Rocky Linux, Reflections on Three Years of Growth

https://rockylinux.org/news/happy-birthday-rocky/

by nuker • 2 years ago

39 57 2 years ago

rockylinux.org

repelsteeltje• 2 years ago

Yet another Rocky post that craftfully manages not to mention Red Hat or RHEL by name.

[added]

And CentOS, but not CentOS Stream.

bayindirh8• 2 years ago

What should have they done? Thank them and IBM for setting the landscape ablaze, and dropping a couple of napalms on top by stopping white-box SRPM distributions?

freedomben5• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the Rocky Linux attitude in action. Red hat has done and continues to do absolutely nothing deserving of thanks. Not for their work on fedora, not centos stream, not the myriad of projects that they maintain, absolutely nothing.

DarkmSparks2• 2 years ago

Probably following my grans advice.

If you cant say anything nice dont say anything at all.

bclemens9• 2 years ago

Projects have always done this, as Red Hat has always been rather litigious and it's unwise to give them any unnecessary ground for legal complaints. The common euphemism has been "Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor" since the early days of CentOS.

Back in 2007, CentOS's self-description was "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor's redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free".

chasil• 2 years ago

Interestingly, Oracle does not remove the /etc/redhat-release file.

That would be an interesting fight.

nuker9• 2 years ago

My default Linux for stuff. Just installed it as a VM on my Proxmox box for an SFTPgo instance. I think it is the best choice today for RPM based distro.

opentokix• 2 years ago

Just give up on that RedHat trash

bayindirh8• 2 years ago

Depends on what you are, and what you do. If you don't have the expertise, and you run non-standard hardware (IB cards, GPU farms, or semi-complex storage to begin with), having a RH subscription is a plus IMHO.

If you believe that you can handle all of that yourself (and you can do if you're willing to do), go with one of the free alternatives.

tutfbhuf3• 2 years ago

I don't know. All that I read from them over and over again is that they celebrate themselves and that they made the right decisions. What I really would like to read are more detailed writings about their challenges, especially legal concerns.

bayindirh8• 2 years ago

AFAIK, they don't detail these for a reason.

bclemens9• 2 years ago

We aim to be as transparent as possible. The only information that we don't share publicly is the obvious stuff (PII, sensitive infrastructure information, etc). The information regarding source access / challenges / etc is available at https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/.

bclemens9• 2 years ago

We have a whole blog post about exactly that, here: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/

tutfbhuf3• 2 years ago

I had already read that when it was published, and I think it's very vague.

Fortunately, there are alternative methods available to obtain source code, and we would like to highlight two examples

Okay, you list two options for obtaining the source of any RHEL binaries, but which one of these do you currently use? Or can't you say anything about it due to legal reasons?

These methods are possible because of the power of GPL. No one can prevent redistribution of GPL software.

Not every RHEL binary is GPL-licensed, though. How do you plan to obtain the source for non-GPL-licensed binaries, where there might be no legal guarantee to obtain the source?

mihalycsaba• 2 years ago

What's the difference between Rocky and AlmaLinux? Why would one choose one over the other?

bayindirh8• 2 years ago

Rocky mirrors RHEL exactly, aiming to be a bug for bug compatible release with RHEL itself.

Alma Linux decided to mirror CentOS stream, being an independent RHEL clone, only with ABI compatibility guarantee [0].

They are taking slightly different routes as alternatives, Rocky taking a harder approach, if you pardon the pun.

[0] https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/

jaboutboul• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t rebuilding from the RHEL sources be the easier approach?

Also Alma doesn’t mirror Stream, they pull sources from several unencumbered places including stream.

gtirloni• 2 years ago

I can't be see parallels with "Don't just build a wrapper around OpenAI's API".

mvavassori• 2 years ago

TBF if I were to start a company today i would never choose a RHEL-based distro over a Debian-based one. As a matter of fact almost all startups are already on Ubuntu... To my perspective playing corporate games with the open source community have hurt the public image of "stability" of RHEL-based distros. (Obviously Rocky and Alma have no fault on this)

nuker9• 2 years ago

As a matter of fact almost all startups are already on Ubuntu... To my perspective playing corporate games with the open source community ...

"Canonical Ltd.[4] is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth" [0]

Lol, Canonical is as corporate as they go. I think using Ubuntu is a dumb choice. Canonical is unpredictable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)

cpach• 2 years ago

Yeah, IMHO Debian feels much more dependable.

bclemens9• 2 years ago

Happily surprised to see this hit the front page! If anyone is interested, I keep track of some statistics regarding Rocky Linux usage at https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com/auto.html

Note that those statistics are only really useful for determining relative usage of Enterprise Linux distros as it's derived from EPEL logs. I haven't gotten around to attempting to derive statistics from the Rocky Linux logs because it's an intimidating amount of data.

(It's supposed to be automatic, but it seems the GitHub CI is having an issue with one of the dependencies for the past week. Guess now's a good time to fix it, and maybe make the page look more aesthetically pleasing...)

nuker9• 2 years ago

Offtopic. I watched this post rankings [0] and saw a huge drop from 6 to 75, a minute ago. Damn algorithms, lol

[0] https://hnrankings.info/39286209/

Rocky Linux, Reflections on Three Years of Growth

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