SUSE is forking RHEL

Post by kmac_ » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 10:23 AM UTC

zvmaz wrote: post #51

imiric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat offers corporate support contracts, while other distros have community or consultant support at best. This is attractive to executive managers in corporations, as they can be seen as investing into a mature technology, and the systems are contractually guaranteed to keep running by a 3rd party, so shifting blame is easy.

> so shifting blame is easy. But are the contracts actually useful? I wager that to have support from Red Hat is really useful beyond what you may view as "corporate politics".

Post by richrichardsson » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 10:24 AM UTC

tannhaeuser wrote: post #32

silisili wrote: post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

> I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable RHEL compat per se is irrelevant, it's the 10 years guaranteed maintenance enterprise customers are after, plus a path forward for their third-party software investments only certified on RHEL (because of said guarantees) and internal IT deployment/admin line processes. Despite making the rounds on HN, enterprise and other commercial users give a flying fuck to io_…

Post by tourmalinetaco » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 10:27 AM UTC

bandrami wrote: post #38

silisili wrote: post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

Our contract with the Air Force required that we document guarantees from every parts vendor for the servers we built for them that they would keep making those parts for at least a decade. They also demanded RHEL exclusively. It's a great example of how extreme stability is more important than any other question in a lot of business decisions.

Post by coldtea » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 10:32 AM UTC

mst wrote: post #23

silisili wrote: post #4

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for beca…

The time (some years back now, it was a 5.10 patch and a 5.8 rpm) they mis-backported a perl patch to work around a bug in a deprecated CPAN module for one of their enterprise customers and in the process caused a 2x-30x slowdown of lots of other newer code (including the library that had replaced it in the majority of production environments by that point) was 'fun'. Took me a couple years to get together a coalitio…

Post by em-bee » Tue, Jul 11, 2023, 10:34 AM UTC

gigatexal wrote: post #39

pgeorgi wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How will they confirm that they're fork is compatible? The only thing they need to ensure right now is that their stable release remains compatible to existing RHEL. Everything needed for that is around. Going forward, maybe "RHEL v+1 compatible" doesn't even matter anymore (to quote that press release: "CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard.") RHEL became the defac…

I’m not saying it’s the best business model just saying that all these companies are undercutting RedHat out of spite/business. Oh well. RedHat should take this opportunity to pivot and do something else. Holding on to licensing is dying especially in the world of clones.