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I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here"

I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. Why not just use one of the avaible distros or why not even make a deal with SUSE (a bavarian company) to have a subscription model with support directly from experienced distro makers? Surely they could've made sure that all important features and workflows can be implemented. Of course this would've needed to be a public bidding but if Red Hat gets it or SUSE does not really matter and surely is much cheaper than Microsoft licenses.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. For the same reason there are hundreds of forks and counting: it is difficult to get the environment you want without rebuilding everything from scratch, and once you do that you have to maintain it.
josefx 5y ago
They went with an Debian/Ubuntu based fork due to popularity. >if Red Hat gets it If your goal is to run a proprietary OS you might as well stay with Windows. No reason to endorse outdated IBM enterprise crapware after they killed the only compatible distro that didn't require paying the IBM tax to test and develop software for it.
ptman 5y ago
The big distros are quite customizable in order to suit a large audience. A large organization typically has defaults and customizations that need to be added. A common strategy is to _distribute_ their customizations by creating a distribution based on some more widely used distribution. Google had Goobuntu based on Ubuntu.
deknos 5y ago
because back in the day, no distribution was good enough for our needs. today is a completely other situation. redhat might, but they borked it somehow as they said we would not be allowed to change anything or loose all support. at least that was what i heard. and then there was supposedly the decision "we do not want any external company due to the bad experience with microsoft".

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

> I always wondered why they had to create their own fork. I had the feeling that this is unecessary maintenance work that they took on and a "not invented here" philosophy. For the same reason there are hundreds of forks and counting: it is difficult to get the environment you want without rebuilding everything from scratch, and once you do that you have to maintain it.

josefx 5y ago

They went with an Debian/Ubuntu based fork due to popularity. >if Red Hat gets it If your goal is to run a proprietary OS you might as well stay with Windows. No reason to endorse outdated IBM enterprise crapware after they killed the only compatible distro that didn't require paying the IBM tax to test and develop software for it.

ptman 5y ago

The big distros are quite customizable in order to suit a large audience. A large organization typically has defaults and customizations that need to be added. A common strategy is to _distribute_ their customizations by creating a distribution based on some more widely used distribution. Google had Goobuntu based on Ubuntu.

deknos 5y ago

because back in the day, no distribution was good enough for our needs. today is a completely other situation. redhat might, but they borked it somehow as they said we would not be allowed to change anything or loose all support. at least that was what i heard. and then there was supposedly the decision "we do not want any external company due to the bad experience with microsoft".