[HN Gopher] Has Rakuten made a Rocky-er road for Red Hat?
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Has Rakuten made a Rocky-er road for Red Hat?
Author : CrankyBear
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-10-31 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mobileeurope.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mobileeurope.co.uk)
| bdcravens wrote:
| TIL Rakuten has a cloud services business, but I'm still not sure
| what it is.
|
| Clicking on one of the pages for Rakuten Symphony
| (https://symphony.rakuten.com/automation/a-single-platform) I
| think I'm even more confused:
|
| "A single platform, where all operational data sits powering
| real-time AI driven feedback loops for continuous workflow
| improvements. In the platform, automation enablement scales to
| the size of the wanted business rather than being limited by the
| operational headcount."
|
| I feel like an entire graduating class of MBAs is kept employed
| just maintaining this page.
| anthomtb wrote:
| If you are a VP of a mobile operator who has KPI's of
| "integrate AI", "drive automation", and "stable headcount" then
| that page pretty much says take-my-money.
| solidsnack9000 wrote:
| Regarding Rocky Linux, it is "...an open-source enterprise
| operating system designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux(r).": https://rockylinux.org
|
| The news page goes back about two years:
| https://rockylinux.org/news/2
| pinewurst wrote:
| "Designed to be" == they recompile RHEL source and sell support
| - for some level of support - cheaper than RH.
| jacooper wrote:
| The article is written weirdly.
|
| So Rakuten owns CIQ which created Rocky Linux?
| Lio wrote:
| I'd not heard of Rocky Linux or CIQ before so I thought I'd check
| them out.
|
| Sadly looking at their corporate About Page[1] tells me nothing
| about who they are, when they were founded or who their key
| people are.
|
| Instead it's all "Why People Choose CIQ" and "Empowering People"
| type meaningless marketing fluff and I'm none the wiser. That
| doesn't fill me with confidence.
|
| 1. https://ciq.co/about/
| robertoglick wrote:
| Check out
|
| https://rockylinux.org/about/
|
| Then go to bottom of page there is lots of info and a great FAQ
| and check out the community.
| hedora wrote:
| It's from one of the original CentOS founders.
|
| I imagine they want to write "Rocky Linux: Brought to you by
| CentOS", but cannot, since they sold the trademark to Red Hat
| years ago.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I haven't willing used Redhat since they dropped desktop support,
| and spun out Fedora as a community supported replacement. I had
| just purchased a boxed copy with a book from best buy, and they
| let me return it even though it violates their policy against
| returning open software. I knew the manager that was working and
| explained open source to her, but I think she just let me slide
| cause she liked me. I used the money to buy a physical copy of
| Suse, which came with a bigger book. Suse was my main driver for
| a few years after that, but I switched to debian when Novell
| bought them and started causing trouble. I really liked Suse
| though, Yast was way ahead of it's time.
|
| Sorry, that took a bit long to get to the point that these days I
| only use Redhat because it's the only linux distro available at
| my job. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe IBM
| is just realizing no one gets joy from using RedHat anymore, so
| they might as well squeeze every bit of money out of it before it
| dies.
| dralley wrote:
| >> I haven't willing used Redhat since they dropped desktop
| support,
|
| But desktop support still exists?
| https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| "explained open source to her, but I think she just let me
| slide cause she liked me"
|
| I think she let you return it because she didn't want to hear
| anymore about open source.
| derkoe wrote:
| Red Hat makes things worse for paying customers to sell more
| subscriptions which will fail in the end.
|
| One example for this is their UBI (universal base image) which
| should be used to build RHEL containers. The image is "free to
| use" and therefore they removed lots of packages from the
| included repos. Many packages cannot be installed - with the
| current version 9 they removed even more packages. This is really
| frustrating and time consuming.
|
| My recommendation: use Alma or Rocky Linuxes as an alternative
| mekster wrote:
| Serious question but why aren't people comfortable with CentOS?
|
| It wasn't a live or die change but people seemed to have
| freaked out somehow.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| People used CentOS to get a perfectly stable OS for free.
| Beta testing releases for RH runs contrary to that usecase.
| mekster wrote:
| Practically how is that damaging your use case by using
| CentOS stream? Do you see many things being unstable?
|
| It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.
|
| https://www.centos.org/distro-faq/#q5-does-this-mean-that-
| ce...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Practically how is that damaging your use case by using
| CentOS stream? Do you see many things being unstable?
|
| I don't know what the actual rate of bugs ended up being;
| I burned CentOS from my infrastructure when the news
| dropped.
|
| > It doesn't refer CentOS as a beta release of RH.
|
| Yes, RH is quite attached to their lie that the thing
| that gets changes before the next stable version of their
| commercial product isn't a beta. It's unclear to me
| whether they somehow actually believe this (and if so,
| why they're giving free users a supposedly better product
| than paying customers), or if not why they expect anyone
| else to believe them, but that is indeed their official
| claim.
| jfindley wrote:
| Because the thing that centos has morphed into isn't terribly
| useful. It gets most updates early, and as a result has
| _many_ bugs, which often take a good while to get fixed.
|
| However for security issues it's the other way around - RH
| won't release security fixes into centos until they've rolled
| out across all their sold products, even long-term
| maintenance releases of old OSes. This can take weeks.
|
| End result: many bugs, often broken, and can be missing
| security fixes for far longer than any sensible user would be
| comfortable with. It's a product to make facebook (who are
| the primary user of it) happy essentially, and very little
| else.
| mekster wrote:
| Do you have references for "many bugs, often broken" or are
| you exaggerating?
|
| You complain about fixes being slow but I don't see they
| were instant before as a community supported distro.
| jfindley wrote:
| My source comes from watching the IRC channels every
| single day, and seeing what users complain about and how
| long it takes to get fixed, compared to before the switch
| to stream. And for important security fixes there's a
| huge change - I've seen upwards of two weeks for kernel
| vulns in 8-stream that would have been O(hours)
| previously.
| linuxftw wrote:
| UBI images work fine for many use cases, and importantly,
| they're free to redistribute, not just use. If you're selling a
| containerized software solution to people, it might make sense
| to use the UBI as it will get real security updates, etc.
| _joel wrote:
| Oh my heart bleeds for them
| teepo wrote:
| I kind of feel Rakuten is just moving their problem down the
| line, or up the stack. Key focus areas in Open RAN is containers
| now. The commodity hardware at the edge needs to be able to run
| many of the network functions in containers, and to do that, a
| service provider is going to need very good k8s orchestration.
| There are not a ton of "free" options any mobile service provider
| will choose to manage this at scale.
| teleforce wrote:
| You know what's better than free? Something that's free and also
| being used by the majority of industry players.
|
| Personally I think this news is a huge one for Linux and RHEL
| based users community in general. This is the main reason why
| FSF's GPL is a great license for open source software.
|
| According to the article not only the Rocky Linux becomes the
| natural successor for CentOS, it also added the real-time
| capability to RHEL based clones, and all it's done with the
| collaboration with the Linux community. This looks to me like a
| RHEL distro on steroid and before long there will be tens if not
| hundreds of books using the Rocky Linux in its title
| descriptions.
| Proven wrote:
| They can't even correctly spell the name of a CentOS founder
| (Greg K). FFS people, put some effort in your content.
| aliqot wrote:
| I have a commonly misspelled name and thank you, yes, this is
| my number one pet peeve.
| [deleted]
| traceroute66 wrote:
| As a concept, I can see the positives in Rocky.
|
| As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming
| lack of LTS version either currently or planned.
|
| I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS, and
| generally works Just Fine (TM) except when you fall into
| something where they are a just a bit too cautious (e.g lack of
| in-house PHP 8 option in the current Debian Bullseye release -
| nothing in main repo, nothing in backports, you have to go to an
| external repo).
|
| I refuse to use Ubuntu because of their increasingly commercial
| smell. I tried SUSE but always felt a bit uncomfortable with some
| of its more exotic sysadmin tendencies.
|
| Which kind of leaves me in the market for another LTS platform.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > As a user, I struggle because of one main reason. The seeming
| lack of LTS version either currently or planned.
|
| > I currently am predominantly Debian. Which is inherently LTS
|
| In what possible way is Rocky not LTS? Its releases have longer
| lifespan than Debian, even _with_ Debian LTS releases
| chungy wrote:
| Yeah, that. One of the driving points of RHEL (and all the
| downstreams as a result, like Rocky) is that you get a
| minimum of 10 years of support for every release.
| tkuraku wrote:
| Seems like if you want free. You should use and support Debian.
| hedora wrote:
| Ever since the systemd thing, I can't get it to work. :-(
|
| Devuan is OK, though apt-get upgrade broke grub on one of my
| machines.
|
| I settled on manjaro. I kind of hate it, but at least it sort
| of works. In particular, I have it on a shared desktop, and
| "switch user" works.
|
| It took 3-4 hours to get xscreensaver to work (poorly) with
| multiple sessions. There's no way to save games in micropolis
| (open source simcity) because it is a flatpack. I frequently
| reboot because PulseAudio is still terrible.
|
| Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe
| that's worth a spin.
|
| I want Debian circa 2002 back. _sigh_
| spijdar wrote:
| If you're willing to run Manjaro (which uses systemd), any
| opposition to running e.g. Fedora with GNOME? I'd guess
| multi-session would function fine with GNOME on GDM, and
| pulseaudio has been replaced by pipewire. Although you could
| also use pipewire in Manjaro...
|
| > Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days.
| Maybe that's worth a spin.
|
| Via running a Linux userland with syscall emulation. Since
| the GUI and user session stuff in FBSD is mostly the same as
| Linux (DRM/KMS for graphics, libinput and the xf86 DDX
| drivers, logind/ConsoleKit for session tracking, D-Bus for
| IPC) so I don't think this will address many grievances...
|
| > I want Debian circa 2002 back.
|
| Did display managers back then even support running multiple
| concurrent X servers on the same seat?
| hedora wrote:
| I never made the switch from Gnome 2 to 3; I switched to
| KDE instead. I use a redhat derivative at work, and it's a
| non-starter for me. RPM + yum is still a hot mess vs. dpkg.
|
| I thought they were recompiling proton for freebsd (it is
| definitely open source), but I haven't looked carefully.
|
| The "switch user" button is one feature. Whether or not
| Debian had it in 2002 isn't the point. The point is that
| what was supported was stable. That hasn't been my
| experience with it since the pulse audio disaster, and then
| the init wars.
|
| I should look into switching to pipewire, but the only
| reason I'm using manjaro is that it mostly works out of the
| box. I'm not really interesting using a distro that makes
| me tinker with it to make my sound card (which has
| perfectly good drivers!) stable.
| arbitrage wrote:
| > Ever since the systemd thing, I can't get it to work.
|
| There are lots of instructions available for de-SystemD'ing
| debian. You could try one of those.
| hedora wrote:
| Devuan is basically that, repackaged, right?
| IceWreck wrote:
| I personally use Rocky/Alma over Debian for servers. Nothing
| beats Red Hat's documentation and its free even without a Red
| Hat subscription.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Maybe a long time ago this was true, but these days Arch has
| better documentation, IMO
| IceWreck wrote:
| First, you won't use arch on production servers. Second
| what you said is incorrect. Arch Wiki has info on a lot of
| topics, but mostly for desktop or casual server usecase and
| certain aspects are completely ignored. Arch's Wiki is
| excellent but its also about the quality of documentation
| and how its structured.
|
| RHEL's docs are simply unparalleled in the Linux world. I
| only wish search was better, but if required I can download
| them and use my own search anyways.
| tiagod wrote:
| Do you run Arch Linux in production? How's it going?
| indigodaddy wrote:
| A not insignificant portion of resources at access.redhat.com
| are locked down behind the RH subscription paywall. It's
| fairly trivial however to just obtain a free RH subscription
| via the RH Developer program:
|
| https://developers.redhat.com/register/
| mroche wrote:
| It's a bit of split as to how Red Hat considers the term
| "documentation". The actual product docs are free to access
| while the Knowledge Base, which is considered a value-add
| for customers, does have a lot of its content (usually
| troubleshooting or specific instructions/guides) behind
| either a Red Hat login or needing an active subscription.
| For which, as you mentioned, the Developer Subscription for
| Individuals qualifies.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I want free things to run my 1.6 trillion yen business, boo-hoo
| :)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakuten
|
| Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ? I doubt it very
| much, just look at the struggles many open-source communities
| have with these large companies sucking blood from them over the
| years (openssh,openssl, ntp...) It is Halloween today, had to get
| a some kind of spooky over the top reference in :)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Amin teamed up with one of CentOS' founders, Greg Kurtzer.
| Apparently the two have been working together for 13 months to
| build a real-time kernel to run complex workloads and complies
| with the Linux open source community.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Does Rakuten ever give back to to the community ?
|
| I mean, they're giving away Rocky for free, so...
| jacooper wrote:
| They own rocky ? How?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| They're listed on https://rockylinux.org/about/ under
| "Backed By". They don't have to "own" rocky to contribute.
|
| EDIT: Although in hindsight, yes I should have phrased that
| a little differently.
| hedora wrote:
| I want corporate open source projects to production-harden
| their stuff on my OS, so I can force them and their communities
| to buy licenses from me. They said no. Boo hoo. :-)
| [deleted]
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Red Hat made a gamble and it may turn out to be a
| miscalculation. By buying CentOS and leaving it be, they had
| tighter control over it's release cycle (how fast patches and
| newer versions were made available etc) as well as metrics on
| who was using it. Additionally, all of the CentOS users were
| still "in the Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open
| for future conversions/sales. They threw that all away now,
| they don't have any control over these forks and have wasted a
| lot of goodwill on short term profit.
|
| Red Hat should've gone with the Ubuntu model instead and maybe
| even change to usage based pricing instead of a yearly
| subscription too, IMO.
| realgeniushere wrote:
| Ah, if only they'd thought of that. The longtime successful
| and solidly profitable (~$500 million a year) Red Hat
| corporation should copy the business model of Canonical,
| which makes 1% as much profit. Do you charge by the hour for
| this kind of advice?
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > Additionally, all of the CentOS users were still "in the
| Red Hat family" and at least kept the door open for future
| conversions/sales.
|
| How? When Ubuntu tried advertising Ubuntu Pro via apt-get,
| everyone was outraged, and rightly so. How else could Red Hat
| talk to a CentOS user to convince them to pay up?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| By providing value beyond just support. Ubuntu does this
| via Landscape, Red Hat is still trying to figure this out
| with Insights and the obtuse licensing for Satellite IMO.
| Packaging software has a high level of effort but really
| low value in customers eyes due to how many Linux variants
| are out there (again, IMO), so putting that behind a
| paywall these days is dumb. Containers exasperate this
| problem as most folks don't care if RHEL ships with
| PostgreSQL, they'll just run the Debian-based container.
|
| For support, folks need enterprise support contracts. Maybe
| not everyone, maybe not every system, but folks that need
| it will pay whatever for it, it's the cost of doing
| business. Charge accordingly.
| mroche wrote:
| > the obtuse licensing for Satellite
|
| Out of curiosity, which aspect of the subscription terms
| do you find obtuse? Simply put, any system managed by
| Satellite needs to have a Smart Management subscription.
| You can get these individually, or bundled with a RHEL
| purchase as the add-on. For consumers of the public cloud
| marketplace RHEL images, they include the client-side
| aspect of Smart Management (no Satellite infra, but you
| can request this) so you don't need extra subscriptions
| to cover those.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Another mistake Red Hat has made over a long is having a
| "talk to the hand" attitude about doing anything differently.
|
| As an example of the pathology, there is a long standing bug
| in GTK that causes the positions of things to be off by few
| pixels if you are running an X server like xming in
| multiwindow mode. It doesn't sound like much but it can make
| it impossible to click on menu items for menus at the top of
| a window.
|
| The people involved at Red Hat would say in no uncertain
| words that they couldn't care less if it worked when you were
| running a multiwindow X server on Windows -- out of nothing
| but pure hate for Microsoft and people who use a Microsoft
| OS.
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways
| cies wrote:
| Only because you do not consider ChromeOS and Andoid to
| be Linux.
|
| Also, if some country/university thinks out loud about
| ditching Windoze for Linus desktops they get a huge
| discount -- so MS takes it serious.
|
| > Nobody takes the linux desktop seriously anyways
|
| I expect you are using OSX (or what ever it is called
| nowadays), which is a more polished desktop product, and
| usable by devs.
|
| If you are on windows: you do not take Linux desktop
| serious enough. If you are on a Linux desktop: you forgot
| to count yourself. :)
| RedShift1 wrote:
| I've used a Linux desktop for years, back in the KDE 3.x
| days (2005 something) where everything worked well. Then
| KDE 4 came, GTK 3 and Gnome and that's when I left
| because it was just unusable and went to Windows.
|
| ChromeOS and Android are nice but are not desktop user
| interfaces.
|
| I do have a Macbook Pro but only use it for testing
| purposes. It works well but I only use it for running
| Safari so can't really say how it works for a power user.
| cies wrote:
| The desktop bit is indeed a little unstable on Linux for
| some features. My experience as well. Especially with
| monitors, plugging/unplugging and window placement.
|
| The underlying OS and command line world is sooo much
| more stable than Windows.
|
| I agree KDE3 was the most stable Linux experience (I'm
| with a few small adventures still a KDE user).
| themoonisachees wrote:
| XFCE has been working well since inception, and Mate was
| working well during that time too. On windows, when win 8
| came out, you either got left in the dust or had to
| endure it. On linux, when groups fuck up their thing like
| that you have the liberty to switch at very little cost.
| dralley wrote:
| Disclosure: I work for Red Hat
|
| Expecting devs who work primarily on Linux to install a
| completely different OS and spent a few hours configuring
| it in a particular way, to work on an issue which is
| neither relevant to their own interests as FOSS devs, nor
| relevant to their employer, doesn't seem entirely
| reasonable.
|
| If someone came along and fixed the bug, submitted a PR,
| did all the legwork and then it was still left to languish
| anyway then you would have a reasonable complaint. Could
| you provide a bit more context?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Fortunately for Red Hat, all of the makers of "cross
| platform UI" platforms are in a race to the bottom and
| that is why we are stuck with Electron apps that are all
| (30+x) MB in size and depend entirely on engineering work
| from Google.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| How is that more context?
| [deleted]
| rwmj wrote:
| Are you saying there is a fix for this bug and someone at
| Red Hat has rejected the fix? Please link to that if so and
| I'll see if I can help.
| bitwize wrote:
| The supported use case is GNOME on Wayland. Everybody else
| can go suck eggs.
| chasil wrote:
| Btrfs is a particularly sore point for Red Hat.
|
| In Fedora, it is growing more pervasive by the day.
|
| In RHEL, any implementation absolutely will not be
| supported, full stop.
| Conan_Kudo wrote:
| I don't think that's the case. The underlying issue is
| that while Btrfs is growing in popularity across the
| Linux space, Red Hat just hasn't attempted to staff for
| supporting Btrfs in RHEL. No staff to support it to the
| level they wish to offer technologies in RHEL means no
| Btrfs in RHEL.
|
| I would hazard to say that is probably because they
| haven't experienced any requests for the filesystem from
| their customer base. If customers started specifically
| asking for it, I think that would change.
| chasil wrote:
| I had a sales call with them recently to swap Oracle
| Linux out for RHEL.
|
| I mentioned that I was using btrfs loopback mounts, and
| they confirmed that these are explicitly unsupported.
|
| Even when running the UEK (i.e. for ksplice), this is not
| allowed, and they must be removed in a support event if
| they have any impact at all.
| fazfq wrote:
| Sucking blood? How is it sucking blood if I give away my code
| and others honour my licence and use it.
| billfruit wrote:
| Obnoxious headline for the article though, why did the writers
| pick such an unclear headline.
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