Just use a different distro. I use Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Ubuntu, and of course, Debian. And if I want Btrfs support on a EL installation, I use Oracle Linux. Even for development, I can’t stand RHEL. Just the fact that their subscription verification daemons are eating up memory that I could be using for something else, it calls home every time I run a dnf command, and sends intimate system data back to RH via Red Hat Insights kills RHEL for me.
Conclusively, you might want to rethink your statement.
Debian 12 might just be the best Debian release ever.
I think @geerlingguy said it best, fool me once, fool me twice at this point its pretty clear RH intent to try to restrict and control any rebuilds so at least for me I will move to other distro’s for new project or builds. I assume they won’t miss us since we are just freeloaders anyway…SMDH.
All I can say is it usually comes down to a few things and greed is one of them and that is all that its about, need to make more $$…oh well.
Sometimes intelligence is nothing more than a subtle and particularly nasty form of stupidity. Reminds me of some obscure linguists and/or semiologists I had to wade through during my studies. There’s not a paragraph where I don’t find myself shouting out “Oh come on !”. This is the stuff theologists are made of.
Red Hat keeps pulling the rug from under the community, and that’s not okay.
I was actually okay with CentOS Stream, for what it is, supposedly a CI/CD development model. I’m a web developer, and for my needs, that works. I run mostly NGINX, LiteSpeed/OpenLiteSpeed, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, PHP, .NET, Python, and Docker. Then I find out that RH does not contribute everything back to CentOS Stream. Uhm, I’m good then, I suppose, lol. I will stick to community distros and chug along, including Rocky Linux.
If Red Hat no longer wants to be the EL standard, that’s fine by me.
Red hat does put everything into centos stream, otherwise their next minor release would reintroduce defects they already fixed. The only problem is that sometimes the patch goes first to centos stream and then to redhat, and sometimes first to redhat and then to centos stream.
There is a lot of misinformation and emotions mixed in this drama, so things you find out there in posts or in comments, sometimes are misleading or plain wrong, as result of ignorance or emotional bias. Best is to go to primary sources, and then see then actual cases to validate the statements.
I think that post is pretty good, and it actually takes the time to explain some technicality that sometimes sysadmins and general users miss about version control aspects of software engineering.
I personally think CentOS stream project (not the distro) is a great idea, and it will become key for projects like Rocky Linux, Alma, etc… and RHEL itself. It can definitely become a center for community EL, balancing stability with innovation; whether it gets centralized all in the CentOS stream project, or it is forked as it happened with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, the latter becoming the winner over the years.
A Change in Direction: Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In response, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. Instead, AlmaLinux OS will aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible.
Implications for Users: For most users, this change won’t significantly alter their use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still run on AlmaLinux OS, and the system will continue to receive timely security updates. The most notable impact is that AlmaLinux can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat’s release cycle.
Development Process Adjustments: The change in goals will require modifications in the development and build processes. For instance, they will include comments in their patches that link to the source of the applied patch. They will also ask bug reporters to test and replicate the problem in CentOS Stream.
Looking Ahead: With the shift away from being a 1:1 Red Hat downstream rebuild, the team is considering the new possibilities this change brings. They promise to keep the community updated and involved in the decision-making process.
Commitment to Open Source: Despite these changes, the team remains dedicated to being good open source citizens. They will continue to contribute upstream in Fedora and CentOS Stream and to the greater Enterprise Linux ecosystem.
Gratitude and Call for Support: The post concludes with a thank you to everyone who has shown interest and support. They invite those interested in helping out to get involved in various ways, from joining the Infrastructure and Cloud SIGs to becoming a sponsor or backer.
In conclusion, the blog post from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation outlines a significant shift in their approach due to changes in Red Hat’s policy. The decision to move away from being a 1:1 binary copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and instead aim for Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatibility is a strategic pivot that could open up new opportunities for AlmaLinux. This change allows them more flexibility in accepting bug fixes and making updates, which could potentially lead to a more robust and responsive operating system.
From my perspective, this is a positive development. It shows that the AlmaLinux team is adaptable and responsive to changes in the broader ecosystem. Their commitment to keeping the community involved in the decision-making process is commendable and speaks to their dedication to open source principles. Furthermore, their call for community involvement and support underscores the collaborative nature of open source projects. It will be interesting to see how these changes play out and what new opportunities they bring to AlmaLinux and its users.
I believe that there are two things at play here:
Cloud Linux had no desire to pick up all the development work and do it on their own for the Cloud Linux stack of products. Therefore, I believe that going forward Cloud Linux will use AlmaLinux as their upstream.
On June 30th this was posted on LinkedIn: The secret behind Fedora, CentOS and RHEL. It was very well written and explained how CentOS Stream is built, and how AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux could move forward.
I believe that AlmaLinux embraced the changes and decided to move forward and build their distro using CentOS Stream as a base.
I’m curious if Rocky Linux will change course and take a similar approach, or if the distribution will continue to strive to be a 1:1 clone of RHEL.
I like Alma’s approach and I hope they do well. I hope that this works for Red Hat as well, and we don’t wake up one day with Red Hat shutting down CentOS Stream or pulling the carpet from under our feet by making some other drastic changes.
I started using Red Hat Linux in 1997, version 4.2 (Biltmore). Over the years I’ve used Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware (I talked many times with Patrick Volkerding, great guy), Mandrake Linux (Open Mandriva now), SuSE Linux (before the Novel acquisition), FreeBSD and a little bit of Solaris. Funny enough, I have a Red Hat developer account, however, I don’t like using RHEL because of the entire subscription thing. It’s just annoying to me that every time I run dnf it calls home, or that it sends info about my servers home, or that if I don’t sign up with Red Hat Insights it will nag me until I do. However, I do love the environment and how everything works. I’d rather use CentOS Stream than deal with all of that. Thankfully, I don’t have to thanks to Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux.
No emotions here, and after Alma’s announcement, I’m pumped that they decided to move on beyond simply cloning RHEL. I wonder what course Rocky Linux will take from here on out.
Watch this, a very good video:
Here is a summary of the video:
The video starts with an introduction to a podcast episode where Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ and Executive Director of RDSF, is interviewed. Greg shares his journey with Linux and open source, and his background in biochemistry.
Greg talks about the creation of Rocky Linux, inspired by SentOS, a community-based distribution of Linux created when Red Hat Linux was discontinued. He led the SentOS project for a few years before it was acquired by Red Hat.
The video discusses the end of life for the CentOS Linux community and the transition to CentOS Stream. Greg expresses his excitement about recreating CentOS and announces the creation of a Slack group for interested individuals.
The video touches on the infrastructure portion of the operating system and the process of building it. It also highlights the close working relationship between Red Hat and CentOS teams.
Greg discusses the creation of a new project called Rocky Linux, which aims to fill the void left by the discontinuation of CentOS. The project has spent a lot of time thinking about the organizational and ownership structure to avoid the issues faced by CentOS.
The video discusses the importance of maintaining control over a board and organization in order to effectively manage projects. Greg believes that it is not a good idea for companies to own and control open source projects.
The video discusses the relationship between corporate entities and open source projects. It emphasizes the importance of strong backing for open source projects to prevent outside influence.
The video discusses the sustainability of open source projects and the importance of commercial support. It highlights the need for a large number of individuals and companies to contribute to and sponsor open source projects for them to be sustainable.
The video discusses the collaboration between different organizations in the development of cloud technology. It also touches on the trend towards rolling releases and the balance between stability and innovation.
The video discusses the desire for a more traditional release cycle and stability in enterprise software. It mentions the excitement about the future of technology, including Kubernetes, microservices, and containers.
The video discusses the importance of having different distributions that people can use based on their needs and preferences. It also highlights the challenges that still need to be solved, particularly in the areas of high-performance computing and orchestration.
The video concludes by discussing the need for diversity in orchestration and scheduling of resources in order to modernize high-performance computing. Greg shares some exciting use cases of Rocky Linux, particularly in scientific computing.
Towards the end, Greg expresses his enthusiasm for these developments and his personal reasons for being excited about them. He mentions being able to focus on and facilitate everything from medical science to energy research to physics and astronomy.
The video discusses the use of big national labs, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and government entities to help with the COVID-19 pandemic. It also mentions the development of a new cloud-native build system.
The video ends with a thank you message expressing gratitude for discussing and improving Rocky Linux, as well as for sharing insights and being a guest on the show.
They have the resources and the backing (cloudlinux folks) to do it. CloudLinux was already using almalinux as their base, they did make this known. You have to consider that some of the folks who work on Alma are the same folks who work for CloudLinux. Combine that with some of the other backers they have, they can make things work as best they can and I wish them luck.
We have made it clear we are keeping our promise of remaining 1:1 to the extent that it is possible to obtain the sources for 8 and 9. This can be found on our website in our news section.
I was going off Igor Seletskiy’s blog post that he wrote right after Rex Hat dropped the news. Like many others, he was a little bit bitter about the situation. Red Hat did a very poor job comunicating the changes, and added a lot of unnecessary drama to the situation. All of that could have been avoided. They need to hire some good PR people and let them make this announcements. Spin control is not their forte.
I’ve used Cloud Linux for a number of years, and given the changes they like to make to the kernel and other parts of the OS, this change is actually a positive one for them.
At this point it would actually benefit Red Hat to directly hand you the srpm files, and in turn the community submits bug reports and fixes to CentOS Stream. More eyes on RHEL is a good thing. After all, this is what they wanted out of it: more help from the community. Now they can get it. I honestly doubt they’ll make it any more difficult than they already have for you to get the sources. It’d be nice to make it easier though.
I’m teaching version control software at our local university here in France, and all I can see in this article is it tries desperately to “drown the fish” as we say here. A very complicated way of explaining things away and have the readers fooled.
In my opinion they won’t shut down CentOS Stream because that is an upstream test bed. The Opensource community supports it and deals with any of the bugs so it is free technology labor.
Hopefully won’t need to get lawyers involved but an interesting source of legal filings from IBM lawyers is at http://www.groklaw.net/. The site seems to have not been updated since 2013 so kind of stale but the site extensively covered the IBM v. SCO Linux case back when when SCO claimed that Linux violated their copyrights to Unix. Lots of interesting filings from IBM defending the GPL and open source in general.
There is no need to involve lawyers as Red Hat is not violating any laws, and IBM owns Red Hat. The IBM v. SCO case has nothing to do with what’s going on now. The issue is that Red Hat doesn’t want clones of RHEL, so they are circumventing the GPL by simply choosing not to keep customers who choose to do so. As an extra measure, they are only distributing SRPM’s per request. Nothing about this violates the GPL. It’s a jerk move but completely legal.
I feel I should also elaborate on why this is such a big deal to begin with. First off, I am a retired Federal contractor for the DoD. I worked in infosec for 25 years at Naval Base Kitsap. Red Hat and the United States Federal government are highly entrenched, with some of its board members being retired military (Our leadership team). In fact, the past chairman was Hugh Shelton, a retired Army General (Hugh Shelton - Wikipedia). A lot of the patches that Red Hat receives come from the U.S Army, Navy, NSA, Air Force, and more. Some of the security and stability patches that Red Hat implements are only released as pre-patched src code, like the Linux Kernel. So what Red Hat has done is essentially made every other Linux distro not Red hat less secure because now the community only gets that patched software when and how Red Hat desires.
Personally I think this has more to do with U.S National Security (Russia and China) than just money.
Pam finished with Groklaw ages back, that’s why it’s not been updated. But there is plenty of interesting reading there, especially the IBM vs SCO. Novell also had a good one which they won also a while back.
I remember when SCO jacked up the price of their crappy Caldera Linux distro to $600 and then told everyone in the Linux community that using any other Linux distro would constitute copyright infringement. People were freaking out.
Thanks for the update on Pam. I continued to follow Groklaw for a little while after the SCO/Novell v. IBM case ended but gradually lost interest once the fireworks subsided. I was working for a small Linux startup at the time of the case and it impacted us as people were afraid of getting pulled into the legal fray (e.g., like AutoZone).
My last gig before I retired was working as a System Administrator at Raytheon on their GPSOCX project. To the best of my knowledge, we were using RHEL and CentOS as released. We were creating hundreds if not thousands of instances on AWS to support testing with CentOS being the solution to not owing huge $$$ to RH for all of the instances getting created, used and recycled.
I mention lawyers and SCO/Novell v. IBM only because IBM/RH is attempting to restrict what source they release and who they release it to. It is a very fine line that may require legal action. Hopefully it won’t.
I understand. If at any time you’re ever concerned about license violations, such as now, you can always contact License Violations and Compliance — Free Software Foundation — Working together for free software for general GPL compliance. For the Linux kernel, you can contact Linus Torvalds at torvalds@linux-foundation.org. Note: he is actually quite pleasant to chat with. Also, you can contact Richard Stallman at rms@gnu.org. Note: he comes off as grumpy and is a stickler for grammar and punctuation. Any of these three will give you solid answers to your questions, I am not sure if Rocky has a GPL Compliance Officer if not that might be something they might want to look into.
