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I find it interesting that there's a need for Rocky to exist at all. IBM basically killed Centos, which was the unofficial Red Hat release that came into existe

I find it interesting that there's a need for Rocky to exist at all. IBM basically killed Centos, which was the unofficial Red Hat release that came into existence when Red Hat stopped providing free versions of Red Hat which Red Hat then grand fathered in as a thing they actively supported. That whole process was just weird. I did not encounter a single project that actually used Red Hat after that happened: world + dog used Centos at the time. That seemed like a horrible process to put up artificial hurdles for people to transition to Red Hat. Killing Centos and then having Rocky and Alm emerge immediately after makes this even less likely. As a business strategy this just seems pretty misguided. These days, I don't deal with the whole red hat ecosystem at all (why would I?). Software ships in docker form these days and I'll typically either deploy it on whatever my cloud provider uses without really messing with that directly or setting up a simple Ubuntu server with Docker using things like Ansible. My daily driver is a Manjaro laptop currently. I like it because I get current versions of everything I need as opposed to old stuff like Gnome 40. Do people actually put Rocky on workstations? My impression is that that whole ecosystem is more about servers and that Fedora is the preferred thing for people in that ecosystem on desktops.

tokamak 4y ago
RedHat benefit is support. You can sue them if something goes wrong ;) Good engineering is using on local what is used on servers. RHEL definitely is about servers foremost. There are many industries where RHEL is a must. Amazon Linux is derivative of RHEL. Good point about containers.
- chasil 4y ago
  I'm not sure if Suse Liberty Linux ISOs are fully available yet, but that is yet another clone offering support. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ Oracle Linux 9 also dropped a week ago, and their support is available if increasingly expensive. The problem with both of these is app support certifications. Microsoft SQL Server (for example) is solely supported on RHEL, although it's obvious that they build on CentOS.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  To me it just looks like they fragmented their own market for no good reason and drove a lot of business to competitors competing with them with their own product. Before Centos, the upsell for Red Hat support was pretty easy: lots of companies were already using it anyway so twisting their arms a little for some support money was probably easy. Now, not so much. Do they even know who uses Alm or Rocky or Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux? Do these companies share their CRM data with IBM/Red Hat. Probably not. And of course both are in the business of providing support and consultancy themselves. IBM does the hard work and those companies reap the benefits. Very noble but not very smart. The whole setup is weird. The only reason for these distributions to exist at all is that IBM/Red Hat refuses to distribute their own software directly. They are still doing the work and providing it for free in source code form (not optional) which is why this works at all. But they've created this whole side hustle that is cutting them off from their own user base. How is that in any way a smart business strategy? All they'd have to do to fix it is roll back to just providing Red Hat to people that want it for free and then up-sell them on support contracts. That's business they aren't currently getting.

tokamak 4y ago

RedHat benefit is support. You can sue them if something goes wrong ;) Good engineering is using on local what is used on servers. RHEL definitely is about servers foremost. There are many industries where RHEL is a must. Amazon Linux is derivative of RHEL. Good point about containers.

chasil 4y ago
I'm not sure if Suse Liberty Linux ISOs are fully available yet, but that is yet another clone offering support. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-liberty-linux/ Oracle Linux 9 also dropped a week ago, and their support is available if increasingly expensive. The problem with both of these is app support certifications. Microsoft SQL Server (for example) is solely supported on RHEL, although it's obvious that they build on CentOS.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
To me it just looks like they fragmented their own market for no good reason and drove a lot of business to competitors competing with them with their own product. Before Centos, the upsell for Red Hat support was pretty easy: lots of companies were already using it anyway so twisting their arms a little for some support money was probably easy. Now, not so much. Do they even know who uses Alm or Rocky or Amazon Linux or Oracle Linux? Do these companies share their CRM data with IBM/Red Hat. Probably not. And of course both are in the business of providing support and consultancy themselves. IBM does the hard work and those companies reap the benefits. Very noble but not very smart. The whole setup is weird. The only reason for these distributions to exist at all is that IBM/Red Hat refuses to distribute their own software directly. They are still doing the work and providing it for free in source code form (not optional) which is why this works at all. But they've created this whole side hustle that is cutting them off from their own user base. How is that in any way a smart business strategy? All they'd have to do to fix it is roll back to just providing Red Hat to people that want it for free and then up-sell them on support contracts. That's business they aren't currently getting.