What do you guys think about this move from CloudLinux “to release a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL”?
I am not sure what to think about that. They probably have everything in place, but a real community-effort cannot come from a business in this form.
Here ist the blog post:
I believe there have been some initial discussions about collaboration but I can’t recall who mentioned that or where. I think it may have been @hbjy?
Personally, I welcome more openly available, open sourced EL builds.
I personally think it’s to their credit that they are not spinning this as anything other than “this is good business for us” and their commitment to opensourcing their pipeline and tooling is great for the entire EL community.
Igor from CloudLinux is a great guy, very smart and I exchanged emails with him before about different things in their products.
They actually do have experience already as they are building their packages directly from Red Hat sources for years. They are in an excellent position to do this both in experience and staff because that is what they do for years now.
Will they try to push their commercial offerings and products with this? Of course, but as long as they don’t bundle any of their tools and packages into the OS and it truly stays bit by bit with RHEL then I suspect plenty of hosting companies and other cloud providers with use them. Let’s hope they just don’t push the upselling too hard which can bother some.
This is course under the control of a commercial company, that might be a good thing or bad depending on how you see things as they can change their tune at anytime. You also have Oracle Linux, they also advertise free for ever (forever seems an overstatement…) and actually that seems to be the best option currently because they patch faster than CentOS when Red Hat releases a new security patch and in some ways is even better than Red Hat because it uses new kernels.
Now, personally I have my suspicious about using anything with the Oracle name on it, but so far its seems to work just fine for most people or even better than CentOS. In the end neither Oracle, nor CloudLinux can really lock you down because as long as their packages are the same, you can always switch back to something else in the future with a simple repo change. There is also Springdale and with this CentOS announcement I suspect other projects will also emerge.
There are huge companies using CentOS, you can expect more than one major company announcing their own Linux distro in the future. This is positive, because now we are going to get, not just CentOS but many RHEL based distros to pick, just like Ubuntu also has so many variants.
But is it not a great opportunity for them (CloudLinux) to back up a undoubtedly open source project like Rocky Linux and in the same time making more people use an OS they know and can support (I mean sell support) ?
It’s two birds in one stone.
I fail to see why that would be the case. From a business logic perspective they have no choice. Their whole product and company relies on CentOS like many other software developers and service companies. It’s just an extra tiny step for them to release an open source OS when they are already compiling RHEL from source. As opposed to Rocky Linux they don’t even have to start from scratch because they are doing this for years.