Hi,
I just stumbled over this: https://openela.org/
This looks promising, the more so since it’s backed by major players like SUSE and Oracle.
What’s your take on this ?
As a relative newcomer to this board, i think the lack of replies at this point is because CIQ who clearly have a close relationship with rocky did this without letting anyone know.
so you can understand why some of those who have invested quite a bit of time in this project maybe a bit … well i cant find the words without possibly offending someone.
My personal take on this is that it could be a good thing as so many people rely on “enterprise Linux” it would be a good thing to wrestle control of the direction of enterprise Linux away from a company that has clearly bitten the hand that feeds it.
Then again one of CIQ’s partners in this is far from an angel when it comes to software licensing.
just my point of view.
regards peter
I’m not sure how you define “close relationship” as CIQ is a principal sponsor, nothing more than that. Unless you want to count the few people on my team that are at CIQ, I wouldn’t consider that a close relationship as they were on my team before being hired there.
This is 99% true while the 1% is based on detail-less statements given to myself and other team leads of the Rocky Linux project. Meaning, something was happening, but we had no idea what that “something” was.
We were told “partnerships are being built” and “conversations are happening” without being given any details, which set off red flags and alarm bells to me right away. I was very adamant that unless we’re involved, the RESF nor the Rocky Linux project cannot be properly represented, regardless of what it is. Majority of the other leads in the project were in agreement with my stance on the matter that it comes down to “we”, not “you”. No votes took place, no consent was requested, no details were given. As a result: The RESF cannot be involved nor represented.[1][2]
Collectively, we have not been pleased about how this has been happening for the past couple years. This most recent thing is what made us speak much louder than before.
My take is that it remains to be seen what this is actually going to do or provide to the greater Enterprise Linux community and derivative projects. I personally have a hard time taking any of it seriously for the time being and the benefits need to be proven in the coming months.
footnotes
[1] It is simply not possible for conversations to occur nor partnerships to be created when not even the boards of the RESF and projects are made aware nor requested to be part of the representation and building of a relationship with others. Closed door conversations or “strategic maneuvering” is never considered a positive from my point of view.
[2] This comes from the misrepresentation of the RESF and our project by key individuals. Time and time again, we have been represented poorly without consent nor discussion with project leads nor board members. You don’t create optimism nor good will among a community nor those who work on Rocky Linux when there are private conversations and then the foundation, the project, and your for-profit company are all being represented at the same time when they shouldn’t.
The result of the incorrect representation is that it has produced many rumors and false information about our foundation and project all over, the primary one being that CIQ and the RESF/Rocky Linux project are the same entities. CIQ does not build Rocky Linux. A recent falsehood that recently came up is that we have a “support business unit” which I found kind of funny. There are many more I could cover here. But the point is that the false information has continued to persist, regardless of what myself (and others in the project) have tried to say.
5 Likes
We still have to wait and see what will come out of this closed-door corporate deal.
While waiting for the clarifications necessary to restore confidence, I share this interesting point of view:
OpenELA is bad news for the Linux world
And also this series of posts really awesome that show there has been a clone war since the beginning of Red Hat Linux:
Dissociated Press:Clone Wars
One positive point, the absence of comments from RESF/Rocky Linux finally show to the outside that it’s not CIQ.
Although, why would there be separate comments from RESF/Rocky Linux, if “RESF/Rocky Linux is CIQ”?
Absence supports confirmation bias.
Absolutely, if not clear enough that was my point.
Another reason for the lack of replies is–perhaps–due to the thread being a few hours old by the time you made this reply, not to mention being in the middle of the night for the US.
I’m interested, personally, in where this will go, but I’m keeping it “at arms length” for the most part.
As Louis says, the RESF didn’t have any foreknowledge of this happening, aside from some mentions of things that Greg was working on. I, personally, had seen some early ‘drafts’ of what I now know is OpenELA, but aside from providing some guidance with respect to the effort involved in what we’re doing with Rocky, I didn’t have any involvement in the project and found out about it at basically the same time as the rest of the Rocky team.
That being said, I do think that the RESF should be involved to represent our interests and to keep an eye on what is going on. At a high level, OpenELA appears to have similar goals to our project with respect to maintaining our position of a downstream rebuild of RHEL, just a “source only” option.
Since the announcement by RHEL, the rocky team has been working hard on new features and components to our build system to assist with attestation of sources–integrating this into our already existing workflow for debranding and importing SRPMs to build for release. This code is open source, and I do think that it is something that OpenELA could utilize to assist with what they are working on.
To that end, myself and a handful of others from the RESF are in the OpenELA chat. I intend to deliver reports/updates to the RESF based on my interactions there, just as I do with other upstream projects I contribute to (EPEL, ELN, etc)
Seems like a really good idea
Ideas can be good, but the implementations are what counts.
(E.g. ESR said something about rhetoric of RMS.)
It’s not an accidental stumble. Rocky’s underwriters are founding member.
As for it’s prospects - it shall succeed by the extent it restores the hopes an aspirations of the entire upstream with Fedora as Nexus.
It can do it through their stomachs by paying Fedora principals to do what they like and at the same time sharing Rocky dogfood with them. Otherwise it would be a short lived marriage of convenience a la IBM/Fedora.