I do agree that it is a fine line. Are the lawyers taking some time to analyse a possible legal action?
I havenāt heard anything but enforcing licensing usually involves lawyers. Like I said earlier, I hope it doesnāt come to that.
I just wanted to remind people of the resource and how the community was able to meaningfully contribute. The closed source mindset has a lot of difficulty understanding how much the community contributes to Linux in general and RHEL in particular. If youāll pardon the pun, they donāt grok open source.
Anyone okay with wanting to use an ABI compatible RHEL distribution might as well use CentOS Stream then since it already is.
While it is under RHās control I donāt see it as a good option. I hope that in the long term Alma and Rocky become major options to RH in what regards EL.
The way Red Hat has set up their development process makes sense:
Fedora ā [CentOS Stream] ā RHEL. Iād like to stress that CentOS Stream is not beta quality software. For all intents and purposes, it is closer to release-candidate quality software. For most people, like me, who donāt deploy mission-critical servers, CentOS Stream is just fine. In addition to that, point releases were a bug, not a feature, in the old CentOS.
There is a method to Red Hatās development process, and it works quite well.
That being said, a greater concern is who owns significant portions of IBM. These two funds have their fingers in every major corporation and have thus far enacted changes in the transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, and financial sectors that contribute to our daily pain, on a global scale. Institutional investors pull the major strings and are the cause of many decisions meant to generate higher profits for them. Red Hat has always had a good head on its shoulders. The day they can no longer make sensible, common-sense decisions, is the day we all have to look somewhere else.
For now, Iām sticking with RHEL, CentOS Stream, Oracle Linux, Fedora, Rocky & Alma Linux. I like the ecosystem, love building packages, and coding. It feels likeā¦ home. Iām just not ready to move to Debian and Ubuntu permanently, yet.
There is nothing wrong with the Stream process. It is a good and useful process that I feel vendors and many others should really take advantage of to certify their software on and I truly believe that. My development team actively use Stream 8 and 9 to try to be ready and suss out upcoming changes they may or may not impact us. I agree that it works well. The folks working on it say it still isnāt perfect process wise, though itās a lot better than what I think most really expected. Stream 10 can only be better.
Though I have to slightly disagree with the ārelease candidate qualityā statement, because there tends to be problems that come up as a result of changes that are pushed. Theyāre not as major as sha1 being disabled and the gpg key being sha1 (though thankfully theyāre working on moving to sha256), but they do come up. And they can cause issues with either userās systems or a given userās or organizationās workflows that rely on Stream.
Iām not sure I understand where this is coming from. Is this implying that IBM had sway in the decisions that Red Hat is making? Whether or not it does, Red Hatās decisions were not of IBMās direction or making. Red Hat is more than capable of making decisions on their own. There is nothing that shows that the decisions made were pushed or forced by IBM.
does this mean if RESF would spend 1 license on RH server theyāre good to continue forking ?
in a way that makes sense since, please do correct me, maintenance of sourcecode is quite intensive. Then again, it worked without fees for decades. Maybe IBM wants to kill or weaken Red Hat to please some other of their business partners.
No, because their subscription agreement doesnāt allow for that.
Spending 34 billion to kill something off seems a bit expensive to me, so I doubt it.
Depends on how the finance department is going about it. Dismanteling Red Hat could be a strategy by incorporating the various units into the larger IBM entity and keep the brand name for a few years.
In all, up to the 90s to have source provided with enterprise software you bought was not unusual. Especially not with mini systems if that rings a bell.
It could be there is a desire to return to this proven profitable model over seeing part of business evaporate to enthousiasts who are decimating the potential number of licenses sold. Over the years this is what i noticed, 1 RH license for 10 or so RH-clone systems in any type of environment.
RH is not alone in this, GrSec did something similar before. Business wise it makes a lot of sense.
It will be up to communities to prove theyāll be able to build Enterprise-Grade Linux and run a profit withouth the symbiotic relationships of the past. I donāt see this happen, maybe initially, not long term.
The move by Suse may be the only option left. Not much to say about Suse, i actually liked what i saw in past encounters. Maybe i should consider Suse over Red Hat for future projects.
As a European that seems just the most sensible thing to do.
The sha1 one was a big one. After that happened CentOS started the CI run between the compose and the mirror push, which runs the t_functional sig project.
That project is also a great place to contribute in addition to the zuul ci.
OK. Like a few of the members her Iāve been using linux since about 2000 ā Starting with Mandrake Linux (a Red Hat offshoot), then moving a short time to Red Hat (NOT RHEL) I think it was Red Hat 5 or 7) then moving to Fedora where I shed more than enough of my blood, then settled into CentOS 5ā¦6ā¦ and 7(still running CentOS 7.9 on my workstation) and then Red Hat killed off Centos. I was not a happy camper. I moved over Rocky Linux 8.3, then 8.4ā¦8.5ā¦8.6ā¦ 8.7, and I juist downloaded RL 8.8, but also downloaded 9.2. Since I needed to wipe my NVMe drive be it an OLD version of 8.7 or a new version of 8.7 to install RL 9.2 (still being installed and configured and tricked out to be as S-M-O-O-T-H as 8.7) and then I fell across this thread that Red Hat might have just killed Rocky Linux as well and I am going, āGreat!! Not Again!ā All I know is Red Hat it its derivatives. Sure Iāve tried others like several of the *ubuntus, Majnjaro, Liniux Mint, and CURRENTLY openSUSE LEAP now at 15.5.
While I love Rocky Linux 8.7, (and hopefully 9.2 after I finished getting it installed, configured, and tricked out) my buddy has basically strayed over to openSUSE 15.4, and dropped Rocky Linux which is his secondary OS.
Whereas Rocky Linux tries to be a bug-for-bug compatible with RHEL, the same goes for my buddy and I and our OSās so we both run Rocky Linux and openSUSE though I am known as āMr. Guinea Pigā (ie. I get to test out the latest OS to see if there is something he should know before he installs the OS on his production Research Workstation. I am retired and while I still do some research, my machines are not āmission critical machinesā, whereas he canāt be shut down for more than a few hours, so I get to go first. While he has had some experience with openSUSE, I had ZERO.
But this debate of the possible killing off of the RHEL clones, such as Rocky Linux , as much as I would hate to see that happen, as Red Hat is by far the easiest to update from point release to point release, and by far the easiest to maintain, but if truth be told part of the reason IBM bought Red Hat is that IBM is all about BIG IRON, and they saw a long time ago that Linux could easily replace UNIX on their servers. The result: RHEL as a result of the IBM purchase has been moving to become a SERVER ONLY OS , and they are trying to phase out their commitment of supporting Workstations. Before the purchase by IBM, RHEL supported both GNOME and KDE, though it was still a GNOME centric , OS, then Red Hat dropped providing KDE and made it ONLY a GNOME only OS, though it will still run KDE.
openSUSE Leap however is far more user friendly, The exception is the install of openSUSE, which is a bloody nightmare compared to RHEL, and while in theory you can ārolloverā from one point release to another, we have not confirmed it yet. openSUSE 15.5 LEAP too has a wide range of apps, widgets, etc. plus comes in various āspinsā including the various DE including KDE (their DEFAULT vs GNOME) but also GNOME, CINNAMON, MATE , and I think Xfce. It is by far, far more configurable that RHEL and its clones.
I think we have finally reached a point in Linuxās Evolution where the various OS distros will āspecializeā. It has already started to happen: RHEL, now in the hands of IBM, has started to specialize into an OS designed to run on BIG IRON, such as servers and server farms, they are more than happy to sacrifice their workstation business, so long as they can corner the server market. openSUSE realizes that a lot of Linux users run Workstations. and while openSUSE will run on BIG IRON, truthfully they have ceded the server market to IBM and Red Hat. openSUSE realizes that they can try and corner the Workstation Market. You then have Debian, Arch Linux, and Free BSD. none of which have the userbase of either Red Hat or SUSE. And if I find openSUSE is a PITA to install, they are worse. after that you have basically the beginner / advanced user market which is dominated by the *buntus, manjaro, and maybe a few others. The rest of the distros are aimed at beginners.
Still this REALLY BAD News. We just went through this when Red Hat killed off CentOS, now they are trying to kill off Rocky Linux and its sisters as well?? At least I will have a Backup OS Iāll have ready to roll.
Sadly,
Dā Cat
@desercat ,
I donāt think has shown indication of dropping support for workstations, ā¦ they did announce recently they are increasing their effort on Wayland and overall user experience on Gnome (at the expense of dropping libreoffice).
I think they are just refocusing to keep the employees head count unchanged and focus on what Desktop enterprise users want the most. They still have their workstation hardware certification program up and running.
We use RHEl 9 workstations at my company, and its adoption is increasing at the expense of MacOS. So far great. Now with the developerās access you can have it entirely for free.
Rocky Linux is still a solid option for desktop, especially 9. CentOS stream was being tested as workstation at facebook and working in making it a reality.
OpenSuSE has other set of problems as you will find out, including the community as what I can hear. I did start early 2000 with Mandrake as well 