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

541–550 of 555 posts

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

#541

Post by hvdijk »

andi999 wrote: post #494
hvdijk wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See Bruce Perens's explanation: https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c... >. The short story: adding a penalty to an action that the GPL allows is a restriction of that action, and the GPL does not allow setting additional restrictions. This has not been tested in court, as far as I know.

In the case of Red Hat it is not a penalty (as far as I understand) but a 'bonus' you can keep your support contract when obliging..

My understanding is that Red Hat does allow redistribution so long as you do not infringe on its trademarks. Given that no version of the GPL ever granted trademark rights, this is not an additional restriction, so this is fine.

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

#542

Post by op00to »

em500 wrote: post #326
CoconutPilot wrote: post #296

Whats 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 me…

> 1. Red Hat Inc. does not want people to build and/or distribute gratis RHEL8 or clones.

Why does Red Hat release everything as source RPMs, and not, say, one big tarball of sources which would still meet the source requirement of the GPL?

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

#543

Post by op00to »

em500 wrote: post #473
evol262 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But [they do]( https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download ). A subscription buys you updates and support. RHEL itself is free. That's true in a literal-but-useless sense. Developers-RHEL might be bit-identical to real-RHEL at some dates, but as a product it's of course very very different due to lack of interim updates. And that's aside of the smaller speedbumps of registration and having to involve Legal…

Developers RHEL is RHEL. You get access to the same updates as a paid RHEL subscription. Stop spreading FUD because someone moved your free cheese.

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

#545

Post by evol262 »

em500 wrote: post #530
evol262 wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's true in a literal-but-useless sense. Developers-RHEL might be bit-identical to real-RHEL at some dates, but as a product it's of course very very different due to lack of interim updates. And that's aside of the smaller speedbumps of registration and having to involve Legal if you want to run in a company. Again, stop moving goalposts. Your comment was "why can't they just put it on FTP/WWW without support".…

> Again, stop moving goalposts. Your comment was "why can't they just put it on FTP/WWW without support". That's exactly what they do. That's exactly what they don't. You're the one who innocuous altered that to "without support and updates" which you know very well makes all the difference. If CentOS had the same non-update schedule as developer-RHEL, approximately nobody would use it in production. Contrawise, if R…

> Maybe I just expressed myself badly, so let my try again. I predict that Rocky Linux will not be a big success, and don't think doing a free-beer RHEL clone (CentOS as most users understood it) is a worthwhile endeavor, despite a seemingly large audience. Yes, giving good stuff away for free is popular (and I do believe RHEL is a good product). Because they're largely dependent on RH, who 1) appear not very enthusiastic about the idea of people running RHEL for free even without support, 2) can largely determine how expensive running a clone project will be. That's why IMO it's better to analyze if users really need a strict RHEL clone, or if what they want from it (xLTS, better tooling, commercial software compatibility, whatever) could be better developed on top of Debian, whose incentives seem to class less. People who really really need a RHEL clone: time to pay up or go with the Stream (it probably really not-so-bad).

> Now unlike you I have zero inside knowledge or experience, so maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. But I am willing to make a somewhat falsifiable prediction, that Rocky and similar clone projects don't have much chance of success. Maybe I'm all wrong and Rocky can with a handful of volunteers and some clever scripts, resurrect CentOS-as-people-understood-it. Or maybe some deep-pocket 3rd party with a better brand than Oracle will step up. We'll find out a year or so.

So, let's try this. I agree that Rocky will not be a big success, but completely because I don't think there's a major market demand for a RHEL clone in 2020. New deployments will end up being a container Linux distro with deployments inside VMs or containers. (RH)EL8 is relatively new with low-ish adoption. We still had customers on EL6 six months ago when I left. Institutional customers aren't likely to move to EL8 until EL7 is nearing the end of phase 3 support, since the costs involved in reworking their applications to work (and their build/config management toolchain to work with modularity+etc. This has nothing to do with Red Hat's stance, which was (for the 7.5 years I was there, and still, from everyone I know who's still there) very overtly pro-upstream.

Users don't need a strict RHEL clone. They need a life raft until they can move to containers. It's not worth re-training administrators how to use some other package ecosystem. Rocky will fail, but for these reasons

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

#546

Post by hobby-coder-guy »

hackerbrother wrote: post #502
reactor wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I know, but cockroaches are also considered ugly in American culture (laugh emoji)

What is the joke?

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

#547

Post by macspoofing »

Spivak wrote: post #408
quicklyfrozen wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CentOS will be useless as a replacement for RHEL. Without the guarantee of binary compatibility, any CentOS Stream update may break your locally installed applications. And I only recall CentOS significantly trailing RHEL at the major version updates (e.g. 6 and 7). Other updates seem pretty timely, and the major version lag doesn't leave me vulnerable. I can see this being useful for developers who are building some…

I replied to you in another thread but nonetheless CentOS Stream isn't going to break your binary compatibility for the same reason that RHEL 7.3 doesn't break binary compatibility with RHEL 7.2. CentOS Stream is spiritually always the next minor release of RHEL. Unless you're the kind of person who pinned to a specific minor version of CentOS (which isn't the default and not supported for very long) you can use Cent…

>bugfixes, security updates, and new features will come to you before they're either batched for release in the next minor version of RHEL or back-ported to the current supported releases.

Security fixes are not coming to CentOS Stream first. That's been in the announcement.

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

#548

Post by desktopninja »

GTP wrote: post #481
znpy wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ubuntu". It's widely accepted nowadays, it was pretty weird in 2004. I got my fair share of jokes in 2005-2007 from friends when talking about that "ubuntu" thing, and I'll spare you the examples.

"Ubuntu" is an African word that means "I'm not able to install Debian" :D

High 5

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

#549

Post by desktopninja »

scaladev wrote: post #415
kinghtown wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Rocky is good. CockroachDB on the other hand is an awful name. Cockroaches are only associated with filth and are revolting to most people. Plus, you got that cock in the name which isn’t helping matters. You might think it’s obnoxious that people always point out the name without considering the product but tone deaf branding is a misstep and begs the question: what else are they screwing up if they could ge…

Living in a non-English speaking country certainly helps. Everybody around here is using `git` without realizing what it means. Same for CockroachDB.

I think Linus knew what he was doing at the time when he created the tool :D

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

#550

Post by strenholme »

em500 wrote: post #473
evol262 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But [they do]( https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download ). A subscription buys you updates and support. RHEL itself is free. That's true in a literal-but-useless sense. Developers-RHEL might be bit-identical to real-RHEL at some dates, but as a product it's of course very very different due to lack of interim updates. And that's aside of the smaller speedbumps of registration and having to involve Legal…

>>roll up the sleeves and do a real _community_ enterprise OS based on Debian instead of cloning RHELI would love to see this too, but backporting security patches is not the kind of “sexy” programming we can motivate programmers to do “for fun and for free”, especially when we tell them to do it for X number of years without having a paycheck to motivate them.
Post reply on HN