM bought Red Hat and things went south. CentOS did not fail, CentOS was killed . It's different.

IBM had nothing to do with it.

While I think that the decision was done before IBM took over, that statement is too much imo. IBM could have stopped the plan, if they wanted to.

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

#469

Post by johannes1234321 »

cpncrunch wrote: post #388
loeg wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RHEL has a business model too.

Yes, indeed, but I was referring to Centos. There isn't enough of a benefit for most of us to upgrade if we get security updates free for 10 years and don't need support.

And that shows how pointless the CentOS kill is. Those users won't go to RHEL but Debian/Ubuntu or if it has to be RHEL-compatible Oracle Linux and then lobby their other vendors to support Debian/Ubuntu or some other distribution as well.

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

#470

Post by iso947 »

cpncrunch wrote: post #311
pinewurst wrote: post #301

Earlier 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.

Do AWS ubuntu images come with a software charge of say 2 or 3 cents an hour?
Post reply on HN