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SUSE is forking RHEL

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Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#91

Post by gigatexal »

em-bee wrote: post #70
gigatexal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

pivot to what? i may be completely wrong on this (and i hope i am wrong) but i have the impression that licensing is the only thing really profitable in the corporate world. i believe support only works if it is combined with licensing because the margins are much lower otherwise. red hat could not pay for all the engineers they have now on support contracts alone.

Could be. It very well could be that the whole RH model dies with the success of clones. I was more-or-less just spitballing. But what are they to do? I guess double down? And try to increase their value add but then if it comes from software quality or their QA/validation that goes into making RHEL the clones will get it for free too

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#93

Post by AndyMcConachie »

freeone3000 wrote: post #80
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. Hey, here’s a comprehensive guide complete with commands, expected outcomes, and side effects of each command for setting up a Windows Domain using an RHEL domain controller: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_single... Oh, that’s for 7.5? One that’s 15 years old and no longer under standard support? It still works! Wait, but you’re a new custom…

I wish I could upvote this 10,000 times.

Documentation isn't sexy or something. I don't know why Linux documentation sucks so much, but Redhat makes it suck must less. It takes lots of effort, money and writer hours to create the kind of documentation that Redhat maintains and businesses love documentation. A HOWTO or a FAQ are not documentation.

I actually prefer man pages and I dropped Linux for my personal project years ago in favor of OpenBSD (sometimes FreeBSD) precisely because their man pages are well maintained and really well written. I still have to interact with Linux sometimes and it's almost always Debian or Redhat. And I gotta say Redhat beats Debian on documentation.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#94

Post by BozeWolf »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #66
bandrami wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way my engineering professor put it was so: when even 5 minutes of off-time costs $5,000 of product you want to be sure your systems are stable.

We are at 500k/hour for at least one system i know of at my current client (energy). Not sure what causes these expenses. It can be missing out on trading, or fines. There may be more of these systems :)

Lots of redhat there.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#95

Post by mrweasel »

xinayder wrote: post #9
saw-lau wrote: post #5

I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?

Red Hat announced that they are no longer providing updates to the downstream repo at git.centos.org and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back, essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code". To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the…

> essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code".

I don't think that's the bit that they're angry about, it's the aggressive undercutting of their support contracts, from people who are essentially rebranding their distro.

Red Hat (along with IBM) still contributes an insane amount of open source code that they appear to happily upstream.

On the Code Radio podcast[1] there was some commentary on Red Hats move, and I'm kinda on their side. Why is it that we're unhappy with Red Hat wanting to be paid for their work. You're getting all the open source benefits, if you don't like RHEL, or Red Hat that's fine, you can still benefit from their work, but you might want to pick a different distribution.

And I can see the point, people are upset that Red Hat would like to get pay and yet they expect to be able to profit from a SaaS platform they build on CentOS or Rocky Linux. For some unknown reason, Red Hat is the only company that's not allowed to profit from their work, despite them contributing to everything from the kernel to X, happily upstreaming and maintaining stuff that few others want to deal with.

[1] https://coder.show/525

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#96

Post by jzb »

nubinetwork wrote: post #14

I knew suse used rpm packages, but I always thought they were their own... good to know they are putting in the work to distance themselves from the IBM mess.

Yes, they used the RPM format with their own tool (Zypper instead of DNF/Yum), but packages weren’t (necessarily) compatible with Fedora/RHEL as far as dependencies and such.

But SUSE isn’t just a package of Red Hat.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#97

Post by ZiiS »

ossusermivami wrote: post #60
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RedHat also built their business on the backs of other peoples work, sure they make contributions back but I’m sure they’re minuscule when compared to profit. They read, understood and accepted licences for the products they on-sell and are now throwing their toys out of the pram when the free market does what it was always inevitably going to do with their in-house tech.

> but I’m sure they’re minuscule when compared to profit. how can you be so sure? Do you have insights on Red Hat finance we don't know about?

They were publically traded till 2019 so thier finances were known. Having said that RH have and do contribute huge amounts.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#98

Post by nottorp »

bonzini wrote: post #29
saw-lau wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many thanks!

Note that the last paragraph is a supposition that is not rooted in reality. Red Hat is still doing upstream first development and is still mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision).

> mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision).

Right, they only pressured them to make more money, didn't tell them how exactly.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#99

Post by jzb »

0dayz wrote: post #13

This is very positive news, I wonder though how far will compatible mean? My biggest problem with opensuse is the lack of cockpit support and integration that RHEL has. Also that they use apparmor instead of selinux as default, I wish that selinux would become the standard MAC, with really good tools (cli and gui alike) for handling selinux policies.

I’m not sure it’s positive, they are very light on details. If this is a hard fork, is it really going to deviate from RHEL? Is a $10m investment enough to carry an enterprise distro for a decade?

I’m a little skeptical about this right now, but we’ll see how it pans out.

Re: SUSE is forking RHEL

#100

Post by interactinghash »

0dayz wrote: post #13

This is very positive news, I wonder though how far will compatible mean? My biggest problem with opensuse is the lack of cockpit support and integration that RHEL has. Also that they use apparmor instead of selinux as default, I wish that selinux would become the standard MAC, with really good tools (cli and gui alike) for handling selinux policies.

SUSE is working on making SELinux the default - and it already is on SLE Micro for example
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