Rocky Linux shares how they may continue to obtain the RHEL source code

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rocky-Linux-RHEL-Source-Access

by pathompong • 3 years ago

114 100 3 years ago

verdverm4• 3 years ago

Not sure these "options" are going to satisfy business risk analysis. We are looking into moving away from all things CentOS, RHEL, or projects like Rocky. It was going to be Rocky, but no more. Red Hat got blue washed and is now ruining their reputation

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

I havent been following the saga, just learned about it last week.

Was Red Hat losing money? Or they wanted more money?

fuzzylightbulb• 3 years ago

"It's not the pile, it's piling it higher."

verdverm4• 3 years ago

They sold out to IBM which was already dying, now they are taking Red Hat down with them... sad times

I worked at a different office that got blue washed, it was depressing af, feel bad for the long-time redhatters

sudosysgen• 3 years ago

IBM thought they could extract more than the already nice margins Red Hat was generating.

yndoendo2• 3 years ago

IBM sees economic utility as just making money. They don't see the utility of name branding and ease of transition.

For example, I was using CentOS for prototype development. No way would I be able to get RHEL for this. CentOS allowed for not having to hassle with development license management with RHEL. Meaning more time spent on trying to get something work vs handling business to business logistics. This way, if the prototype was deemed acceptable, I could hand off OS management to IT and they could handle B2B logistics.

Now I no longer prototype with an easily transferable RHEL style OS. Means IBM just reduced their probability of receiving future support contracts. This is where IBM lacks understanding of economic utility.

LordKeren• 3 years ago

Can you share the top contenders for replacements?

verdverm4• 3 years ago

debian most likely, still have to do a proper evaluation, it's a big lift to go from yum to apt though...

bluedino• 3 years ago

SUSE or Ubuntu

traceroute662• 3 years ago

And now with the release of Debian 12 ("bookworm"), Debian is now sufficiently up-to-date for most users.

NegativeK• 3 years ago

Has RHEL ever been about being up to date? I thought their selling point was maintaining ancient ass software.

betaby• 3 years ago

sufficiently up-to-date for most users

Always has been, compared to RHEL

Twirrim3• 3 years ago

The "problem" with Debian is the lifecycle. You get about a 12-24 months at most of security patches, and that's effectively it (the patching model after that is unreliable). That means you've got to allocate resources for upgrading/validating far more regularly than you would with other distributions. Depending on the size of your business, that could get really expensive and disruptive, for negligible benefit.

Canonical Ubuntu has a longer support on their LTS releases, and may be preferable. If you can get past annoyance with things like snaps.

p_l• 3 years ago

I'll admit it's a big source of schadenfreude for me and I hope compliance reaches similar decisions at $DAYJOB.

techwizrd• 3 years ago

This has definitely spooked us as well. We have numerous images based on our rocky base image, so we're looking at what moving away from all things RHEL, Rocky, etc. as well.

brnt4• 3 years ago

I don't understand all these CentOS forks: you're still dealing with Red Hat and reinforcing their ecosystem for free. What if those forks poured the effort behind Debian? A truly democratic distro that cannot pull rugs from under your feet.

Kwpolska2• 3 years ago

If you want Debian, just use Debian. The idea behind CentOS and its successors is to have a free distro that is bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, so that you can support users of your software who are on RHEL, or use software supported only on RHEL for free.

balou23• 3 years ago

Debian LTS only has 5 years of support, without guarantees, on a volunteer basis.

RHEL has 10 years of support, with the option of 13 years.

I like debian, but sometimes you have to have long term support. And I fully understand why you wouldn't support 13 year old software without getting paid for it.

axus• 3 years ago

The idea was that Red Hat was doing things right, no need to punish them. But if they became a problem, there were other ecosystems.

_ea1k5• 3 years ago

I'm not sure that the old model did either, tbh. The clones were never a great choice if you needed to satisfy business concerns.

cratermoon3• 3 years ago

Red Hat got blue washed

I'm not sure I understand the term. Wikipedia says, "Bluewashing is term used to describe deceptive marketing that overstates a company's commitment to responsible social practices. It can be used interchangeably with the term greenwashing but has a greater focus on economic and community factors."

If I follow your usage, you're saying that Red Hat states they are committed to the ethics and social responsibilities of FOSS and the GPL but the actual practices violate those factors. If they are using GPL code but not releasing their code, then I would tend to agree, but IANAL.

Can you clarify a bit?

CHY872• 3 years ago

IBM = big blue. Red Hat were bought by IBM a few years back.

that_guy_iain4• 3 years ago

I read messages like this and it always seems like folk think Red Hat are missing out because people aren't using a free competitor.

What I think this change will make happen, 80-95% of the companies using CentOS or Rocky stop using RHEL based linux distros. But the rest start paying Red Hat. Those who moved away were never going to buy anyways so why should Red Hat care if they don't use a free competitor that used their work?

ROTMetro• 3 years ago

There's two ways to increase business income, extract more $$$ from a captured user base or create value to attract revenue. One is a sign of a healthy company looking at future growth, the other the sign of a zombie company that has to put a tighter squeeze on you quarter after quarter to keep their numbers up. The people making purchasing/vendor decisions take into consideration the risk of going with a 'zombie' company, so those that do pay are also likely to consider moving away as well.

freedomben• 3 years ago

My impression from being somewhat involved in the (early) communities of Rocky and Alma, is that the Rocky people are quite a bit looser with violating EULAs, ToS, etc. Sometimes that is the superior approach, but with something like RHEL rebuilt it makes me nervous. Alma by contrast are very professional. Rocky also has an antagonistic view toward Red Hat, while Alma views Red Hat as partners. People can hate on Red Hat, but without them none of the rebuilds would even be possible. There's still a lot that Red Hat could do to kill them if they wanted to.

Anyway my main point, I'm not worried about Alma getting wiped out, or about them making a bad decision that ends them in legal hot water and jeopardizes the project.

jacooper• 3 years ago

Agree, Alma's response has been way less hacky.

theandrewbailey• 3 years ago

throwaway2990• 3 years ago

Found out that Amazon Linux 2023 is based on fedora (announced in March). They moved quickly from 2022 to 2023!

anyoneamous• 3 years ago

2022 was never released - the AL2 successor was supposed to be AL2022, but delays meant it actually arrived this year.

parasense• 3 years ago

I think the cloud instance is a pretty good option, and is effectively what the old-gangsta CentOS team was doing, with more or different steps. Back in the old days the RPMs were manually imported, there was no RH provided pipeline to get unbranded RPM sources. So it's really not a big deal to go back to the bad old ways, and if they want to ignore the new shiny CentOS stream way of things, well they are free to be as masochistic as they desire. Certainly nobody is forcing math students to use a graphing scientific calculator if they instead prefer to use a slide rule, because we sent men to the moon with slide rules... so I see no point in complaining about Linux neckbeards preferring to stay with the crufty old ways of importing package sources devoid of GIT history, or any modern pleasantries provided by CentOS Stream. I actually respect these rebuilders, although I think they are zealots to some extent, they are zealots in the good way, highly principled on the idea that software builds should be reproducible, for the sake of validating the software supply chain. But there is an insidious side, their user community is not aligned with the noble ideals of rebuilds, and tend to want the value without the costs. It's one thing to rebuild packages, and another to spin a compose of those rebuilt packages into a distro. That's what RH is apparently all bothered about, and I cannot blame them to some extent. But that said, the user community around the foot hills is still the RH user community for them all the way up high on mount Olympus. So I think Rocky, Alma, or whoever else will still get the package sources, no biggy. But what I wonder about is how RH will treat subscribers who deploy RH and the rebuilds.

_ea1k5• 3 years ago

I think in those old days of CentOS, they had direct access to the srpms from an ftp server. This is marginally harder.

linuxftw• 3 years ago

Red Hat currently releases all sources as if they were GPL sources, but that may stop in the future. EG, an Apache 2 licensed project, they're under no obligation to release the source, but they currently choose to.

That will be the next move for the RHEL sources IMO. They'll probably stop releasing all non-GPL licensed code from RHEL proper.

Tepix4• 3 years ago

RedHat is unlikely to do that.

After all, why would anyone still use RedHat if their competetive advantage (i.e. open source) is lost?

As a RedHat customer i want to be able to take their packages (which include the open source software and their changes to it) and rebuild them from source with both their and my patches whenever i feel like doing so.

tsimionescu4• 3 years ago

Their competitive advantage compared to whom, Windows? Their competitive advantage compared to other Linux distros or to the BSDs is enterprise support, not being open source (all of them are). Apple doesn't even sell their OS at all. So who are you comparing RH to?

that_guy_iain4• 3 years ago

After all, why would anyone still use RedHat if their competetive advantage (i.e. open source) is lost?

Who do you think finds that a competitive advantage? What company is saying "You know what, we can use Red Hat spend millions and worst case we just hire some devs to continue the work?" I doubt any are.

Their competitive is what support so many packages and companies can not worry about issues. Open source has no part in that.

elteto• 3 years ago

If you are a paying customer you can get the SRPMs, so nothing has/will change for you.

This will definitely be one of their possible next steps, as they seem bent on locking down RHEL.

I see people frequently disparage the GPL here in HN and promote less encumbered alternatives. Well, _this_ is why the GPL is important, and it will become even more relevant in the future.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

meanwhile Debian users are continuing on with their blissful utopian lives.

stay away from rhel ecosystem for your mental health =)

doublerabbit2• 3 years ago

Its not like that Debian is completely drama free. Ubuntu and Canonical happily provides that mess.

whalesalad2• 3 years ago

Ubuntu and Canonical are downstream. So yes, Debian is more or less drama free.

I run Debian on all my servers and, knock on wood, I have not had an issue in over 15 years of usage. It quite literally is the most rock solid and trouble-free OS I have ever used.

I have a ton of experience with Ubuntu, too, but these days there is no compelling reason to use their stuff. The contrary actually - considering all the telemetry, motd integrations, etc and don't forget snap.

Debian 12 is a really outstanding release.

themerone• 3 years ago

Debian once went 5 years between major releases. They got their act together, but at one time there were legitimate worries about the project's future.

Ericson2314• 3 years ago

Good times for NixOS

pkulak• 3 years ago

I'm in the middle of switching now, from Silverblue. It's a lot of fun. The Arch wiki to do something will have you changing three files and restarting 2 services, while with NixOS you add a line to your config and you're done. And when something doesn't exist as a Nix package/config, it seems somewhat easy to build your self (compared to other package managers, at least). I realized there's no "game-devices" package last night, for example, but I was able to get this working in about an hour of Googling:

https://github.com/pkulak/dotfiles/blob/nix/nix/gamedevices....

Still not all the way in. Like, I'm still going to use Chezmoi for my home directory because I don't quite see the value-add of Home Manager, but who knows; maybe I'll be a super fan next year and move everything over.

_ea1k5• 3 years ago

I really need to dedicate some time to studying that. It sounds like a really solid way to host containers.

Compared to the mess that is ansible+ubuntu, it must be an improvement.

drumhead• 3 years ago

The days of community and cooperation are coming to an end. Reddit ditches the relationship it had with it's users, and now Red Hat is turning into more of a proprietary software company. Did we take the spirit of the old internet for granted? Who's next I wonder.

_ea1k5• 3 years ago

In many respects, I feel like it already ended.

- How many companies still offer free APIs for access to their data? This used to be amazingly common. Now, even my garage door wants a paywall. - Google bragged about not selling search placement. But is what they are doing now really any different than the old keyword buying engines? - How many people still use email? And of those, how many just use gmail, effectively giving Google a near-monopoly - It used to be that MS Office competed with other office suites and there was a lot of talk pushing for long term interoperability. But all of that seemingly died with the shift to online services.

Free as in speech is in worse shape now than it was 20 years ago.

havnagiggle• 3 years ago

I see lots of people standing up for good principles. The status quo is trying to cash in on complacency, but IMO it's just a catalyst for good things to come. People that know why they picked RHEL also know why they will be moving on.

choeger• 3 years ago

I dislike this move from Red Hat, but I think that bug-for-bug compatibility is overvalued. Everyone who either likes the general RH ecosystem or has to support RH customers could probably continue working on CentOS.

People could also just fork and long-term-support CentOS to provide a more stable platform.

pierat• 3 years ago

Well, then let's play the prisoner's dilemma best solution thus far, and do "tit for tat".

That's a nice EPEL you got there. Sure'd be ashame if it went away or if it got left-pad'd!

Rocky Linux shares how they may continue to obtain the RHEL source code

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