5 ms·

Ubuntu Pro

72 points by kristianpaul 4y ago

Spivak 4y ago
Shots directly fired at Rehat. If you're not in the "world" of Linux distributions this is a genuinely impressive commitment that, if they pull it off, makes Ubuntu Pro the most set and forget distro.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Not very open though. Livepatch is closed, unlike kpatch. And probably they are going to be using some kind of snap packages somewhere. Which are annoying to deal with and centralized. However since many of the things they support are using a GPL license, then its a matter of time until we get a Ubuntu Pro clone. Also its free for 5 Devices, RHEL is free for 16 but you need to renew every year manually, which is really annoying, looks like Ubuntu Pro doesn't require to do such a thing. I like the RHEL philosophy in software more, as they tend to make everything open, unlike canonical which is currently pushing a centralized package format and has a history of trying to do things their own way. This is coming from someone who is using Debian everywhere.
  - kapilvt 4y ago
    s/format/repository
  - rlpb 4y ago
    > Livepatch is closed, unlike kpatch. It's the same. For example https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch/docs/faq https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch/docs/faq links to https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/livepatch/livepatch.rst https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/....
  - pabs3 4y ago
    All of the Linux live patching efforts are paid services. I think Gentoo might have some open stuff, but no patch generation/distribution service. IIRC the reason is that you basically need full-time staff knowledgeable in Linux kernel internals to be able to generate the Linux live patches.
    - jacooper 4y ago
      Kpatch is fully open https://github.com/dynup/kpatch https://github.com/dynup/kpatch But if you mean the Kernel patch packages themselves, then you are right, looks like there are no free patch packages that one can just download and use.
      - pabs3 4y ago
        Right, kpatch itself is open, but the infrastructure to run it is generally proprietary (except for Gentoo's) and the patches themselves are paywalled (and Gentoo produces no patches).
- remram 4y ago
  With Red Hat becoming more and more IBM [1], this is really a good time to launch this. [1]: https://access.redhat.com/announcements/6978646 https://access.redhat.com/announcements/6978646
  - hulitu 4y ago
    And Ubuntu more and more Microsoft. At least IBM sells also AIX.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      idk i think if forced i would rather throw my hat in with MS than IBM. An independent Redhat was truly a jewel I took too much for granted now that it’s gone. They were incredible stewards of any project they adopted, they pushed Linux userspce forward for 20 years, had an obsessive commitment to backporting, did literally the best systems integration work, and basically all of it was FOSS.
- pabs3 4y ago
  They might be feeling the heat from Debian LTS too.
cmsj 4y ago
A decade of CVE coverage for all of universe? Colour me skeptical that they can actually pull that off.
- zepearl 4y ago
  Maybe I don't fully understand this: does this mean that they would manually backport/reimplement fixes to whichever (old) version of software X that has implemented security fixes for its higher version (but not for the lower version used by the "Ubuntu Pro version Y", assuming that Ubuntu Pro would stick to a specific version of software X)?
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Yes, that's what backporting is. Porting a patch back to an older version. Since Ubuntu and Debian preserve stability by not doing any feature upgrades. Which is done apperantly differently in RHEL land, podman gets updated to the latest version regularly, I couldn't find a clear answer to RHEL's update policy and how it works. Ubuntu also has exceptions for packages like Firefox, which need to get updated often, and is something Debian struggles with regularly. However Ubuntu is snapping up everything lately, I was surprised the `pro` utility was a normal package instead of a snap.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Also they support complete Software projects, like WordPress, which is truly impressive. I dont know how they will do it, especially when comparing with RHEL, which only supports around 3000 packages, and then you have to rely on EPEL which has "community" support.
blagie 4y ago
I don't mind paying $25/year/desktop nearly as much as I mind the twenty clicks to find out the $25 is an annual fee. Look at it: https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro Whoever did this web design should be shot. I had to go partway through placing an order to find out this is an annual (as opposed to monthly, quarterly, or lifetime) fee. I still have no idea which fees are per-machine, and which are one-time. The server pricing is messed up too: (1) I would never pay $225/year for my nano instances. (2) I have no idea how to count licenses in my cloud, where servers spin up and down all the time in response to load. (3) I'd pay a lot more for uber-large instances (if I were currently using them, which I'm currently not). The server pricing ought to just take a flat cut of my EC2 costs. I'd gladly pay Ubuntu a flat markup.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- abrookewood 4y ago
  Yes, I can't work out if this is free for virtual servers?? Would imagine not, but what applies then?
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Yes it is. Up to 5 instances.
- deznu 4y ago
  > Whoever did this web design should be shot. I think this kind of wording should not be normalized on this website, and asking for someone to be shot is a gross exaggeration. The amount of disrespect for the developers, designers and victims and families of those affected by gun violence (including women affected by domestic violence). I suggest you expand your lexicon in the future and use the appropriate choice of words.
  - alar44 4y ago
david2ndaccount 4y ago
Interesting to me that it includes Python 2 support. I guess some things never die.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Wow, how reading this makes me hope Ubuntu Pro fails catastrophically. Supporting Python 2 so publicly at this point is actively damaging to the Python ecosystem. I don't wish to open a flamewar here, it's been debated to death already. Nothing wrong in giving paid Python 2 support to individual companies, but doing so on a distribution scale offloads the consequences of that support to the rest of the ecosystem -- an ecosystem which does not benefit from the money Ubuntu Pro will make. How this works concretely: because it's Ubuntu (Pro) and because they decided to support Python 2, we in the Python community will continue to receive random bug reports, random feature requests, random crash reports, and more things we aren't paid to deal with. It's a hidden cost, and we're going to pay with our time. Fuck. That.
  - nequo 4y ago
    > we in the Python community will continue to receive random bug reports, random feature requests, random crash reports, and more things we aren't paid to deal with. Can you just close those with “won’t fix?”
    - scrollaway 4y ago
      That’s the best case scenario (and still one where we might get complaints, and which takes brainspace). Other cases might be, for example, time taken to debug an issue impossible to reproduce only to find out a week later that it only happens on py2.
  - blagie 4y ago
    You shouldn't blame Ubuntu here. The Python development community did this to itself. It offloaded a huge cost of porting literally everything in the universe mostly for syntactic niceties like print and parenthesis. That was an astronomical unfunded downstream mandate. Now, it's paying the consequences. There are codebases which couldn't afford to do that, who are suffering. For example, there's a lot of academic code which was grant-funded, which is widely-used, but with no more funding. Python is used a lot for numerics. That code had better keep working, if you want scientific replicability and apples-to-apples comparison of results. There are ones who _can't_ do that, for a variety of reasons (many regulatory). Like FORTRAN, Python 2 needs to be around for a long, long time. If I have a system with a multimillion dollar audit / certification process, I can't just up-and-port to Python 3 like a web app. Bless Ubuntu and other organizations who simply didn't say F-U to all legacy codebases. I might not even mind if Python 3 was designed to do anything useful: supporting compiled code better, multicore, GPGPU, JIT, or whatever. However, it was mostly minor syntactic sugar. The only breaking change in Python 3 which made sense was probably unicode, and that one didn't have to be so breaking. It was just so random, stupid, and arbitrary. Yes, the Python community should deal with "receive random bug reports, random feature requests, random crash reports" and other crap. This should be a very visible failure, or we'll see this again with other projects (not to mention Python 4).
paxys 4y ago
> Free for personal use > Anyone can use Ubuntu Pro for free on up to 5 machines, or 50 if you are an official Ubuntu Community member. This is pretty neat. Will have to check it out.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
Is it a rule that enterprise software sales pitches must be really hard to understand? Maybe I’m tired but what is Ubuntu pro - a longer lts?
- weare138 4y ago
  I've always wondered if these sales pitches were made to be intentionally vague so you have to call a sales rep before you could make a decision.
fomine3 4y ago
I'd like to call it Enterprise rather than Pro. Professional sysadmin may not want to keep the same OS version for a decade.
anxiously 4y ago
Pardon my ignorance, but what even is this? From my understanding, it's Ubuntu selling more LTS updates. By "five machines" for free, they mean you can apply a free subscription token to up to five machines. It sounded like they were handing out VMs/VPS instances for use, but you need to already own/run a VM with Ubuntu on it to apply your free token onto.

72 points by kristianpaul 4y ago

Shots directly fired at Rehat. If you're not in the "world" of Linux distributions this is a genuinely impressive commitment that, if they pull it off, makes Ubuntu Pro the most set and forget distro.

jacooper 4y ago
Not very open though. Livepatch is closed, unlike kpatch. And probably they are going to be using some kind of snap packages somewhere. Which are annoying to deal with and centralized. However since many of the things they support are using a GPL license, then its a matter of time until we get a Ubuntu Pro clone. Also its free for 5 Devices, RHEL is free for 16 but you need to renew every year manually, which is really annoying, looks like Ubuntu Pro doesn't require to do such a thing. I like the RHEL philosophy in software more, as they tend to make everything open, unlike canonical which is currently pushing a centralized package format and has a history of trying to do things their own way. This is coming from someone who is using Debian everywhere.
- kapilvt 4y ago
  s/format/repository
- rlpb 4y ago
  > Livepatch is closed, unlike kpatch. It's the same. For example https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch/docs/faq https://ubuntu.com/security/livepatch/docs/faq links to https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/livepatch/livepatch.rst https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/....
- pabs3 4y ago
  All of the Linux live patching efforts are paid services. I think Gentoo might have some open stuff, but no patch generation/distribution service. IIRC the reason is that you basically need full-time staff knowledgeable in Linux kernel internals to be able to generate the Linux live patches.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Kpatch is fully open https://github.com/dynup/kpatch https://github.com/dynup/kpatch But if you mean the Kernel patch packages themselves, then you are right, looks like there are no free patch packages that one can just download and use.
    - pabs3 4y ago
      Right, kpatch itself is open, but the infrastructure to run it is generally proprietary (except for Gentoo's) and the patches themselves are paywalled (and Gentoo produces no patches).
remram 4y ago
With Red Hat becoming more and more IBM [1], this is really a good time to launch this. [1]: https://access.redhat.com/announcements/6978646 https://access.redhat.com/announcements/6978646
- hulitu 4y ago
  And Ubuntu more and more Microsoft. At least IBM sells also AIX.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    idk i think if forced i would rather throw my hat in with MS than IBM. An independent Redhat was truly a jewel I took too much for granted now that it’s gone. They were incredible stewards of any project they adopted, they pushed Linux userspce forward for 20 years, had an obsessive commitment to backporting, did literally the best systems integration work, and basically all of it was FOSS.
pabs3 4y ago
They might be feeling the heat from Debian LTS too.

cmsj 4y ago

A decade of CVE coverage for all of universe? Colour me skeptical that they can actually pull that off.

zepearl 4y ago
Maybe I don't fully understand this: does this mean that they would manually backport/reimplement fixes to whichever (old) version of software X that has implemented security fixes for its higher version (but not for the lower version used by the "Ubuntu Pro version Y", assuming that Ubuntu Pro would stick to a specific version of software X)?
- jacooper 4y ago
  Yes, that's what backporting is. Porting a patch back to an older version. Since Ubuntu and Debian preserve stability by not doing any feature upgrades. Which is done apperantly differently in RHEL land, podman gets updated to the latest version regularly, I couldn't find a clear answer to RHEL's update policy and how it works. Ubuntu also has exceptions for packages like Firefox, which need to get updated often, and is something Debian struggles with regularly. However Ubuntu is snapping up everything lately, I was surprised the `pro` utility was a normal package instead of a snap.
jacooper 4y ago
Also they support complete Software projects, like WordPress, which is truly impressive. I dont know how they will do it, especially when comparing with RHEL, which only supports around 3000 packages, and then you have to rely on EPEL which has "community" support.

blagie 4y ago

I don't mind paying $25/year/desktop nearly as much as I mind the twenty clicks to find out the $25 is an annual fee. Look at it: https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro https://ubuntu.com/pricing/pro Whoever did this web design should be shot. I had to go partway through placing an order to find out this is an annual (as opposed to monthly, quarterly, or lifetime) fee. I still have no idea which fees are per-machine, and which are one-time. The server pricing is messed up too: (1) I would never pay $225/year for my nano instances. (2) I have no idea how to count licenses in my cloud, where servers spin up and down all the time in response to load. (3) I'd pay a lot more for uber-large instances (if I were currently using them, which I'm currently not). The server pricing ought to just take a flat cut of my EC2 costs. I'd gladly pay Ubuntu a flat markup.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
abrookewood 4y ago
Yes, I can't work out if this is free for virtual servers?? Would imagine not, but what applies then?
- jacooper 4y ago
  Yes it is. Up to 5 instances.
deznu 4y ago
> Whoever did this web design should be shot. I think this kind of wording should not be normalized on this website, and asking for someone to be shot is a gross exaggeration. The amount of disrespect for the developers, designers and victims and families of those affected by gun violence (including women affected by domestic violence). I suggest you expand your lexicon in the future and use the appropriate choice of words.
- alar44 4y ago

david2ndaccount 4y ago

Interesting to me that it includes Python 2 support. I guess some things never die.

scrollaway 4y ago
Wow, how reading this makes me hope Ubuntu Pro fails catastrophically. Supporting Python 2 so publicly at this point is actively damaging to the Python ecosystem. I don't wish to open a flamewar here, it's been debated to death already. Nothing wrong in giving paid Python 2 support to individual companies, but doing so on a distribution scale offloads the consequences of that support to the rest of the ecosystem -- an ecosystem which does not benefit from the money Ubuntu Pro will make. How this works concretely: because it's Ubuntu (Pro) and because they decided to support Python 2, we in the Python community will continue to receive random bug reports, random feature requests, random crash reports, and more things we aren't paid to deal with. It's a hidden cost, and we're going to pay with our time. Fuck. That.
- nequo 4y ago
  > we in the Python community will continue to receive random bug reports, random feature requests, random crash reports, and more things we aren't paid to deal with. Can you just close those with “won’t fix?”
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    That’s the best case scenario (and still one where we might get complaints, and which takes brainspace). Other cases might be, for example, time taken to debug an issue impossible to reproduce only to find out a week later that it only happens on py2.
- blagie 4y ago
  You shouldn't blame Ubuntu here. The Python development community did this to itself. It offloaded a huge cost of porting literally everything in the universe mostly for syntactic niceties like print and parenthesis. That was an astronomical unfunded downstream mandate. Now, it's paying the consequences. There are codebases which couldn't afford to do that, who are suffering. For example, there's a lot of academic code which was grant-funded, which is widely-used, but with no more funding. Python is used a lot for numerics. That code had better keep working, if you want scientific replicability and apples-to-apples comparison of results. There are ones who _can't_ do that, for a variety of reasons (many regulatory). Like FORTRAN, Python 2 needs to be around for a long, long time. If I have a system with a multimillion dollar audit / certification process, I can't just up-and-port to Python 3 like a web app. Bless Ubuntu and other organizations who simply didn't say F-U to all legacy codebases. I might not even mind if Python 3 was designed to do anything useful: supporting compiled code better, multicore, GPGPU, JIT, or whatever. However, it was mostly minor syntactic sugar. The only breaking change in Python 3 which made sense was probably unicode, and that one didn't have to be so breaking. It was just so random, stupid, and arbitrary. Yes, the Python community should deal with "receive random bug reports, random feature requests, random crash reports" and other crap. This should be a very visible failure, or we'll see this again with other projects (not to mention Python 4).

paxys 4y ago

> Free for personal use > Anyone can use Ubuntu Pro for free on up to 5 machines, or 50 if you are an official Ubuntu Community member. This is pretty neat. Will have to check it out.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

Is it a rule that enterprise software sales pitches must be really hard to understand? Maybe I’m tired but what is Ubuntu pro - a longer lts?

weare138 4y ago
I've always wondered if these sales pitches were made to be intentionally vague so you have to call a sales rep before you could make a decision.

fomine3 4y ago

I'd like to call it Enterprise rather than Pro. Professional sysadmin may not want to keep the same OS version for a decade.

anxiously 4y ago

Pardon my ignorance, but what even is this? From my understanding, it's Ubuntu selling more LTS updates. By "five machines" for free, they mean you can apply a free subscription token to up to five machines. It sounded like they were handing out VMs/VPS instances for use, but you need to already own/run a VM with Ubuntu on it to apply your free token onto.