[HN Gopher] Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?
___________________________________________________________________
Dear Red Hat: Are you dumb?
Author : thepbone
Score : 524 points
Date : 2023-06-22 18:39 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jeffgeerling.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jeffgeerling.com)
| CrLf wrote:
| I don't think Red Hat is trying to kill clones, but I believe
| they're trying to kill clones that are "1:1 compatible with
| RHEL".
|
| They're trying to force a shift in what clones are supposed to
| be, and that started with CentOS Stream. Locking the sources to
| RHEL-proper is just the next step.
|
| This may signal their death as a widely-recognizable Linux
| distribution vendor, but I can't really say I blame them.
|
| If CentOS Stream isn't adequate for production -- and I see it as
| being at least as adequate as Debian for those that also upgraded
| from one RHEL major to the next soon after its release -- then
| the future of clones may lie in becoming downstreams of CentOS
| just like RHEL is.
|
| I do see the value in a CentOS Stream derivative that's more
| conservative, but it doesn't need to be 1:1 bug compatible with
| RHEL.
|
| Honestly, I don't see the point of 1:1 clones unless you're
| running some closed-source commercial software. And such software
| tends to not be supported by its vendor even on 1:1 compatible
| RHEL clones.
|
| I like the Red Hat flavor of Linux, and I like the fact that I
| can have a machine with an OS installed in 2014 continuing to get
| security fixes without having to upgrade major versions. But I
| don't care if that's 1:1 compatible with RHEL (and it doesn't
| really need to be supported for 10 years).
| phpisthebest wrote:
| >>clones unless you're running some closed-source commercial
| software. And such software tends to not be supported by its
| vendor even on 1:1 compatible RHEL clones.
|
| this is false, there are TONS of commercial software that runs
| certified by the vendor to run on RHEL supported by the vendor
| on RHEL, and only supported by the vendor if you run RHEL, that
| is one of the things that made RedHat into a billion dollar
| business.
|
| ERP systems, commerical databases (that many here probally have
| never heard of), and tons of other enterprise software.
|
| Many of these vendors have been adding Ubuntu support since the
| CentOS changes.
| fariszr wrote:
| Well, for those people who like upgrading, CentOS Stream still
| doesn't support in place upgrades.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Wait, dnf system-upgrade won't work?
|
| Granted, CentOS Stream has only seen two major releases in
| its current form, but still.
| apienx wrote:
| Rocky Linux listing the following (funny) options:
|
| - Buy a farm in Nebraska or Montana. Raise cattle Stack suggests
| goats instead, as they may be easier (plus milk, cheese, gyro's,
| and they will eat poison ivy!) - Utilize RH subscriptions to
| access CDN sources and create local source mirrors for every
| package which we can then import from Q for legal: we need to
| review the licensing terms - Infiltrate RH
|
| https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/r.24fab14385c0aa2db6fa7340a8b...
| nhanlon wrote:
| Author of that pad here: For the record, someone changed their
| color to something similar to mine and added the 'Infiltrate
| RH' line which has been since removed.
|
| But thank you for appreciating my humor lol
| snitty wrote:
| Didn't expect the RaspberryPi YouTube guy...
| superdug wrote:
| Geerling is one of those guys who speaks with authority, mainly
| by not speaking unless he's sure he's an authority on the
| matter. I've solved many problems by just following his youtube
| antics and blog posts. He's also kind of an Hn rockstar and
| lurks here on occassion.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Aww, thanks.
|
| I think for me, this whole thing hurts the most because I
| know SO many people in the Red Hat ecosystem. From Fedora, to
| Ansible, to RHEL, to Kubernetes/Openshift people... I've
| worked closely with so many.
|
| And there are still many who work there, and I know the words
| I wrote will sting for some of them. I don't hold any of this
| against them.
|
| It's just... painful to see the Red Hat that I remember from
| a decade ago, slowly becoming, what? IBM-ified? There's still
| a lot of good in that company, but it is being blotted out
| over time.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I thought you meant Explaining Computers[1] and had to go back
| and check.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbiGcwDWZjz05njNPrJU7jA
| b800h wrote:
| NOBODY expects the RaspberryPi YouTube guy! His chief weapon is
| surprise. Surprise and absurdly impractical Kubernetes
| clusters. His TWO weapons.. etc.
| totallywrong wrote:
| Funny, I mostly knew him as the Ansible guy. He wouldn't be
| notorious without RH and look at him now.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Notorious? I didn't know he was notorious at all..?
| totallywrong wrote:
| In here, kind of.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Quick tip for any AWS users (or users of any cloud provider,
| really): if this affects you, let your account manager know,
| along with your thoughts on how you anticipate responding. That
| feedback is invaluable for service teams who are trying to figure
| out what OS support to prioritize for the tools they might be
| building.
| mathattack wrote:
| This is a natural outgrowth of being owned by IBM. They are in
| the business of harvesting revenue from existing customers until
| they revolt. They don't care about open source or smaller
| customers. They care about squeezing and auditing the enterprise.
| This is bad for RedHat because there are other options.
| bragr wrote:
| Everyone seems to forget Redhat is owned by IBM, and this is
| their core business model. IBM doesn't care that this guy is mad,
| they were never going to make money off him. If you're a bank
| (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't going to leave them
| because of this, and if you make software for banking companies
| (continuing the example), you'll pay up for the licensees to test
| your software on.
|
| If you're open to moving to another distro (Rocky, Debian,
| Ubuntu, Alpine, etc), you were probably never to going to license
| Redhat anyways.
| theossuary wrote:
| This is patently false. Redhat is making bank off of this guy.
| Jeff has written 100s of Ansible roles for free and made them
| widely available. I've used dozens of his roles as a contractor
| for F500 companies to help get projects off the ground quickly.
|
| Now instead of giving him free binary compatible OSes to
| develop his roles against, he'll probably just drop support
| because there's too much hassle. The next time I go to install
| an OS, it'll be Debian, because most of the tools I'll use
| won't have packages for RHEL like OSes.
|
| This is so dumb it hurts, Redhat won't recover from this. It'll
| cripple their package ecosystem over the next decade.
| bragr wrote:
| >This is patently false. Redhat is making bank off of this
| guy. Jeff has written 100s of Ansible roles for free and made
| them widely available.
|
| Firstly, creating value is not the same thing as creating
| revenue.
|
| Second, people aren't licensing Redhat for access to these.
| People license Redhat so when they have a bug that affects
| them, it gets fixed right away with guarantees. Unless that
| guy is getting paid to do those fixes, I don't see how this
| affects Redhat customers.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| You'd be surprised how many paying RHEL customers use
| community-contributed Ansible roles because there's no way
| for a company even as large as IBM to employ experts in all
| the various software RHEL users install to maintain
| integrations.
|
| That's the long-term effect of starving the wider
| community: you lose having 'great' integrations, and you
| end up with poorly-written and barely-maintained
| integrations for anything that's not extremely mainstream,
| and so you start losing the customers who use anything
| outside the core set of products extensively.
| bragr wrote:
| I'll just copy paste what I said in another comment:
|
| >I'm not saying this is the morally right, "best" in the
| long term sense, or otherwise socially optimal choice,
| I'm just saying it's the standard IBM choice.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| Ah, missed that ;)
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| > It'll cripple their package ecosystem over the next decade.
|
| but in a way that's really hard to measure and doesn't show
| up on a bean-counter's spreadsheet. So that means corporate
| will consider it "good business" and will just blame
| something else for the immeasurable failures a decade later.
| notatoad wrote:
| >IBM doesn't care that this guy is mad
|
| No, but they should. Jeff Geerling is one of these guys:
| https://xkcd.com/2347/
|
| IBM might not make money off you or me, but they absolutely
| make money off people like Jeff. In some regards, that's kinda
| their _whole_ business
| bragr wrote:
| IBM is a big company. They can pay one their 300,000
| employees less than one average support license to replace
| all the work he does for them indirectly, and if he's
| opensourcing his software, it's not like he can stop them
| from using it even if he is mad.
|
| I'm not saying this is the morally right, "best" in the long
| term sense, or otherwise socially optimal choice, I'm just
| saying it's the standard IBM choice.
| blowski wrote:
| > They can pay one their 300,000 employees less than one
| average support license to replace all the work he does for
| them indirectly
|
| I bet they can't. He's hardly some code monkey churning out
| generic lines of code.
| [deleted]
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > If you're a bank (for example) running off Redhat, you aren't
| going to leave them because of this
|
| Not sure if it ever happened, but when I was at BofA there was
| _definitely_ interest from up high on going to Oracle Linux
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Out of the frying pan and into....
| BringerOfChaos wrote:
| I'm a former Red Hatter. I left just after the IBM acquisition.
| We all saw stupid stuff like this coming. It's a sad loss, but
| the Debian (and Debian-based) world is lovely.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| As a long time Debian user for 20+ years I have to say I really
| prefer dnf/yum over apt/dpkg now. It's significantly faster and
| has much less version deadlock snafus from my experience in the
| last 5 years. I still use and support servers from both sides
| and my Debian servers are often a chore to work with by
| comparison.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution
| into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat
| Enterprise Linux, but free", users like me were justifiably
| angered.
|
| Funny sentence there.
| bodeadly wrote:
| Yeah, I don't get it either.
|
| On a related note, folks who are thinking we'll just use Debian
| or SUSE or whatever other distro, don't understand what RH
| does. RH is one of the principal contributors to core Linux
| components used by all distros. Who makes some 10GbE driver
| work really well? RedHat. And that driver makes it's way back
| into the kernel sources used by all distros. So I think there's
| a lack of understanding of the dynamic here.
|
| The allure of RHEL clones is that it's all been checked over by
| organized engineers who's job security depends on the quality
| of their work. I would much prefer not to rely on a couple of
| free-timers producing a result equivalent to what RH does.
|
| And yet there is a huge demand from folks that simply cannot
| pay what RH wants. So my guess is that something new is going
| to come out of all of this ....
| wronglebowski wrote:
| Given my experience, RHEL is a favorite among enterprise
| environments. As such IBM will continue to pursue a strategy that
| forces people into that business funnel. They do not care who
| falls out of it, the ecosystem will only become more closed.
|
| I think we need to be more realistic about where things are
| headed. SUSE? Market cap of 2.2 Billion, IBM paid 34 for RH.
| Ubuntu? Still not profitable. As we continue to see the tech
| sector cool and become more mature belts will tighten and things
| will consolidate.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I bet Microsoft will eventually buy Ubuntu, given their
| relationship on WSL and key distribution for Azure.
| freedomben wrote:
| I've suspected this for a while as well. At one point GOOG
| would have been a good bet, but having turned down many
| potentials over the years they clearly don't have an
| interest. I could see MS buying Canonical (or Ubuntu),
| although there has to be enormous pressure against that from
| the Windows people.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Why should be pressure be from Windows people?
|
| They just announced at BUILD 2023 the graduation of CBL-
| Mariner Linux distribution into "Azure Linux", and guess
| what else has same support level, Ubuntu.
|
| https://build.microsoft.com/en-
| US/sessions/4c586f76-ad6e-444...
|
| Naturally, they have plenty of other distributions being
| supported.
|
| If anything, most likely it is the Azure focus that is
| partially responsible for the chaos of Windows GUI
| frameworks, as the teams have minimal resources to keep
| going.
| fariszr wrote:
| But why? What would they gain? You think Microsoft is
| interested in Linux enterprise support?
| kjs3 wrote:
| Microsoft is very interested in _any_ enterprise support it
| can monetize. Ignoring WSL (you shouldn 't), you'd be
| surprised how much Linux runs in Azure. Buying Ubuntu lets
| M$ say "sure you can run Linux in our cloud. We have one
| right here, one we support, for a modest fee".
| rektide wrote:
| Most of the threads here - where people describe the
| corporately driven business wants/desires - seem to recognize
| though that this is killing the holden goose.
|
| Enterprises want RHEL because the staff know & use RHEL _and_
| the enterprise can get a support package for RHEL. If Red Hat
| no longer is in the public eye, if it 's only a paid for Linux,
| the demand is going to dry up, vanish.
|
| There's only one way to retain mindshare & market share &
| that's to keep RHEL in front of people. This current course of
| action almost guarantees that RHEL fades into irrelevance.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| AIX would like to have a word...
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes SUSE
| not a viable alternative? If anything, this makes me feel like
| they're undervalued, especially now that they're the only
| company shipping an enterprise linux with an open source and
| privacy respecting (looking at you Canonical) base distro.
| pjmlp wrote:
| SuSE is owned by MicroFocus.
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| SUSE was sold to EQT in 2019 and went public in 2021.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75%
| though, and apparently they are an investment fund.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Do you have a source for that? I was under the impression
| SUSE no longer had any ties to Micro Focus
| johnvanommen wrote:
| Sometimes I feel that a lot of tech companies are
| virtually behaving as hedge funds
| johnvanommen wrote:
| > Can you elaborate why a market cap of 2.2 billion makes
| SUSE not a viable alternative?
|
| I'd always assumed the MicroFocus acquisition of SuSE had
| something to do with OpenStack, and when OpenStack stopped
| being The Big New Thing, that impacted SuSE.
|
| Basically:
|
| * I was on the HP OpenStack team
|
| * HP burned through over a billion on that, and sold the
| product off to SuSE
|
| * Somewhere in the mix there, MicroFocus was divested from
| HP. Even working there, it was hard to follow, because HP
| _also_ split into HP and HPE
|
| * As various vendors lost interest in OpenStack (Cisco, EMC,
| VMWare, etc), SuSE replaced their CEO who was behind the
| acquisition in the first place
|
| I talked to some SuSE folks about OpenStack at one of the
| VMWare conferences, and they seemed confident in it's future,
| and then just weeks later I read that they'd discontinued the
| product in it's current state
|
| The entire thing is incredibly confusing because HPE also had
| _two_ versions of OpenStack. "Helion Open Stack" and
| "Carrier Grade OpenStack" and they were two different teams.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I didn't think they really had to pay for the openstack
| assets, I didn't think they did anything with those. IIRC
| they had their own managed openstack contracts with their
| SLES customers before the acquisition, and were working on
| getting kube/paas offerings on top of that which they then
| scrapped for Rancher.
|
| So I know they burned a bunch of money too, but I don't
| think it was on the HPC or other openstack assets (HPC was
| the public cloud openstack offering that I think got
| shutdown sometime around the HPE split)
| wronglebowski wrote:
| What I meant is what would prevent IBM or other large
| corporation from acquiring them as well?
| pjmlp wrote:
| They already have been, multiple times, nowadays they
| belong to Micro Focus.
| veave wrote:
| _In July 2018, Micro Focus International, SUSE 's parent
| company since 2014, announced its plan to sell the
| business unit to a subsidiary of EQT Partners in the
| first quarter of calendar year 2019.[7][8] This
| acquisition was completed on 15 March 2019, making SUSE a
| standalone business. Under new ownership, their legal
| name is SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH._
| pjmlp wrote:
| I stand corrected, it is still owned by them in 75%
| though.
| jzb wrote:
| SUSE is tenacious AF, you have to give 'em that. This _could_
| be an opportunity for them to grab some market share. I 'd love
| to see it. I don't wish ill on Red Hat, either, but I'd love to
| see SUSE grow and be a stronger player here. It'd be good for
| the larger ecosystem.
| aeyes wrote:
| About 15 years ago the (German) company I worked at had a lot
| of their customers from different industries run on SLES. But
| over time many customers just weren't willing to sign up for OS
| support contracts anymore (and also switched from Oracle to
| MySQL). SLES/openSUSE never managed to get the same support
| from third parties and communities as CentOS/Fedora. With RHEL
| 6 we migrated all customers from SLES to CentOS/RHEL. This
| allowed to have a homogenous environment with and without
| enterprise support contracts.
|
| We'll have to see where this is going. Certain enterprise
| software (like Oracle) requires the use of certified operating
| systems or you lose support. Oracle Linux looks like the more
| natural choice.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| If you are using RH, or SUSE, it is because pointy hairs forced
| you to use RH or SUSE. So you are kind of trapped in that
| funnel.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Are you asking why a commercial company doesn't want to give its
| main product away for free? I'm surprised CentOS lasted as long
| as it did.
| mindcrime wrote:
| The code and bits aren't Red Hat's main product. Red Hat's main
| product is the "warm fuzzies" that large enterprises get from
| knowing that somebody is "on the hook" to provide support if
| there's a SHTF outage or other incident, and somebody to sue in
| the unlikely chance that they lose serious $$$ as a result of a
| technical problem. In many ways Red Hat is closer to a company
| that sells insurance than a company that sells software.
| ozr wrote:
| The product is open source. They chose to make a linux
| distribution.
| bananapub wrote:
| what do you feel RH's main product is?
|
| is it:
|
| 1. a collection of very old binaries of software with lots of
| testing done, or 2. a linux distribution that happens to have a
| very good support contract and a web of agreements with other
| vendors
|
| ?
| steve1977 wrote:
| Based on the experience I had with their support (covered by
| a support contract), it must be 1.
| ahoka wrote:
| So the value is having to live with the same bugs for 10
| years?
| somerandomqaguy wrote:
| For some people yes. The bugs you know about usually will
| have a workaround that minimizes it's impacts. It's the
| bugs you don't know about that are typically most
| difficult to deal with.
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| The value is not having to reverse-engineer, rewrite and
| recompile software every week because some random library
| changed in a non-compatible way.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I guess the question that would lead to is why a company that
| didn't want to give it's main product away for free would have
| had a main product that was licensed as open source for so many
| years.
|
| We all know that an open source license means people can use
| it, copy it, modify it, and run it where they want, without
| paying anyone, right?
|
| (Is it even legally possible to have a linux distribution that
| isn't open source? I'm not sure?)
| arp242 wrote:
| > Is it even legally possible to have a linux distribution
| that isn't open source? I'm not sure?
|
| For the GPL parts? No. But that doesn't mean "you must make
| it the source code publicly available at
| https://example.com/source-code.tar.gz".
|
| GPL 2 and 3 differ a little bit in the exact terms for this,
| but both are essentially the same: you only need to ship
| source code to the people you distribute the software to, not
| to the general public at large.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| You need to ship the source code to the people you
| distribute the software to _and_ you need to do so under a
| license that allows them to modify and redistribute this.
|
| So if any of your licensees wants to make a 100% copy of
| what you shipped, then you need to allow them to.
| arp242 wrote:
| Kind of, but also no. As I understand it, RedHat
| customers are forbidden to redistribute the source code
| by the RedHat EULA. While they can't legally sue you for
| breaking the GPL, they can sue you or just drop you as a
| customer for breaching the EULA. I'm not entirely sure
| how this interacts with the GPL's "no additional
| restrictions" clause in a legal sense, although it
| clearly isn't in the spirit of it.
|
| Either way, the net effect is the same: no one is going
| to risk the wrath of IBM's lawyers, and any avenue of
| "source leaks" can be closed off. It's not a functional
| mechanism for RHEL derivates.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I'm not sure that is accurate about the EULA?
|
| The EULA I find googling (this is not something I am
| previously acquainted with) says:
|
| > With the exception of certain image files identified in
| Section 1.3 below, the license terms for the components
| permit User to copy, modify, and redistribute the
| component, in both source code and binary code forms.
| This EULA does not limit User's rights under, or grant
| User rights that supersede, the license terms of any
| particular component.
|
| -- https://www.redhat.com/en/about/licenses/rhds-rhcs-
| eula
|
| I may not be interpreting that correctly or what it means
| practically, I'm not really familiar with what's going on
| here. If you definitely know better than me, I'm happy to
| hear it (cites to other informed authors explaining it
| would be great!), but I don't want to go down a long
| thread accidentally discussing things based on a
| misunderstanding of the EULA...
|
| I do get that Red Hat is trying to somehow add value to
| open source software (linux), have it's software be
| understood as being open source itself (for the marketing
| value), while also trying to get people to pay to use it.
| They are trying to have their cake and eat it too, I get
| it. And maybe they have enough lawyers to make it work
| somehow, or can just make it _so inconvenient
| practically_ to use the rights the open source license
| grants to make it work somehow.
|
| But yeah, if you "don't want to give your main product
| away for free", and your "main product" is licensed with
| an open source license... you are in a pretty difficult
| spot. Which is, I guess, where Red Hat finds themselves.
| arp242 wrote:
| I've seen it mentioned in a few places; it took me a bit
| to find it, but it's in the "subscription services
| agreement"[1], the relevant bit being section 2.2:
|
| _" Distributing the Subscription Services (or any
| portion) to a third party outside the Portal or using the
| Subscription Services to support a third party without
| paying the respective fees is a material breach of this
| Agreement even though the open source license applicable
| to individual software packages may give you the right to
| distribute those packages (and this Agreement is not
| intended to interfere with your rights under those
| individual licenses)."_
|
| I _think_ the way this works (legally) is that accessing
| their service (their Customer Portal) is covered under
| this EULA, while the software is covered under the
| license. So technically you 're not adding additional
| restrictions to the GPL. Or something like that. Not a
| lawyer etc. etc.
|
| _Edit_ : I see there's also some discussion of this over
| here, in case you're interested:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375
|
| [1]: https://www.redhat.com/rhdc/managed-
| files/GLOBAL_Cloud_Subsc...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Makes sense -- it sounds like you can't let someone else
| use your credentials to access the Customer Portal
| website/online services... or maybe there's something
| else that's a "subscription service" they're trying to
| limit too that I don't understand... but they seem to
| acknowledge you still have the right to redistribute the
| source code of any GPL licensed code, that the GPL gives
| you, right?
|
| But yeah, they are trying to figure out how to square the
| circle and have their cake and eat it too. It does not
| seem like they are actually trying to tell you that you
| have lost the legal right to redistribute GPL software
| though.
| dboreham wrote:
| The license doesn't actually say that. It says thar if you
| ship someone a binary then you also need to give them the
| source on request. Not the same as "everyone has a right to
| free access to the source".
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Open source licenses "actually" also say that anyone you
| ship the binary and source to is free to share the source
| with whomever else they want to.
|
| So an open source license to me seems to be in conflict
| with the idea that you "don't want to give it away for
| free", but if you think a license that requires you to give
| users the source and then lets them distribute that source
| as they will is a different thing than "giving it away for
| free", I don't know if I'm interested in arguing about it.
| Although I guess I'm curious if that's your position.
|
| The "four freedoms" are "the freedom to run, copy,
| distribute, study, change and improve the software". Note
| "copy" and "distribute". Any user of your software is free
| to copy and distribute it.
|
| "Open source" has for decades _not_ simply meant "you share
| the source code with your licensed users", while not
| allowing modification or redistribution except by further
| license. There has for decades been a difference between
| "open source" and simply sharing the source with paying
| customers while not allowing them to share it with third
| parties -- and attempts to rewrite history and make "open
| source" mean nothing more than the latter are attempts to
| rewrite history.
|
| You are right that making software available under open
| source license does not require the original owner/author
| to run any particular infrastructure of distribution
| though. It does not require them to run a web site or git
| repo or anything else. It just says that anyone with the
| software is allowed to share that software with whomever
| they like however they like, as well as make modifications
| and share those modifications with whomever they like, as
| well as run that software however they like, with no
| further permission or fee required because the open source
| license already grants permission.
|
| So, I stand by my comment -- if you "don't want to give
| your main product away for free", and you license your
| "main product" under an open source license -- you have
| made a terrible mistake. (Or are engaged in some kind of
| calculated deception of your userbase). Because the open
| source license has indeed already granted the world the
| right to use your software for free.
| arp242 wrote:
| The thing is, I'm not so sure RedHat actually lost revenue over
| CentOS. The people who want to use CentOS is a very different
| type of userbase than the people who would use RedHat/RHEL, and
| the CentOS people would simply choose Debian or something else
| over RedHat.
|
| From purely a business perspective I think the entire thing
| naively makes sense, from a far-away view without much
| knowledge of the business space. But once you look a bit closer
| I don't think it does.
| IshKebab wrote:
| They definitely lost revenue. People use RHEL/CentOS because
| a load of software only officially supports Enterprise Linux.
| But why would they pay for RHEL if CentOS works fine?
| arp242 wrote:
| > a load of software only officially supports Enterprise
| Linux
|
| Which software is that?
| wingmanjd wrote:
| The database engine IBM DB2 didn't (doesn't?) officially
| support Centos. It had to be RHEL.
| arp242 wrote:
| At this point at least they seem to support RHEL, CentOS,
| SUSE, and Ubuntu. Or at least, they offer downloads for
| it - I'm having a hard time navigating their
| documentation to find a more precise answer.
|
| But the people who are running Db2 probably has very
| little overlap with the people running CentOS, too.
|
| https://www.ibm.com/software/reports/compatibility/clarit
| y-r...
| ilc wrote:
| Then they shouldn't have poked the bear.
|
| By taking out the CentOS Foundation, which was NEVER going
| to sell support. They created 2 companies that will sell
| support, and they still have the same issue.
|
| At the WORST those companies will have to buy a RHEL
| license somewhere in here, if Red Hat takes away
| redistribution rights on the srpms... they might as well
| put a gun to their own head.
|
| SuSE will take the business gladly.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| But, sometimes the people that use CentOS get hired by Mega-
| Corp and when their CTO requires a support contract with
| contracted SLA's, they choose RHEL instead of Ubuntu One,
| because they're way more familiar with RHEL'like systems
| instead of Debian systems.
|
| Yes, cheap/free people will be cheap/free, but sometimes
| they're not the decider.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This is a bummer. But as a NixOS developer I gotta say it also
| has its upsides.
| ehayes wrote:
| As an ex Red Hatter (pre IBM) this feels like top-down IBM
| influence, and against the _always open_ spirit of the old Red
| Hat.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm also an ex-er but was there post acqui. It's definitely IBM
| influence, but it's long-time Red Hat people who are actually
| making these decisions. I don't think these are people that
| actually believed in Red Hat in the first place. Or if they
| did, they're willing to IBM-ify in order to keep their jobs (or
| ascend the ladder)
| BeefWellington wrote:
| It's exactly this. When I worked at IBM some years ago via
| another acquisition, this is the same pattern I saw. Senior
| leadership -- people who had been at the prior company for
| nearly two decades -- were the ones gladly steering it
| aground in order to do what IBM wanted.
|
| You can see this with Red Hat - the Chairman and the CEO are
| both long-time RHers. Were they just the opportunists?
|
| All the talk about running RH as an independent subsidiary
| was either smoke and mirrors or the IBM management style has
| infected the leadership at Red Hat.
| jehb wrote:
| I have to agree. All IBM is asking for is to hit certain
| numbers. Now, those numbers might be short sighted and
| unrealistic, but in my experience the operational decisions
| were still coming from inside Red Hat, at least through the
| middle of last year when I left. It doesn't matter whether
| IBM or Wall Street is demanding double-digit growth numbers
| every quarter, the end result is the same. Despite a really
| strong push by a lot of people inside the company to put
| culture first, in the end, a demand for unsustainable growth
| is going to wreck any culture, no matter how strong.
| oneplane wrote:
| Seems like we're in a period of ecosystems shooting themselves in
| the foot, be it 'social' media, software, banking or politics.
|
| I suppose, in a way, we have gotten accustomed to a relatively
| long period of stability. As for what RHEL thinks they are doing
| with this: every time a (IMO: nasty) enterprise vendor starts
| packaging their software in containers (IMO: a good thing!),
| distributions become less relevant by the day, and so does their
| view on software distribution.
| noizejoy wrote:
| Business models break, when money is no longer almost free.
| Interest rates near zero created a historically rather unique
| environment. That's now apparently ending.
| colechristensen wrote:
| We're in a period of unsustainably subsidized free environments
| being culled.
|
| People trying to monetize free things in order to continue
| providing free things seems to not be working all that well.
|
| The thing you do to make money and the free thing you offer
| probably just need to be separate for long term stability.
|
| The Linux kernel model of lots of institutions supporting an
| actually free project is probably the only real long term
| successful free model.
| izacus wrote:
| Ironically, Red Hat is one of the biggest supporters of Linux
| Kernel and now needs to actually fund that support and dev
| time.
| oneplane wrote:
| I suppose the linux kernel model has the benefit of having a
| mutual dependency so you can't really easily long-term
| extract value without adding value. (i.e. forking the kernel
| means you'll be spending a lot of time keeping up, so doing
| to work to upstream your stuff has a real benefit)
| mrmister00 wrote:
| Of course they're dumb, they are IBM now.
| freedomben wrote:
| Disclaimer: I'm a former Red Hatter but my opinion is my own
|
| Red Hat, you _NEED_ to fix this. I get that it sucks to have your
| business built on selling support, and a couple of companies have
| popped up selling cheaper support but not taking on the cost of
| building the thing. I get that (you think) it 's going to cause
| problems for you (it might, I'm not sure yet). But you're
| torching an _insane_ amount of good will that was built up over
| 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds. You are making
| yourselves an enemy and a villain, rather than a friend. You need
| to stop the bleeding.
|
| I don't have any answers, but I have some ideas:
|
| 1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can
| exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach an
| agreement with them not to offer or sell support. If those don't
| agree, other projects will emerge who _will_ agree and will take
| their place. Don 't make their lives unnecessarily hard by
| throwing up roadblocks in their way. There will probably be popup
| companies selling third party support for Alma/Rocky etc here and
| there, but I doubt that type of support competition makes a
| serious dent to enterprise sales. In fact, I think it helps you
| by increasing adoption. A rising tide raises all boats,
| especially in this field.
|
| 2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers use
| real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or licensing
| or activation. Be liberal with this and _make it easy_
| hinkley wrote:
| I worked for a company that did the voting for American Idol
| for the first few seasons. Weird culture, a mix of bare metal
| and NIH that I thought didn't quite function and some of us
| were trying to change that culture. Everyone resented working
| on that project and wanted to do other things, so at some point
| we disinvited ourselves (or so the story went, might have been
| sour grapes).
|
| The problem was we killed the cash cow without any viable
| livestock lined up to replace it, and the layoffs started about
| a year later. Of course 4/5ths of the people trying to change
| the culture were in the first round. Get rid of the rabble
| rousers first.
|
| While I think our proposed changes would have helped
| dramatically, I also think it might have been better if the
| company management had invested in making it more palatable to
| work on the project. Bribery if you have to. Conferences,
| toys... but they didn't do either, and it flopped.
|
| Edit: on rereading your comments I may have missed your angle,
| but I'll leave this anyway, since we are talking dumb failure
| modes.
| gymbeaux wrote:
| That I can't run sudo yum update out of the box with RHEL is
| one of the big reasons I don't bother with it. I love the
| "stability aspect" of RHEL but I love the I guess "convenience"
| of any other distro being ready to go out of the box, no
| activation required
| freedomben wrote:
| I totally agree. Even when I worked at Red Hat and could get
| whatever licenses I needed, I _still_ used CentOS for local
| stuff and for testing things because of the friction of the
| registration /activation process. It has gotten easier in
| recent years, but simply existing is enough to turn off a lot
| of people.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Since RHEL 8.2 its at least possible to register at
| installation time.
| ilc wrote:
| "Me too" - Ex Red Hat. Development is done on Fedora and
| CentOS. I was pissed when they changed CentOS mainly
| because it changed my workflow.
| pipo234 wrote:
| Alma, Rocky, fair enough.
|
| But isn't the elephant in the room here Oracle Linux?!
| freedomben wrote:
| Yes, very fair point. Oracle and Amazon both deserve to be on
| the list, probably much further up than Alma or Rocky
| pipo234 wrote:
| Amazon actually seems to have seen this coming. While
| Amazon Linux 1&2 was a basterdized CentOS6& derivative
| (with some newer packages), the latest breed (Amazon Linux
| 2022/2023) is based off Fedora.
|
| Also, I'm not convinced Amazon (or Oracle for that matter)
| have a very bright future. The opaque development process
| and (lack of) community support make development pretty
| hard. I know from experience, getting bugs resolved (or
| just getting Amazon to care) is _very_ hard. At the same
| time, even for a large corporate maintaining your own
| distro brings with it considerable costs.
|
| Wouldn't it be great if instead they would work together,
| share some of the costs and profits of support and cloud
| mutually?!
| ilc wrote:
| Amazon missed then, the company to bet on is SuSE here.
|
| Both Oracle and Amazon Linux have VERY bright futures for
| their use-cases.
|
| Do you run Oracle? Want to know your distro will be
| supported 100%. Oracle Linux seems like a damn good bet
| to use.
|
| Are you one of the largest companies on earth, who needs
| a distro to run your business? If so... guess what.. your
| distro is viable just on your own business.
|
| Amazon offering Amazon Linux is just them showing some
| internal tech. Nothing more.
| neilv wrote:
| > _1. Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky
| can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but
| reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support._
|
| I don't know how the support business breaks down for this, but
| for the large customers, I can't imagine any of the little
| rebranding projects taking the support business that the IT
| dept. itself calls. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM," and
| in this case it's literally true again: RH still have some of
| the best technical experts.
|
| (Imagine being a huge company with a urgent mission-critical
| kernel problem: you want to be able to get a Red Hat commando
| team parachuting in, including a Sr. Principal Engineer who
| specializes in hard debugging tasks in that vast code base. Not
| have Bob's Discount Distro's support line be lost after you say
| you already tried rebooting and reinstalling your global
| operations.)
|
| At the same time, if anyone distro is rebranding RHEL _not_
| just as an open source hippie volunteer thing (that a lot of
| not-ready-to-pay-for-RHEL smaller businesses use), but _also_
| trying to make it a support business out of it, then that might
| be poking the lion. The hippie commune might get ripped apart
| in a rampage. Which might be what 's happening now?
|
| (Credible support options from AWS and maybe Oracle are a
| different matter.)
|
| > _2. Figure out a way to let individuals and small developers
| use real RHEL without having to dick with subscriptions or
| licensing or activation. Be liberal with this and make it easy_
|
| Maybe CentOS had been providing this market segmentation with
| upgrade path to enterprise support, until recently? RHEL is not
| easy to switch to, and I've had a client that was very capable
| shop look at switching to RHEL, and nope right back, because
| they didn't want to learn the new bureaucracy. If they'd been
| able to use RHEL for free since they were smaller, becoming an
| RH enterprise support customer as they grew would be easy and a
| no-brainer.
|
| (Docker and then K8s have shaken this up a bit.)
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Red Hat, you NEED to fix this.
|
| No, they don't. They don't need to do anything.
|
| > But you're torching an insane amount of good will that was
| built up over 20 years of good and mostly selfless deeds.
|
| Doesn't matter. That goodwill doesn't really benefit them. How
| many companies paid Red Hat because they liked the things they
| did for open-source? Realistically, very few if any.
|
| > Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky can
| exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but reach
| an agreement with them not to offer or sell support.
|
| Realistically, there are lots of companies that would pay for
| Red Hat but don't because they get can get it for free.
| redundantly wrote:
| > Realistically, there are lots of companies that would pay
| for Red Hat but don't because they get can get it for free.
|
| If the free RHEL variants disappeared today I'd wager most of
| those companies would choose other distributions (Debian,
| Ubuntu, openSUSE, etc) or making the jump to containerisation
| or serverless before paying for RHEL. In the end less people
| would be using their kind of Enterprise Linux, which in turn
| will result in less conversion to the paid version of it.
| zb3 wrote:
| > In the end less people would be using their kind of
| Enterprise Linux, which in turn will result in less
| conversion to the paid version of it.
|
| Why would anyone want to convert to the paid version if
| their use case is covered by the free version? Out of
| generosity?
| anyoneamous wrote:
| There are plenty of cases where infrastructure can be
| split into "critical" and "nice to have".
|
| In HPC, it is reasonably common for people to run RHEL on
| the scheduler, database and login nodes (totalling maybe
| a dozen servers) but then use CentOS (now Rocky) for the
| compute nodes, which might be hundreds of nodes. Those
| customers simply can't justify the cost of RHEL
| everywhere, even with more recent changes which make it
| cheaper than it has been historically in this use-case.
| zb3 wrote:
| To me it sounds like the pricing model is not optimal. I
| guess in these situations, they could pay RH "a bit more"
| in exchange for a legal RHEL license covering those extra
| nodes. But if there was no such offer then it sounds like
| a lost opportunity.
|
| (but I'm a complete outsider, I just share my views and I
| do acknowledge I may be missing something, so feel free
| to elaborate further)
| anyoneamous wrote:
| I think you are right - the problem is that "a bit more"
| really ought to be a small uplift on the _needed_
| licenses, rather than the current inadequate discount on
| compute nodes (along with hoop-jumping to convince sales
| people you aren 't trying to scam them).
| jsight wrote:
| It is usually some combination of needing paid support if
| updates break things, and also generosity. Trust and
| generosity define the choice of paid support
| organization.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Sometimes support - for the OS or from applications - is
| actually useful. I worked at a shop once that ran CentOS
| for most things but RHEL for the database servers,
| because the vendor only officially supported that.
| redundantly wrote:
| Additionally as their needs grows and the free version
| doesn't meet their needs out of the box and the non-free
| version does they'll be more apt to buy into it given
| their previous experience with their products.
| zb3 wrote:
| So the reason for not using RHEL everywhere is the
| pricing model? I wonder whether it'd be possible for RH
| to optimize it so that choosing RHEL 'd still be the best
| option for them now that CentOS doesn't provide the same
| level of stability.
| redundantly wrote:
| > I wonder whether it'd be possible for RH to optimize it
| so that choosing RHEL 'd still be the best option for
| them now that CentOS doesn't provide the same level of
| stability.
|
| What you may not be aware of, or have forgotten, is the
| free versions provided by other companies that provide
| package compatibility and similar support (as in updates
| and security fixes) that CentOS did.
|
| Oracle Linux, Alma Linux, Rocky Linux, and Amazon Linux.
| Quite possibly even more.
|
| Red Hat will have a hard time undercutting them just by
| reducing their pricing, which is why they're using
| tactics like a free number of subscriptions/licenses for
| small organisations and developers and trying to cut off
| access to the source code.
| kbenson wrote:
| I had a meeting with our RH reps last week, as a followup to
| Red Hat Summit and to talk about a potential purchase with
| them. I had a discussion about how we use free RHEL
| derivatives, and have for almost 30 years (when Red Hat itself
| was free), and we might have used one of the first public
| releases (I do know we were running 5.2 in '99).
|
| In explaining our position I told them we use the free products
| (which meant CentOS until stream, and now Rocky), I noted how
| I'm sure they have their own reasons for what they did, but the
| Stream change made us _seriously_ consider other distros like
| Ubuntu, and while we settled on Rocky in the end after it came
| out, if we had chosen Ubuntu we wouldn 't be having a
| discussion about possibly spending $100k with them now and more
| in the future, so that's how they're hurting themselves.
|
| Then again, from attending Red Hat Summit, it's apparent that
| they're really aiming at the enterprise and government anyway.
| I would estimate attendance was 60% government and education
| (including a lot of government contractors), 30% enterprise
| (Adobe, etc), and 10% small to medium business (and I'd bet
| many of them are partners offering services and want to support
| Red Hat).
|
| To me it looks like people making short sighted moved to
| increase their hold on their enterprise customers (this might
| be aimed more at Oracle Linux than Rocky or Alma), but at the
| expense of the surrounding ecosystem. The knock-on effects
| might be that they kill the ramp to RHEL and the training of
| admins in its use except for those companies willing to
| actually shell out for official training programs, as there
| will be little to no regular use by non-enterprise customers
| anymore if they keep this up.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Also former Red Hatter, disclaimer also applies.
|
| According to my observations, Red Hat does an unbelievable
| amount of stuff by hand. Lots of internal processes require
| someone to do something at a given point, otherwise these
| distros are not happening.
|
| I believe RH is now cutting costs at precisely these places:
| projects that don't directly contribute to the revenue get cut.
| However, as the post said, these changes make it incredibly
| hard to ship open source software for RHEL-likes to the point
| where I already decided to look for alternatives when doing
| integration work.
| avhception wrote:
| I would like to add the perspective of a small-business
| infrastructure guy here.
|
| First things first: we're a Rocky Linux shop. About 100
| instances, some bare metal, some VMs. A few local, a few at
| cloud providers like DigitalOcean. Held together by Ansible and
| kickstart installs.
|
| Too often the discussion about RHEL clones like Rocky paints a
| picture of people like me as freeloaders. And some of the folks
| with a similar setup might be. But most small-time Linux admins
| I know are real open-source believers. I would really like to
| funnel some money into the platform we're using. First and
| foremost because it's the right thing to do, the people writing
| all that source code deserve it. But also because we need
| platform continuity, and being able to open a support case from
| time to time would also be great.
|
| But it's really hard. I don't have the time and nerves to deal
| with the RHEL sales department, deal with the licensing,
| produce my own cloud images because DigitalOcean can't provide
| them, deal with our own internal purchasing process, deal with
| convincing my superiors that we need to.
|
| Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or
| something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has
| automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers,
| work something out.
| kbenson wrote:
| We're the same, but a little larger. Don't let anyone
| convince you you're a freeloader. If you're a freeloader,
| then Red Hat are freeloaders for relying on the Linux Kernel
| and all the open source software in their distros as well.
|
| What we both are are power users that don't really need their
| support. Our company has an entitlement so we can use the KB
| articles (to our benefit) and view/submit bug reports to them
| (which is to _their_ benefit). I have no problems telling
| them that (and for the most part did last week), and if
| someone on the call were to argue me on that point, I 'd have
| happily gotten into it with them. I know they're adding a lot
| to linux and open source, and pay for a lot of developers to
| maintain and add to projects (including Linux itself), but
| that's just the point, they're _adding_ to something that
| _already exists_ that they use. They don 't own it, and they
| can't expect to require payment for it. They aren't
| Microsoft, and the only reason they've ever been able to
| compete in that space is because they're standing on the
| shoulders of what the open source community has made
| possible.
|
| It's a symbiotic relationship, and they can mess with it at
| their peril.
| avhception wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback!
|
| We've just about finished transitioning to 100% Rocky,
| coming from a 50/50 setup with many of the bare metal
| installs being Ubuntu. But Ubuntu left a real bitter taste
| in my mouth with the snap enforcement (I can't even start
| this snap thing in my Ubuntu Docker container? And you took
| away the native apt? Wow.), so we started a migration to
| 100% Rocky.
|
| Telling my manager that we'll have to work something out
| after we just about finished working something out will be
| my own peril as well. Let's see where this will end.
| kbenson wrote:
| Yeah, we were late on CentOS 8, and had just put 3-4
| systems and VMs into production when the Stream
| announcement hit, which made us stop in our tracks. We
| eventually accepted Rocky and started actually getting
| newer systems in place once 9 was out, so we just jumped
| to using 9 and in-place upgraded our Rocky 8 systems to
| 9.
|
| We're only about a quarter migrated though, so still have
| a few hundred Centos 7 boxes to eventually get off of,
| and we'll see if that ends up being Rocky or something
| else.
|
| I will note that this episode of The FOSS Pod[1] with a
| Debian lead actually made me think switching to Debian
| itself way back in the past (since we've been doing this
| for almost three decades now) would have been a safer
| path. I highly recommend it, it cleared up a few
| misconceptions I had as a Red Hat/CentOS user about what
| Debian is really attempting and why, and how that would
| fit with our needs. For example why their goal of pure
| open source licenses isn't an ideological choice, but a
| choice to benefit the Debian ecosystem, since the goal is
| to make downstream distros of Debian easy and without
| problem (e.g. no extra legal review needed based on
| licensed included).
|
| 1: https://fosspod.content.town/episodes/debian-linux-
| with-jona...
| avhception wrote:
| Same here, we still have 2 or 3 CentOS 8 to Rocky
| conversions to go from before we even started replacing
| Ubuntu!
|
| I have to admit, while I share a lot of the values of
| Debian, I never really liked the product. Especially the
| apt package mangler, err, manager. They've also carried
| some Debian in-house patches that really caused me some
| grief in the past.
|
| I've started running FreeBSD on my personal servers.
| Unfortunately it's not an option at work.
| kbenson wrote:
| I've never really Debian it in the past, so can't comment
| on the reality, just what I've heard, and even my Ubuntu
| experience is lacking. I'm running it as a virtual
| desktop now, but I try to keep my use of it to an MUA,
| web browser and terminals so I don't have to spend the
| time to become familiar with it, given it's got no other
| use for me so far.
|
| Our director loves FreeBSD, and we actually use it for
| firewalls, so it's not a spectacularly hard sell. I'm not
| sure it's significantly different from the problems of
| Stream to make it worthwhile, at least not without some
| external patching and support entity in addition, but
| it's been a long time since I looked at the specifics of
| their packaging and ports systems. I don't actually mind
| something like Stream for a personal server actually.
| It's just when trying to manage a fleet in the tens and
| hundreds when it becomes a real liability and increased
| possible admin support load IMO.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Just curious, why didn't you migrate from Ubuntu to
| Debian? Wouldn't that have been a smaller change?
| freedomben wrote:
| I would wait a bit to see how this shakes out before
| raising the alarm. I'm waiting to see what Alma/Rocky do,
| as well as holding out a small amount of hope that RH and
| others will agree to something.
| izacus wrote:
| Did you really compare our freeloading shop against one of
| the biggest software contributors to Linux and supporting
| ecosystem? RH is a top 5 contributor of patches across the
| most important core components.
| op00to wrote:
| > then Red Hat are freeloaders for relying on the Linux
| Kernel
|
| "freeloaders"
|
| Most Active Linux 6.1 Employers [1]
|
| By Changeset
|
| [...]
|
| 7. Red Hat 672 4.8%
|
| By Lines Changed
|
| [...]
|
| 10. Red Hat 24073 3.1%
|
| Most active employers, 5.16 through 6.1
|
| By changesets
|
| 3. Red Hat 4916 5.7% (behind Google and "Unknown")
|
| By lines changed
|
| 8. Red Hat 202698 3.3%
|
| [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/
| dralley wrote:
| There's also different types of contributions. Hardware
| vendors like Intel and AMD are _mostly_ contributing
| their own hardware drivers (and a lot of that, especially
| in AMD 's case, is just autogenerated hardware
| definitions), whereas Red Hat is _mostly_ contributing to
| core kernel functionality.
| autoexecdotbat wrote:
| > If you're a freeloader...
|
| It's dishonest to leave that conditional off the quote.
| The work and risk/stress involved in running a
| supportless shop is quite high. So if they are
| freeloading by using Rocky then Red Hat is also
| freeloading.
|
| I do think it's funny that they weren't even number 1 on
| that list though. Guess they are at least getting a lot
| of volunteer work from other companies!
| kbenson wrote:
| It's hard to tell without more context _of your own_
| whether you 're supporting what I said, or refuting the
| argument that Red Hat are freeloaders, which is an
| argument I _did not_ make.
| freedomben wrote:
| and that's just the kernel. Red Hat also runs or
| contributes to a bunch of other projects that are
| significant, especially relating to containers.
| justinclift wrote:
| ... and looks like they're locking many of those changes
| to the source code behind their own paywall.
|
| While it may technically be legal (ie crafted by lawyers
| to make sure of it), that still seems like a pretty
| shitty thing to do.
| StillBored wrote:
| Not just containers, all the core linux stuff. gcc,
| binutils, gnome, systemd, etc.
|
| One of the major differences between buying a support
| contract with RH and buying one from literally any other
| vendor is that RH doesn't sell support for things without
| having someone active in that project's community.
|
| AKA, there is a good chance the gatekeeper that your !RH
| support provider is talking to is a RH employee or funded
| by RH. Put another way, rocky can't afford to hire 1k
| engineers to maintain all those packages, nor can anyone
| else so your trusting that the bug you want fixed can be
| fixed by a drive by contributor. This is part of the
| reason that RHEL has such a small package list too, just
| about every single package in that list has someone
| working upstream.
|
| So, you won't get stuck like i did 15 years ago with a
| glibc bug that the company your paying a support contract
| to can't fix. Sure that distro patched their own version,
| but the change got dropped a couple years later during a
| rebase, and it was the only distro with the fix. Meaning
| our product only ran on that specific distro + version
| until we reopened the bug with RH and they actually got
| it fixed upstream.
| kbenson wrote:
| To be clear, you're _less likely_ to get stuck like that.
| There 's plenty of bugs open that Red Hat doesn't fix
| because it's either too problematic or affects too few
| people. Sometimes that's eventually solved with a point
| release and them rebasing to a newer package version
| which includes an upstream fix, sometimes it just
| persists. I'm not saying it's common, but it's happened,
| and happened to us. Encountering a bug and finding the KB
| article with only workarounds and then a bugzilla entry
| that's been open for a couple years isn't exactly common,
| but I also wouldn't count it as all that rare in my
| experience.
|
| _Also_ to be clear, I wasn 't making a case abovc that
| Red Hat doesn't provide a lot of benefit to the open
| source community, just that Red Hat could not exist
| without that same community. I do not begrudge Red Hat
| making money. I do think they're being extremely
| shortsighted if and when they shut off the larger open
| source community's uses of their core OS product. They're
| making their whole ecosystem much harder to get talent
| for if they do that, and it's not like entities running
| Rocky or Alma are just going to spring for RHEL. We trade
| on our staff's skill as System/Linux Administrators, and
| the core OS is not as important as all that. It's like if
| Python started requiring licensing fees. You'd get some
| short term return on that and some larger entities will
| just pay, but you'd see python usage in the general
| community plummet, with all that entails about its
| future.
|
| Maybe to their eyes it makes more sense in this current
| world of startups and VC to just exclude the smaller
| players, since those companies that grow organically to a
| size where Red Hat's pricing makes sense are much rarer?
| jzb wrote:
| "Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or
| something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has
| automatic RHEL licensing."
|
| This is a two-way street. It's not all on Red Hat. I don't
| know to what extent Red Hat has or hasn't tried to do a deal
| with Digital Ocean but it's not as simple as Red Hat just
| deciding to do it. There's a fair amount of certification
| work that DO would have to do as well as hammering out the
| legal / business agreements.
|
| The "comparable" part exists with many cloud providers, so if
| you're not married to Digital Ocean then that part should be
| doable. Red Hat also has some programs around subscription
| portability.
|
| However, I do get it that the subscription process introduces
| friction and for small shops that have a patchwork
| infrastructure as you describe, it's going to be difficult.
| Some of that is on Red Hat to solve if they want your money,
| but not all of it. They can't do it all themselves by fiat if
| Digital Ocean isn't willing to meet them halfway.
| avhception wrote:
| We're not married to DigitalOcean, but changing cloud
| providers also takes time and investment we'd rather spend
| elsewhere. And we'd still have to figure out what to do
| with the bare metal instances, container images and
| whatnot. The friction is very real.
| ikiris wrote:
| you have to understand, why would digital ocean want to
| deal with this when they can use actual open source
| options without the overhead?
| jehb wrote:
| > Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or
| something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has
| automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers,
| work something out.
|
| I think they do this on AWS and Azure (and maybe GCE?). DO
| may just not see enough of their enterprise customers asking
| for it for them to dispatch the lawyers and negotiators to
| make this happen.
|
| Disclosure: Ex-Red Hatter, but never got anywhere close to
| anything related to sales or licensing.
| avhception wrote:
| Thanks for the hint! I will keep it in mind. Still waiting
| for the situation to really calm down. We'd rather not
| spend precious time and effort on changing clouds, and even
| if we did we'd still need to figure out the situation
| regarding bare metal and container images.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| Most likely switching from DO to AWS or Azure is going to
| greatly increase your costs
| freedomben wrote:
| From your description, IMHO you're not a freeloader,
| especially since you want to contribute. You are the exact
| type of people that I think Red Hat is harming themselves
| with.
|
| I'm in basically the same boat, currently using Linode. At
| other companies I've made decisions to buy RHEL and
| OpenShift, and would again because I've been pretty happy
| (we'll see how this current thing shakes out).
|
| I also went to work for Red Hat (and took a pay and title
| cut) largely because I had so much love for them. I'd been
| using Fedora and CentOS (pre-stream) for many years. The
| expertise that I gained from the experience also let me hit
| the ground running in my new job, and I made them a lot of
| money. Had CentOS not existed, I would never have learned
| their ecosystem and certainly wouldn't have gone to work
| there. That's profit that is hard to measure, and it is hard
| to directly tie it to somebody's commission or KPIs, but I'm
| sure it's not unsubstantial. Many of the people I worked with
| had a similar backstory!
|
| I would also say (at least when I worked there) I didn't know
| _anybody_ (who wasn 't a sales person) who would have called
| us free loaders. Quite the opposite, they considered us part
| of the community.
| avhception wrote:
| This is essentially my backstory as well. I'm typing this
| on a Thinkpad running Fedora. RedHat seems to be focused on
| big corp and government customers. But even they are not an
| island. Loosing the grassroots will really hurt them in the
| long term I think.
| bayindirh wrote:
| You with 100 instances is pretty sizeable. On the other hand,
| I know _research infrastructures_ (read: thousands of
| instances around Europe) built with CentOS 7, Alma & Rocky.
|
| These guys are also power users and developers who need no
| support.
|
| This is a massive blow by RedHat, and I'm not sure that
| they're aware of the size of the install base they are
| attacking to.
| Twirrim wrote:
| > Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or
| something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has
| automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers,
| work something out.
|
| Most of the major clouds _have_ this pre-existing capability
| to charge more and revenue share the extra through their
| marketplace services etc; and they 're in active use by other
| vendors. It's often a good source of revenue for both the
| cloud company and the vendor, and helps the customers by
| providing them with prebuild solutions that they don't have
| to build themselves (e.g. web application firewall vendors
| can/do provide closed source images that customers can use
| that way). It's not like this is expecting cloud companies to
| build whole new services from whole cloth just to support Red
| Hat.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| >Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or
| something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has
| automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers,
| work something out.
|
| We've tried to make deals with RH in the past, but they will
| only let us sell RHEL VMs with licenses if it's running on a
| RHEL hypervisor... which none of our platform is using at
| all.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think this sucks, but for a little bit of defense of RH
| on this the entire support stack is built around assuming a
| RHEL host (meaning you're using a supported and exact
| version of the hypervisor and associated tools). Adding
| support capabilities for a non-RHEL host would be a major
| task, and not one they are well equipped to do.
|
| Now that said it's a bit dumb because with most things it's
| not hard for support to tell your customer, "yep that's a
| problem in the guest" and help, or "that's a problem with
| the host, contact DO" or whoever.
|
| But in general, when Red Hat says something is "supported"
| they are guaranteeing a lot about it. They'll literally fix
| the code if something is wrong. There's also a culture
| internally of "be careful helping with something that is
| 'unsupported'" because customers have previously accused RH
| people of messing stuff up and demanding they fix it. I
| helped with stuff like that most of the time when I worked
| for RH, but I was always very clear with the customer that
| "this isn't Red Hat, this is me helping as a friend and
| fellow Linux nerd" and the rapport with the customers was
| always good enough that I wasn't worried.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| As someone who has done this, and benefitted from others
| doing this, I think the open sharing is probably the
| number one reason to use these types of solutions. You
| get people that are in their own niche and know specific
| parts of the system inside and out. That builds
| credibility and increased profits, but the companies are
| too nervous to stand behind their people.
| bonzini wrote:
| > you're using a supported and exact version of the
| hypervisor and associated tools
|
| Having exact versions is not a problem (any version of
| RHEL guests are supported on any RHEL hosts past and
| future, almost). Plus Windows, ESX, Amazon and Google
| clouds, and a few more.
|
| Rather, the problem is having _up to date_ versions; with
| RHEL you can often ask the customer to reproduce on an up
| to date host if possible, with other distros the support
| machinery isn't there and you need someone to talk to at
| the cloud provider, so that they can debug stuff that
| breaks only in their environment and can't be reproduced.
| Otherwise you cannot guarantee the level of support that
| you mention. Very few cloud provider can provide that, I
| am not even sure that IBM's cloud made the short list.
| XorNot wrote:
| Isn't long term support Red Hat's thing? The ask isn't to
| support some random system, it's for RH to put out an
| official image and distro they support on cloud providers
| and bake the licensing costs into the hourly runtime
| fees.
|
| This is exactly how you consume Windows on AWS and it's a
| huge incentive to do it that way because it takes
| licences management out of consideration.
| bonzini wrote:
| The cloud provider is also running software, the cloud
| doesn't run on magic dust. Red Hat doesn't supports RHEL
| on your blood if they don't believe they can trust you to
| help supporting RHEL, the way their customers expect. The
| easiest way is to run RHEL as the bare metal OS but it's
| not the only way.
|
| > This is exactly how you consume Windows on AWS and it's
| a huge incentive to do it that way because it takes
| licences management out of consideration.
|
| It's also how you consume RHEL on AWS, GCE or Azure.
| avhception wrote:
| That's sad.
|
| And we'd have to figure out what to do with the bare metal
| instances and containers, too.
| jsight wrote:
| Honestly, there are a ton of people like you out there. A big
| selling point for Red Hat has always been their contributions
| to the community and that funding them would help to drive
| that.
|
| It is a big motivator for people transitioning from your
| state to becoming a customer.
| dralley wrote:
| >Please, dear Red Hat, just give me a DigitalOcean VM (or
| something comparable) that costs a few dollars more and has
| automatic RHEL licensing. Make deals with the VM providers,
| work something out.
|
| This 100% already exists, but I don't believe Digital Ocean
| is one of the supported vendors.
| rwmj wrote:
| _> Continue to make it so that rebuilders like Alma or Rocky
| can exist as bug-for-bug by having access to the source, but
| reach an agreement with them not to offer or sell support._
|
| That was CentOS (after acquisition by Red Hat but before CentOS
| Stream). Unfortunately killed off.
| freedomben wrote:
| Agreed, although there is one important difference: Red Hat
| isn't behind Alma or Rocky like they were CentOS (yes they
| did that to themselves by acquiring CentOS, but that was in
| the past. It was a mistake, but we have to move forward from
| where we are _today_ ). A lot of people knew that CentOS was
| owned by Red Hat and that made them a lot more comfortable
| using it. They kind of had to change that relationship
| somehow. I'm not happy at all that they did it, but I can
| understand why.
|
| Option 1 above allows them to keep that "those are third
| parties, not Red Hat" relationship but still have the
| benefits of a free community build.
| acomjean wrote:
| almost 20 years ago when I took a Red Hat Kernel internals
| class (at Redhat) they basically told us to use CentOS if we
| wanted to experiment with RHEL. (We were preparing for a
| transition from the HPUX/Solaris machines.). But it worked,
| some of our architects did that and we could get the scheduler
| behaving similar to HPUX. I left that company, but I'm pretty
| sure they did switch and RedHat got a big contract out of it.
|
| We've come a long way.
| redundantly wrote:
| > Red Hat, you NEED to fix this
|
| You should be addressing IBM. This is how they operate. Things
| will only get more strict and more difficult to work with from
| here. They don't care about good will. They don't care about
| OSS. The only thing that matters is dominance in the market
| place to take care of their bottom line.
| freedomben wrote:
| A lot of Red Hat people pay attention to forums like this,
| and I would bet money there's a big discussion going on
| internally right now. IBM couldn't care less, but the people
| at Red Hat will. They're also not powerless (at least, they
| weren't when I left a few years ago).
| jzb wrote:
| Obviously IBM owns Red Hat now and all that. But people
| overestimate how much involvement IBM has day-to-day with Red
| Hat. (Source: I'm a former Red Hatter, left last year.)
|
| At worst I'd imagine that IBM's influence is felt this way:
| IBM expects x% growth and other metrics every quarter. How
| that is achieved is up to Red Hat's executives. If the
| leadership at Red Hat decides it can do that with the status
| quo, then I don't think IBM is going to say "no, you _must_
| change the source distribution to fit our evil plan. "
|
| The worst thing that IBM has done directly (IMO) was plucking
| Jim Whitehurst away from Red Hat and over to IBM, but not
| making him CEO. Whatever reason IBM chose to do that, it
| wasn't good for Red Hat or IBM long-term in my opinion.
| bamfly wrote:
| I think this is a key part of where they've been aiming for
| _years_. Since the '00s, even. Maybe earlier, IDK. I just have
| their public behavior to go on, but it sure _looks_ like a
| long-term strategy. If it 's not, it ought to be, because
| they're doing most of the work for it anyway.
|
| 1) Steer enough of the Linux ecosystem that Red Hat is _the_
| most-qualified support source for common Linux stacks,
| including maneuvering to make it difficult to decouple or avoid
| them in other distros (Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key
| plays here).
|
| 2) Cut off access to the blessed least-risky-for-enterprise
| version of your product.
|
| 3) You _are_ Linux for much of the market. You own it. Profit.
| busterarm wrote:
| a.k.a. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
|
| Few of us have careers long enough to remember purchasing SCO
| or HP-UX or similar and what that whole experience was like.
| We're positively blessed compared to how things were in the
| '90s.
|
| Red Hat's leadership forgets what made them successful in the
| first place and wants those bad old days back badly.
| kbenson wrote:
| When you're not at the top you want competition, since you
| _are_ competition. When you 're at the top you want to
| choke competition and gate as much as you can. It's a story
| as old as trade itself.
| kelnos wrote:
| > _Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key plays here_
|
| Systemd, sure, but I would assume that the vast majority of
| Red Hat's support contracts would be for server use, where
| GNOME and Wayland are irrelevant.
| bamfly wrote:
| Gnome was a major lever in making it hard for other distros
| to avoid systemd, early on. The way Wayland's been
| structured and that... transition, such as it is, has been
| managed, smells a whole lot like a fire-and-motion move,
| and besides, dominance there was necessary to keep Mir from
| winning as the successor to X-Window and making it possible
| for Ubuntu to follow Red Hat's playbook and use it to push
| some of their other, deeper-in-the-stack projects (they'd
| have been _neatly_ positioned to interfere with both
| Systemd and Gnome, had they won). I don 't think Red Hat
| would let Ubuntu push _anything_ of note, at this point,
| without countering it, for (justified!) fear of their own
| tactics being turned on them.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
|
| Systemd's the main body of Red Hat's army here, if you will
| --no doubt that's the most important part of all this--but
| other projects have played other important roles in
| supporting or defending it, at times.
| xorcist wrote:
| It's not like Red Hat planned and schemed to execute on
| Wayland as a plan for domination, but their decision to
| support Wayland as an existing project with technical
| merit staffed by skilled people might well have been
| tactical for the reason you mention.
|
| Some people tend to imagine the first situation and
| rightly dismiss it as a post facto conspiration but the
| second situation is utterly realistic. They may even not
| have realized until much later how right they got.
|
| And I say that as someone who is convinced we need
| something like Wayland, the sooner the better. But we
| also have to avoid being naive about how business is
| done.
| zh3 wrote:
| You missed 'deprecating the alternatives' :)
|
| Somewhat jaded opinion after many years in the business, but
| these companies exploiting OSS for profit have learnt from
| how Microsoft's moves have played out over the years (and are
| now making their own mistakes). Given the only way they make
| money is by providing support, obviously they're going to go
| the MS route (make operation arcane and complex, as per your
| first point).
| kelnos wrote:
| > _You missed 'deprecating the alternatives'_
|
| I don't want to disagree too hard with this, because I,
| too, have been uncomfortable with the march toward making
| it very difficult to build a Linux system without things
| like systemd (I actually don't have all that much of a
| problem with systemd anymore, but I also value choice).
|
| But no one company can deprecate anything. The source is
| all there, under permissive licenses. If people want
| sysvinit or openrc (etc.) to work well in order to build
| systems without systemd (for example), they are free to
| maintain, support, and evangelize them. And this happens,
| to some degree. If it's not happening to the degree we're
| all happy with, then we should pitch in to help, either
| with our labor, or financially. Otherwise we don't really
| get a say.
| bamfly wrote:
| They just have to make it hard/risky/expensive to keep
| using things they've declared deprecated, or to avoid the
| software they're pushing & steering. Which they've done
| pretty damn effectively (again, if this were all somehow
| accidentally, holy shit, it _shouldn 't_ have been,
| because, _wow_ , it's been a highly-successful-and-
| effective set of business maneuvers executed over a span
| of years)
|
| Doesn't matter if some hobbyists still run Gentoo with
| openrc and X-Window with Windowmaker and all the classic
| interchangeable daemons and components that Systemd
| replaced (and with which it is incompatible)--it matters
| that any _commercial_ competitor 's only realist option,
| short of a massive and risky investment, is offering the
| same things Red Hat does, but with less influence on
| those projects. They want it to be expensive to build a
| competitor that's not a Red Hat knockoff--and if that's
| not what they wanted, well, somehow they took a whole
| bunch of steps over a span of years to make it happen
| anyway, by accident I suppose, but the outcome's the
| same.
| notabee wrote:
| As ever, solidarity matters. The only way to get out of
| these embrace, extend, extinguish cycles is to form
| independent organizations that are never beholden to a
| single company or even a small handful. Individuals can't
| stand up to the efforts of teams of company-paid
| developers just by contributing their free time. But it's
| very hard to create such an organization without the
| companies immediately recognizing the need to stuff as
| many of their proxies into said org to gain influence,
| and that's a difficult thing to counter. As an ecosystem,
| we need to contend not only with whether a particular
| thing like systemd works well or solves a problem but
| also whether it has predatory intentions. This is simply
| what the incentives lead to unless the community has a
| strong voice to counter such attempts. And in this day
| and age, that also includes dealing with all the
| submarine articles and other consent manufacturing that
| are well within the budget of any large company to try to
| fake organic community discourse.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| That sounds a lot more like Canonical's (attempted)
| strategies
|
| 1) Be the defacto "new user" or "newbie friendly" distro for
| two decades
|
| 2) Keep making asinine attempts to monetize your users
| (Amazon search bar comes to mind)
|
| 3) Try to pivot and break core Linux functionality so
| software _only_ works on you (Keeping Upstart after everyone
| else abandoned it, Mir instead of Wayland and the horrendous
| amount of forking done to GTK and others to get that hideous
| 'Unity' desktop going)
| bamfly wrote:
| Yes, Canonical has been their main competitor on each point
| and it's _possible_ the threat of Canonical is what sent
| them this direction in the first place [EDIT: or vice-versa
| --Ubuntu may have attempted to "own" parts of their system
| in response to Red Hat's moves to do the same, I'm not sure
| how exactly that timeline works out and all I have to go on
| is how both have behaved].
|
| Canonical-steered alternatives to Systemd, Gnome, and
| Wayland, have been advanced (as you note: Mir, Unity,
| Upstart) with less political and/or technical savvy than
| Red Hat's efforts, and have all failed. Technically they
| all still exist, in some form, but they're _de facto_ dead.
| Snap /FlatPack is another place they're butting heads, and
| I think it's fair to say Snap's not got a bright future,
| but I guess it's technically still in the running, so we'll
| have to call that one undecided.
| vedranm wrote:
| How exactly would Red Hat pursue such strategy and
| compete with Canonical? Consider the fact that Red Hat
| leaves the copyright to the contributor in Red Hat's
| projects, while Canonical requires contributors to sign
| CLA to get patches included in Canonical's projects.
| Given this arrangement, Canonical both benefits from the
| contributions and also has extra rights over the code
| that everyone else doesn't have that gives them a
| competitive advantage.
| bamfly wrote:
| What's that got to do with maneuvering for control of
| extremely-important parts of Linux? If anything,
| license/attribution fuckery would put you at a
| disadvantage in that kind of a game. Red Hat was playing
| for position, not material, in chess terms. Canonical may
| have held more rights to their competing software, but it
| doesn't matter a bit, because those projects are
| irrelevant now. They "own" more, perhaps, but they're in
| checkmate, so it doesn't matter. Who's looking to pay the
| best-positioned claimant to "upstart maintainer" for
| support? Practically nobody, and that's not a growing
| market.
|
| If you're an enterprise, do you see Canonical/Ubuntu or
| Red Hat as the most-credible vendor to support Systemd,
| which both of them are running? Is there anyone _else_
| who might hold that title? The answer to those questions
| _are the point_ of what Red Hat 's done (or else they've
| accidentally achieved a pretty amazing coup through a
| series of maneuvers that led to that outcome simply by
| chance, which notion strikes me as unlikely).
|
| What's important is making it extremely expensive to
| launch or re-position a competitor distro to Red Hat that
| actually ships substantially-different software than Red
| Hat does, at a level of polish & reliability that might
| let you compete with them. It leaves competing distros as
| Red Hat _followers_. Which, fine if some hobbyists pick
| that, what they care about is being perceived as the only
| credible claimant to the title of first-party vendor _of
| Linux, in most contexts_ by enterprise.
| [deleted]
| progmetaldev wrote:
| I think you can really only use this assumption if you are
| talking about desktop Linux. Using the Ubuntu server
| version is mostly giving you Debian with more packages
| available (and all the benefit and downsides to that).
| freedomben wrote:
| Agreed, I think Canonical has been a lot worse in this
| respect than Red Hat. I think Red Hat's technical arguments
| have merit, and they do a pretty good job separating
| projects from the company so they are definitely not RPM
| distro-only.
| rlpb wrote:
| > Keeping Upstart after everyone else abandoned it...
|
| False. Ubuntu switched to systemd as soon as its upstream
| (Debian) did.
|
| See https://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1316
| freedomben wrote:
| At the (current) top levels, you might be right. I don't
| think it's been going on longer than 10 years though. I'd
| guess maybe 5 or 6.
|
| The bulk of engineering doesn't like this, but sadly for a
| while now it's been a sales-driven company, and the IBM
| influence has certainly not helped. Sales doesn't give a shit
| about the health of Linux, or even the long-term health of
| Red Hat. They want their commission and promotion, and pesky
| open-source ideological things get in the way.
| mrighele wrote:
| I would say at least since udev was merged into systemd and
| gnome adding an hard dependecy on systemd-logind [2], both
| in 2012 so I would say more than 10 years.
|
| To me that this was an act to force a Redhat-led project
| through other Redhat-led projects.
|
| [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/490413/ [2]
| https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-
| daemon/-/commi...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| How about since July 9th, 2019?
| hosteur wrote:
| What happened then?
| jacooper wrote:
| Gnome and Wayland are the last worries for any enterprise
| customer.
| bamfly wrote:
| Gnome's part of the play to make it painful for other
| distros to avoid Systemd, which _does_ concern ~all
| enterprise customers. And I 'm sure some of those
| enterprise customers are paying for graphical workstations,
| besides, even if it's a minority.
|
| [EDIT] If I'm not communicating this well, consider: if Red
| Hat steers several key projects that basically all other
| serious distros are stuck with (in no small part due to Red
| Hat maneuvering that _sure looks like_ it was designed to
| bring this situation about on purpose), how can another
| vendor ever be anything more than a knock-off of Red Hat?
| Ubuntu tried to fight them on each of these points, and
| others, and lost every time. Result: if you 're running
| Ubuntu, much of your system is defined by, and the future
| development of it steered by, Red Hat. You're practically
| running a Red Hat knock-off, aside from their dead-man-
| walking FlatPack competitor, Snap. May as well just pay for
| support from a budget RHEL vendor... oh, wait, those just
| got cut off, guess you'll be paying Red Hat. It
| dramatically increases their moat and the cost of building
| a credible competitor that's not basically just off-brand
| Red Hat with less ability to steer the future of the
| platform.
| charcircuit wrote:
| systemd makes enterprise customer's lives easier. It's
| more reliable and it's easier to write your own units and
| timers than what came before.
| bamfly wrote:
| Systemd's a lot more than an init system, and that's no
| accident. Red Hat now determines where Linux goes in some
| very important ways, and I think they believe they've
| finally got a solid lock on that, after years of effort,
| if they're making this move. Why go with a competitor (if
| you're a paying customer, which is who matters) that's
| just following in Red Hat's wake? And now, the options
| for RHEL-in-a-different-label will be gone. Who's left?
| Nobody, you're gonna pay Red Hat or eat extra (perceived,
| if not actual) risk.
|
| [EDIT] Nb that for the above it _doesn 't even matter_ if
| Systemd's better than the pile of interchangeable daemons
| and programs it replaced. I have opinions on that, but
| it's irrelevant to Red Hat's market maneuvers, aside from
| that it was important to them that it not be easy & safe
| to cleanly replace, in part or whole.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Have you looked at 2022/23 commit logs for systemd and
| matched those authors to employers?
|
| (Preview: It's mostly Microsoft, Meta and Suse.)
| jsight wrote:
| The funny thing is that it looks like most of the
| decisions leading to that outcome have been
| overwhelmingly coincidental.
| bamfly wrote:
| I would be very surprised if it's a coincidence that
| Systemd's as difficult to avoid, if you're building a
| Linux distro, as it now is, nor a coincidence that it's
| been going NIH all over the rest of the system ever since
| Gnome was leveraged to speed up its adoption.
|
| The point is to make it difficult to offer a credible
| enterprise Linux distro that's not full of Red Hat-
| steered software in key places, turning you into a cheap
| knock-off of Red Hat with little say in what happens to
| the software you're providing, in terms of future
| development. It now costs a lot more money to get out of
| Red Hat's shadow & control, as a would-be Red Hat
| competitor--they're not just another distro among many,
| they run the damn show.
| tester756 wrote:
| >You are Linux for much of the market. You own it. Profit.
|
| What a twist!
|
| So after all it wasn't Microsoft EEEing Linux, but actual
| "Linux Companies"?!
| anyoneamous wrote:
| Microsoft tried and failed because their product is
| strictly inferior for the market which Linux has ended up
| dominating. Marketing and evil behaviour can definitely win
| out over technical quality, but we were fortunate that it
| didn't go that way in this case.
| jzb wrote:
| "Systemd, Gnome, and Wayland are key plays here"
|
| GNOME and Wayland are utterly non-strategic for most of Red
| Hat's business. If your theory of Red Hat's long-term
| strategy hinges on those being strategic, then you need to go
| back to the drawing board. You could fairly cite systemd, I
| suppose, but Wayland and GNOME not so much.
|
| On point 3 - that's not really controversial. All the Linux
| vendors have tried to "be" Linux in the public market.
| Canonical has certainly tried to be the brand-name Linux for
| most users.
|
| To the extent Red Hat has tried to steer the market w/r/t its
| tech stack, it's done so pretty honestly and by trying to
| persuade others to adopt its tech stack _and_ by doing the
| work in the open. This is the opposite approach of Canonical
| which has tried to push lots of NIH technologies to silo
| people to Ubuntu and continues to fail at it over and over
| again.
| justinclift wrote:
| Yeah. To me, this just seems like IBM feeling like their
| existing (corporate) sales funnel is big enough that the
| consequence of this (reducing OSS users based sales funnel)
| aren't going to meaningfully matter.
|
| Or, at least they won't matter while the current decision
| makers are still at IBM. It could be a problem for future
| IBM leaders, who will probably just attempt to buy SuSE or
| Canonical or something at that point. ;)
| bamfly wrote:
| Gnome and Wayland countered Ubuntu's attempts to "own"
| competitor projects in those areas (the current fight is
| Snap/Flatpack). Gnome, in particular, was important as a
| lever used to make it expensive for distros to avoid
| Systemd, forcing it into _de facto_ standard status more
| quickly than it may have achieved on its own merits (if it
| ever would have--and maybe it would!), from which point
| they 've started using Systemd to eat other system services
| & daemons, increasing their control over the platform and
| cementing their status as, effectively, the "first party"
| vendor _for Linux itself_ --not literally the kernel, but
| enough of the system that you've got to go pretty far into
| _here be dragons_ territory, by the standards of
| enterprise, at least, not to be using Red Hat-steered
| software in key parts of your system--so if you want a say
| in the direction of Linux, as you experience it, or
| priority bugfixes from the best-possible source, or to talk
| to experts who _write that software_ for a living, for
| advice or training, you 're short on options other than...
| Red Hat. Which is the whole point.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Gnome is a healthy non-profit foundation with the
| majority of its organizational capacity (and income) not
| associated with Red Hat.
|
| Red Hat hasn't been dominant in Wayland for years. It's
| very much a community effort, including governance and
| maintainership.
|
| systemd is currently mostly developed by employees of
| Microsoft, Meta and Suse, aside from I guess Frantisek.
|
| Red Hat does a lot, and I'm sure they have thoughts about
| where they spend their money, but I don't think people
| really understand how decoupled these projects and
| communities are.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| It's funny how people view GNOME/systemd as some sort of
| conspiracy rather than it just being what the people who
| contribute want to work on.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| > the current fight is Snap/Flatpack
|
| I work with enterprise customers every day who use RHEL,
| it's free variants, and Ubuntu - I can promise that none
| of them give a single shit about Flatpak or Snap. They
| will never use either of them. Those tools are only
| relevant to Linux on the desktop - the small size of that
| market is exactly why both companies (mostly Canonical)
| have gotten away with being a nuisance on this front.
| dizhn wrote:
| Flatpak is very relevant on the immutable OS space which
| is being pushed hard as the future. It is mostly an
| enterprise (server/vm) thing too.
| anyoneamous wrote:
| I just don't see people caring about an immutable OS in
| the enterprise space. The central requirement is already
| addressed by containers, and all of the security and
| compliance stuff enterprises do is predicated on having a
| "normal" OS - even if an immutable deployment is
| technically more secure, that doesn't help you if your
| auditors can't understand whether it checks the requisite
| boxes.
| pmontra wrote:
| Maybe a solution for point 2 could be that the first five
| licenses or activations are free.
| freedomben wrote:
| That would help, but I think that only works optimally if
| they also do number 1. If there is any "activation" process
| or the like, it adds enough friction to cause problems,
| especially in a modern CI/CD environment. It's not an easy
| change by any stretch, but if they don't do something they're
| going to be the next Oracle.
| m463 wrote:
| International Business Machines1 should merge with the
| International Brotherhood of Magicians2 to get a better chance
| of pulling this off.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_M...
| totallywrong wrote:
| > When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution
| into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat
| Enterprise Linux, but free", users like me were justifiably
| angered.
|
| I miss CentOS too. But how is that justifiable anger? Are you
| angry at the myriad of companies using open source code to build
| a paid product, and not giving it for free? I absolutely think
| that it backfired and they shouldn't have done it, but I also
| understand they had no obligation to maintain a 1:1 free
| alternative of their main product. That's just an unrealistic
| expectation imo.
| soneil wrote:
| Changing the support terms from 10 years to 1 year mid-stream
| lost them a lot of trust. It's not just what they did, it's
| how.
| totallywrong wrote:
| To that, I couldn't agree more.
| leni536 wrote:
| It's not comparable, as the source code is mostly not theirs.
| totallywrong wrote:
| As long as they comply with the licenses, which they do,
| that's largely irrelevant I'm afraid.
| soneil wrote:
| I'm a little confused how this new move still complies with
| many licences.
|
| As a paying customer you receive access the sources, as
| you're supposed to - but under contractual terms that you
| can't share them.
|
| Take the GPL as the most famous example. Providing me GPL'd
| sources that I'm not allowed to redistribute under the same
| terms definitely feels like it's against the spirit of the
| agreement. I'm too warm-blooded to argue whether it's under
| the letter.
| totallywrong wrote:
| It's been said elsewhere, you can legally redistribute,
| but then they will end your subscription, as those are
| the terms you agree to.
| soneil wrote:
| So the restriction isn't on exercising your rights on
| what you've received, which would be under the terms of
| the licence - it's on their willingness to provide you
| with anything else, which would be under the terms of
| their contract.
|
| I think I'll stick with my position that it's not within
| the spirit of the licence. (But I'd agree that this
| change has no impact on this.)
| pg_1234 wrote:
| Not just the spirit, the GPLv2 terms include:
|
| "Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work
| based on the Program), the recipient automatically
| receives a license from the original licensor to copy,
| distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms
| and conditions. You may not impose any further
| restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights
| granted herein."[1]
|
| So if they forbid sharing, they can't distribute Linux
| themselves.
|
| [1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-
| licenses/gpl-2.0.html
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| It's _legally_ irrelevant, but if you want an explanation
| for "justifiable anger" it's extremely relevant.
| shaan7 wrote:
| These days isn't OpenShift their main product?
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Can someone explain what the value of RHEL is supposed to be?
| op00to wrote:
| Yes, your Red Hat sales person can explain it, or perhaps their
| web site. Posters are not here to do the bare minimum of
| research for you that is freely available.
| shaan7 wrote:
| This comment sums it up quite well I think:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36438048
| nolist_policy wrote:
| This is great actually! Redhat continues to keep the same
| maintainers and devs on payroll and working on the same open-
| source projects, so the OSS ecosystem won't loose anything in
| that regard.
|
| But where will the big research labs that previously used
| Scientific Linux, then Almalinux go now? CentOS Stream? Debian?
| They will switch some systems to RHEL, but probably only a
| minority.
|
| I wonder what distro will gain from this, makes me excited for
| the future.
| [deleted]
| stndef wrote:
| Red Hat, you made the internet's nicest man, Jeff Geerling, upset
| and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
| taylodl wrote:
| Is anyone surprised?
|
| Red Hat has been running roughshod over the Linux community for
| some time now. I say good riddance!
| synergy20 wrote:
| I have been using debian and ubuntu for almost two decades
| without using Redhat, things seems OK, will this change by Redhat
| push more users to debian|ubuntu side?
|
| Canonical probably will do something similar in the future, but
| at least we have Debian.
| fariszr wrote:
| I mean they might've already done it, is Ubuntu Pros source
| code open?
| tguvot wrote:
| "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the
| word no."
|
| i worked in many different companies (including multi-billion
| revenue per year), and all of them used centos in order to have
| "proper enterprise linux" but for free. The only cases when real
| redhat was used is for something that actually required it by
| licensing/support terms - like Oracle, or alternatively
| contractual obligations for SLA.
|
| Pretty sure that IBM/Redhat know this as well and "third party
| open source packages compatability" not exactly something that
| they care about. Availability of sources only takes business from
| them.
|
| I personally somewhat happy about it. I moved to Debian 20 years
| ago and it "uncomfortable" to live in RH derived world. Even
| though Redhat 4 (or 4.1) was first ever Linux distribution that I
| installed back in 1997
|
| PS. Also when RedHat "partnered" with CentOS back in 2014, it was
| somewhat obvious what is the direction. If there is anything that
| it surprising, then it will be that it took so much time.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > i worked in many different companies, and all of them used
| centos in order to have "proper enterprise linux" but for free.
| The only cases when real redhat was used is for something that
| actually required it by licensing/support terms - like Oracle,
| or alternatively contractual obligations for SLA.
|
| I worked on a product that allowed both RHEL and CentOS, and
| then moved to a different one that mandated RHEL with a
| supported contract. The latter was _far_ less stressful to deal
| with, because any time there was an OS issue, we could pretty
| easily tell them, "Go to Red Hat." The shops that were on
| CentOS on the other product tended to be small businesses (and
| cheapskates), and every time an OS issue arose, it was a
| screaming match trying to convince them that we're not going to
| fix their OS for them.
| tguvot wrote:
| i just edited my post when you replied. companies where i
| worked had multi-billion revenues. it's not exactly small
| business. they just don't want to pay money for proper
| redhat. they had money to do so, but savings are savings.
| chasil wrote:
| Red Hat also conducts software audits.
|
| That is a huge reason to avoid them, regardless of the
| savings.
| tguvot wrote:
| in some cases, it's just cost of doing business
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| I for one would be okay with a distro like AlmaLinux migrating
| away from being an exact RHEL downstream clone to being an
| independent stable RPM based distribution. Stability and RPM
| ecosystem compatibility is what people are really looking for
| when they use a distribution like RHEL. So any reasonable
| distribution that provides those two will be sufficient to
| migrate away from Fedora/Redhat entirely.
| kjs3 wrote:
| I wouldn't, and neither would a _lot_ of other shops I 'm
| familiar with. Being able to run binary compatible distro in
| dev/test/QA and pretty seamlessly migrate to supported RHEL in
| prod is an important cost and risk containment measure. Now
| it's either 1) deal with 'is this bug our issue or because of
| something in the close-but-not-exact distro', 2) Dump our
| current supported distro for another; RH support has been in my
| experience very, very good, and no I don't think Rocky or the
| rest will come close any time soon, or 3) take a pretty big
| financial hit licensing RHEL everywhere.
|
| May be time to look at SuSE again.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Red Hat is IBM now. That might not be clear today, but give it 5
| or 10 years and it will be.
| kjs3 wrote:
| IBM bought them in 2019. Do you need another 5 or 10 years to
| figure it out?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Respectfully, what's wrong with CentOS for testing purposes?
| jacooper wrote:
| Isnt 100% compatible with RHEL, so the result won't really
| represent what would happen on RHEL.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| If it's not 100% compatible then how compatible is it?
|
| If 100% compatibility is the requirement then the only option
| has always been RHEL built, packaged, and distributed by Red
| Hat. Not some 3rd party's infrastructure.
| secabeen wrote:
| CentOS Stream is not the same operating system as RHEL.
| Original CentOS nearly was. 99+% of the time, if you ran
| into a bug in CentOS, that bug could be replicated in RHEL.
| For most people, that 99%+ compatibility was enough.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Apparently the package versions don't match and the order
| they are released don't match RHEL, so it is not possible
| to be sure a package that works on CentOS Stream works on
| any given version of RHEL.
| javitury wrote:
| RHEL market share won't last forever, so they have decided to
| milk the Red Hat cow as fast as they can.
|
| Long term, people will switch to containers and cloud apps
| (Kubernetes, AWS). In this new environment, operating systems are
| commoditized and RHEL's moat will slowly shrink. Instead,
| developers will focus on alpine, debian or similar.
| time0ut wrote:
| My company is steadily moving from being a heavy RH shop (RHEL
| and OpenShift) to Amazon (Amazon Linux 2 and EKS) as we migrate
| from our colos to AWS. RH has been a good vendor and I have no
| complaints, but it makes little sense in the long run. I am
| sure they are feeling it.
| creatonez wrote:
| Red Hat has significant involvement in container platforms
| right now.
| javitury wrote:
| Those are different Red Hat products and belong to different
| layers of the cloud stack.
|
| Previously third party developers targeted RHEL directly,
| enhancing the RHEL ecosystem. Red Hat could play long term by
| (indirectly) giving away the base product to the community,
| and profit from the increase in support subscriptions.
|
| New projects don't target RHEL as often as their primary
| platform, they prefer containers now. There is less ecosystem
| enhancement and it's more profitable to milk existing RHEL
| users. Centos Stream makes it possible to smooth the
| transition to the new paradigm.
|
| Openshift, Coreos, etc have different purposes and follow
| different market dynamics. Mainstream developers don't target
| them directly.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| Corporate brain fucking up yet another formerly admired
| organization.
|
| RIP Redhat. And fuck you, IBM.
| hinkley wrote:
| Everybody treats the sale of a company like you've won a game
| of Life. I went through a few where I obviously did not become
| a millionaire, and with a lot of time and unpacking it with
| coworkers and people with similar experiences, it's more like
| an Irish Wake.
|
| Sure there's booze and laughter, but something unique has been
| lost to the world, and that's why we are all here.
| jpswade wrote:
| This isn't a RedHat problem, it's an IBM problem.
| mynonameaccount wrote:
| I disagree. RedHat can do whatever they want just like you can do
| whatever you want. Don't like what RedHat is doing, then change
| your distro.
| cowmix wrote:
| "yes"
|
| That's today's episode of EZ answers to EZ questions.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| What a great episode, see you on the next!
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Y'all are talking to the subsidiary of a Fortune 500 like it has
| ears, or feelings. It doesn't. It doesn't care about your open
| source. It doesn't care about logic, or slowly shooting itself in
| the foot, or alienating its base.
|
| It cares about sales, profits, and the balance sheet. As long as
| it can make a profit, the people supporting and developing for
| its platform _for free_ can go fly a kite. And it will continue
| to burn itself into the ground until it becomes a write-off.
| Because there is no founder worried about its livelihood to try
| to right the ship. There is merely an executive VP who needs to
| jigger the numbers to make it look like they got another win this
| year so he can make his bonus.
|
| I call this Corporate Source.
| Aperocky wrote:
| There are Corporate and then there are IBM.
|
| Some corporations have a working long term plan, even if those
| plans are are purely about making more money in the future.
| Can't say the same for IBM.
| pengaru wrote:
| Wait, you're telling me IBM isn't committed to their messaging
| of Peace Love Linux, 23 years later?
|
| https://linuxgizmos.com/files/peace-love-linux.jpg
| freedomben wrote:
| You're probably right, but for some of us (certainly me) Red
| Hat is like an old friend. If there's even a tiny chance we can
| stop them from running off of a cliff, we have to try. When we
| see the self-harm they are doing, it pains us.
|
| Now, if there were widespread engineering dissatisfaction and
| turnover and they started losing some of the top talent and
| nerd-famous people that work there, I think there's a chance
| the people at the top would listen. Just a chance of course.
| loudmax wrote:
| I think the hope is that Red Hat would care about its own long
| term profitability. That is, the people running Red Hat will
| realize that they're sacrificing future revenue by prioritizing
| instant profits and this course is unsustainable. If they're
| interested in maximizing long term revenue, they should take
| the long term view.
|
| That is a reasonable idea. Unfortunately, the situation seems
| to be that the execs making these decisions are taking a pump
| and dump approach to the brand and don't care if Red Hat is
| still in business by the end of the decade. They'd rather the
| certainty of a dollar today than the promise of ten dollars
| tomorrow.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > I think the hope is that Red Hat would care about its own
| long term profitability.
|
| They are a public corporation. They only care about the short
| term sheet as that is all investors care about. As long as
| the stock market punishes long term thinking this is what you
| will get. Part of me thinks it is by design... that it is
| easier to make money in the market if you have a steady flow
| of companies going public then eventually going out of
| business.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > As long as the stock market punishes long term thinking
| this is what you will get.
|
| I hate to have to ask this, but _why is this not priced
| in_? In a naive conception of the stock market, public
| knowledge that a company is screwing itself over is
| basically free money, and somebody should take that money
| and thereby push the stock price down. Why, again and again
| in tech, does that not happen? Is the slow decline simply
| too slow or what?
| BirAdam wrote:
| There are a few parts to this. The first is, the future
| is currently extremely uncertain and therefore short term
| moves make sense. The second is the same as every other
| industry, if the price of money (interest rates) is super
| low people accumulate debt leveraging the future for the
| present and thereby raising the need for immediate
| return. This second part creates a feedback loop of
| constantly needing more and more revenue to pay the
| lenders. The third part of this is that most megacorps
| become seriously dysfunctional over time. There are a ton
| of reasons for this, but it mostly comes down to growing
| bureaucratization. IBM is among the worst in this regard,
| and many people predicted exactly this future when IBM
| bought Red Hat.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Personally I see it as an inherent flaw in the corporate
| model and we should rethink the idea of permanent
| corporations.
| gary_0 wrote:
| Do not anthropomorphize the IBM.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| I always come back to Bryan Cantrill telling me not to stick
| my arm into a lawnmower.
| Jalad wrote:
| Amazing talk that's referenced in this thread. Good review
| of Sun's opensource history, and a hilarious amount of
| shade thrown at Oracle:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
|
| The specific clip starts at 33 minutes but I recommend
| watching the whole thing. Also Bryan is on HN!
| hinkley wrote:
| It hates it when you do that.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| and above all, never feed it after midnight
| Thoreandan wrote:
| (1992) https://genius.com/Information-society-where-would-i-
| be-with...
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| This is an important point! Corporations don't make decisions
| - individual people do. A corporation is a piece of paper in
| a drawer.
| [deleted]
| zb3 wrote:
| Why should Red Hat provide its main product (stability,
| compatibility, support) for free? Why are enterprise users so
| entitled? Why should Red Hat care about them at all?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| While I agree with that partially, unfortunately I don't agree
| that it's a wise move for IBM. There is indeed a weird dynamic
| where IBM is basically funding third party companies to make a
| profit reselling what is advertised as a bug for bug compatible
| version of their own software while struggling to sell the
| original.
|
| So, I can see the logic of IBM wanting to end that. Of course
| the flip side is that that might prompt those third party
| companies to cut loose and join forces on creating a proper
| alternative that is effectively an independent fork that
| replaces Red Hat as an upstream. Amazon would be well familiar
| with that playbook of course. And they already have Amazon
| Linux as their in house preferred Red Hat derivative. And I
| seriously doubt Amazon cares a lot about bug for bug
| compatibility. In fact the whole point for them is probably not
| having most of those bugs to begin with. They just want a
| stable upstream that they can pull changes from.
|
| That's what makes this such a dumb move. IBM/Red Hat might get
| a few users to jump ship to the paid Red Hat. But most simply
| won't. And the further which ever fork emerges as the
| alternative diverges the less likely it becomes that users will
| still want to consider switching. Users want a stable upstream
| but it's not a given that IBM is the ideal steward of that
| upstream. And with Amazon, Oracle, Rocky, Alma, etc. all
| needing the same thing, the logical alternative for them would
| be to unite and form a foundation that takes that role.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Impact of RHEL Changes to AlmaLinux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36436375 - June 2023 (43
| comments)
|
| _Red Hat cutting back RHEL source availability_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36420259 - June 2023 (299
| comments)
|
| _Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources to CentOS Stream_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36419586 - June 2023 (27
| comments)
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| It is completely mystifying to me that anyone would use a
| "commercial" version of linux at all. I can't image commercial
| linux support is better than google and s.*overflow. I guess the
| answer is, as always, lawyers.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > I can't image commercial linux support is better than google
|
| You get a real expert engineer answering your questions and
| even fixing package source verses an outdated answer on SO.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > I can't image commercial linux support is better than google
| and s.*overflow. I guess the answer is, as always, lawyers.
|
| Then I guess you've never dealt with Red Hat.
|
| Sure I can spend a few hours Googling about mysterious log
| entries, blindly try various solutions that will fuck my system
| even more, and eventually I might even find a solution.
|
| OR I can just ping my support contact, get on with other tasks,
| and receive a magical solution by the end of the day. And if
| it's a software bug, they might even patch it!
| ledgerdev wrote:
| Reminds me of the wise words of Steve Jobs, the sales and
| marketing people are running things now. The product Genius has
| been rotted out, by people who have no conception of good
| product, no feeling in their heart about wanting to help
| customers.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
| soulbadguy wrote:
| I can't help that think this kind of move should be expected once
| IBM bought red hat. The core of the issue is an trying to extract
| more value from a well run/well optimize business which usually
| happens after such large acquisition. There is a fundamental
| limit to the kind of return on investment that a OSS first/sell
| support model can provide. In the short term, it's probably more
| profitable to pivot to more close model, and try to extract even
| more value from captive audience... But only time will tell how
| that pans out in the long term.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| Red Hat is IBM, do the math.
|
| This is not the inflammatory surface level comment that it seems
| to be, Red Hat invests and supports a lot of opensource projects
| and there are many good people there, but..
|
| Red Hat is IBM, do the math.
| andix wrote:
| I think a lot of companies are using RHEL and Alma/Rocky side by
| side. Because they are compatible, because people have an easy
| time to switch between them. I don't think that those people will
| move their license free servers to RHEL, but they will probably
| switch to Debian/Ubuntu.
|
| So in the end Red Hat will have a smaller market share and less
| support from the community. Currently most software provides a
| package at least for RHEL and Debian/Ubuntu. That may change in
| the future, if the amount of RHEL compatible systems drop
| significantly.
| izacus wrote:
| Noone is switching from RHEL to Ubuntu or Debian. If you're on
| RHEL it's because you need their ridiculous long support cycle
| which noone else comes close for.
|
| It's used by people building medical hardware and telescopes,
| not for website deployments.
| andix wrote:
| I meant their license free Alma/Rocky Servers.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| [dead]
| depereo wrote:
| Sometimes it's because you're operating a platform for a
| government entity and they have requirements like 'all OSes
| are under support contracts'.
|
| It's harder to get reputable support for debian in the south
| Pacific. RH is damned near the only decent option.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| Or compliance certifications. Whomever has the one you
| need, that's the distro you're going with. And any customer
| who needs that compliance usually has a boat load of cash.
|
| Microsoft really missed an opportunity for a boatload of
| cash by not putting out a distro for enterprise and
| government use. I guess they're making up for it now on
| Azure.
| andix wrote:
| If you're running some expensive software, the few
| hundred bucks for a RHEL license doesn't matter at all.
| Some database licenses easily reach a six figure price
| per server. Custom built software often runs only on a
| handful of servers and can then easily reach seven
| figures per server.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| We did... Enterprise ERP systems...
| bubblethink wrote:
| Ubuntu offers 10 years which is the same. RH is more
| entrenched, especially in the US. On the technical side,
| aside from selinux v/s apparmor, there aren't too many
| differences between Ubuntu and RHEL. RH has a few more custom
| offerings on the server side (freeipa, openstack, rhev,
| gluster, etc.), but those are probably not relevant for most
| users.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Ubuntu has 5 years of "standard support", with EOL after 10
| years. RHEL has 10 years of "production", with another 3-5
| years of "extended support".
| bubblethink wrote:
| That's just corporate speak. They are all the same. If
| you use RHEL after 5 years or after the .5 release, it
| becomes plainly obvious that it's begging you to pull the
| plug. It's only half assed security fixes after a few
| years, no matter where you are. If a customer asks for 13
| years, I'm sure Canonical will oblige.
|
| Edit: I'm talking about Ubuntu Pro that is 10 years.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense. As somebody outside the RHEL
| ecosystem, my main experience is needing to argue that
| maintaining compatibility with whatever ancient version
| of gcc ships with the oldest "production" version of RHEL
| isn't worth it. (E.g. that it is okay to require C++14
| support)
| izacus wrote:
| It's that "corporate speak" that wins paid contracts for
| software that needs to run for a decade or more.
|
| RHEL competitor in the market is Windows, not half
| supported hobby distros.
| bonzini wrote:
| I can't find numbers, but an awful lot of customers are
| still on RHEL 7 which was released in 2014. It's old but
| it's way more up to date than Ubuntu 14.04.
|
| I myself only switched (to CentOS Stream 9) last February
| for my personal servers.
| bubblethink wrote:
| Canonical started that 10 year thing only recently (maybe
| around 18.04). Also, you need to be on the pro
| subscription to get updates beyond 5 years. So a more
| accurate comparison would be 18.04+pro and RHEL 8,
| accounting for the fact that RHEL 8 is a year newer. Or
| 22.04 and RHEL 9.
| rch wrote:
| FreeIPA is a compelling differentiator.
|
| I've just started testing the port that recently landed in
| NixOS.
| bubblethink wrote:
| FreeIPA is nice, if over engineered and fragile. There is
| nothing preventing Canonical from packaging it, they just
| don't see enough demand probably, and for the most part,
| they care about ubuntu clients joining an AD domain,
| which I think Canonical supports.
| wingmanjd wrote:
| Fwiw, we moved (are moving) on from RHEL and derivatives to
| Debian/ Ubuntu servers at $DAYJOB. We were planning on
| deploying Centos 8 before the Stream debacle came along.
| monkeywork wrote:
| SuSE offers 10+ years support windows, is also RPM based, and
| has been the RHEL of Europe really for decades.
| izacus wrote:
| Indeed, SuSE is a much more likely alternative than others
| that are being thrown around.
| jacooper wrote:
| But support from the community almost doesnt exist.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Imagine if a Windows developer complained that they had to get a
| license for Windows in order to make sure their software worked
| on Windows. It is entitled to think that just because you are a
| developer that you deserve a license.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I don't see this as being about entitlement either way. RHEL
| isn't entitled to Jeff testing his software on RHEL, and Jeff
| isn't entitled to test his software on RHEL for free. The point
| was that a previously mutually beneficial arrangement is ended.
|
| The thesis is that Red Hat needs 3rd party devs to test on RHEL
| more than 3rd party devs need access to Red Hat, and if this is
| true then the move is dumb.
| izacus wrote:
| The business hustlers of Hacker News demand everything be given
| to them for free so they can then extract maximum margin for
| their Salas built on top of free (as in beer) software. It
| angers them when they find out that someone needs to pay for
| OSS development too.
| freedomben wrote:
| That's a fair point, but as one of the developers who complains
| about it, the difference for me at least is I don't support
| Windows or Mac unless someone in the community will test it. I
| only have Linux in my life, and I'm not buying Windows or Mac
| in order to support those platforms. I'm not buying RHEL to
| support that either. I'm a big Fedora user these days so I'll
| probably end up supporting RHEL by inference since most Fedora
| packages will work unchanged on RHEL, but I won't be testing
| it. I'm also considering moving back to Arch, but Fedora is so
| good that it's hard to picture leaving and Arch has the same
| problem that Fedora now has (that there's no "server" version I
| can use, and I like to use the same ecosystem on servers as I
| do locally. That's actually why I started using EL in the first
| place and have since been the cause of hundreds of purchased
| licenses over the years).
|
| And no CentOS Stream and Fedora Server aren't quite good enough
| because at this point in my life I have many dozens of boxes to
| maintain. I can't migrate every box every 6 to 12 months when
| Fedora revs, and I can't install and test updates constantly
| with CentOS. It would take a ton of my dev time that needs to
| be used for dev.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Historically, Microsoft had very easy to access developer
| programs to ensure that people were building software for
| Windows. More recently, they gave out free VM images for time-
| bombed Windows for the purpose. Currently, Windows 10 is free
| if you don't need to access customizable features like desktop
| background and are okay with a permanent notice on your
| desktop.
| johnvanommen wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| I'd argue it's never been easier to run a legitimate copy of
| Windows with very few hassles without paying for it. Sure,
| there's a watermark, but that's it.
| gary_0 wrote:
| You don't need to buy a license to test software on Windows:
| https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/virt...
| johnvanommen wrote:
| Even as a dyed-in-the-wool Open Source Guy, I give kudos to
| Microsoft for managing to avoid the pitfalls of it's peers.
| 25 years ago, everyone seemed to hate the company, but
| they've done a great job of turning a profit while _not_
| alienating developers and operations folks.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| It's self-serving of me to like this clip by Balmer, but
| maybe Microsoft gets it some times.
|
| "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, [...]"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
| ilyt wrote:
| Nothing unexpected after IBM takeover sadly.
|
| Pick Debian for your next install.
| ape4 wrote:
| IBM, are you d*mb?
| mcguire wrote:
| Yes.
| mcdermott wrote:
| Glad that we dumped CentOS/RHEL in favor of Ubuntu LTS years ago.
| 120photo wrote:
| How about everyone chip in so that Rocky/Alma can get a
| subscription to RHEL and get the source that way? The GPL does
| not say they have to publish the code in the wild just that they
| have to provide it when they distribute. There are many companies
| that use OSS, make modifications, and since they never distribute
| are not required to make that source available.
| superdug wrote:
| I started my life with a plethora of distros, but I still
| remember redhat 5.2. Redhat in the latter years as it tried to
| incentivize became known to me as redhate. Their insistence on
| gnome over kde was what broke us up, I thought getting bought by
| IBM would be the nail in the coffin, it appears I was right.
| kristianpaul wrote:
| "Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that
| you should not charge money for distributing copies of software,
| or that you should charge as little as possible--just enough to
| cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
|
| Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to
| charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit
| users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If
| this seems surprising to you, please read on."
|
| https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
| BirAdam wrote:
| I believe that it would stand to reason that if IBM/RH is not
| permitting redistribution of sources made available in their
| customer portal, this would constitute a violation of the GPL
| for any GPL package.
|
| I would assume that IBM/RH will then need to take the Apple
| approach and quickly start working to replace GCC with LLVM and
| next rid itself of all GPL software and stick with
| MIT/BSD/OSC...
| bubblethink wrote:
| Seeing how Intel, AMD, AWS, etc. are involved in some way or the
| other in maintaining their distros or supporting RHEL
| derivatives, it would make sense for them to band together and do
| an LTS distro from scratch, or pump enough money into Canonical
| so that it becomes a viable competitor. The distro is not where
| the alpha is. So why all the fuss ?
| kjs3 wrote:
| Only if they make Canonical dump snap.
| izacus wrote:
| Why on earth would they do that?
| putnambr wrote:
| Is there any risk to the Quarkus project from Red Hat's
| involvement? It's been my go-to for Java webservices, but Red
| Hat's track record is making me consider something like Helidon.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| As it stands I really like Fedora and I'm inclined to continue to
| give it a shot. I hope I don't have to eat my words on that. I
| _believe_ that the Fedora Project is somewhat independent of
| RedHat, although they have a sponsorship arrangement.
| fariszr wrote:
| Its relatively independent, but I don't see how fedora can be a
| RHEL replacement.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| It can if you like upgrading your entire operating system
| every 6 months.
| bubblethink wrote:
| This is a pretty good opportunity for Canonical to pick up the
| slack. Aside from the snap related self-sabotage, Canonical was
| on a pretty good trajectory.
| phatfish wrote:
| Given their team up with Microsoft on Azure I don't see a
| redemption arc anytime soon. What is left, SUSE I suppose for
| an enterprise style LTS distro?
| nvy wrote:
| Don't forget baking Amazon ads into their default desktop
| environment. Unity, was it? I forget which one.
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