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Rakuten Mobile is replacing Red Hat as its Linux OS supplier
- rwmj 4y agoMore accurate title: Rakuten did not want to pay for RHEL licenses and still does not want to pay for RHEL licenses They were using CentOS for no cost previously and have switched to another no cost RHEL rebuild (Rocky).
- T3OU-736 4y ago(Playing devil's advocate a bit): But is that not the premise and promise of Linux/*BSD - to provide a viable and free alternative to commercial Unix? Semi-related: now that RedHat is an IBM entity, with the attendant deprecation of CentOS, I fund myself lumping RH into the "fully commercial Unix" mental category.
- rbanffy 4y ago> attendant deprecation of CentOS CentOS is still out there. It's just that it does no longer follow RHEL on every step, but is ahead of it all the time.
- AnonymousPlanet 4y agoIt's not even remotely the same. It's much closer to a rolling release distribution than a stable one. Redhat is unable to guarantee that the same binary will work on Centos 8 in a few months compared to now. That renders Centos utterly unusable for stable environments. Also, you can't use Centos anymore for test environments. You now have to go with Redhat and the entire licensing shebang when you init your test vms.
- ghaff 4y agoNote that Red Hat never made guarantees with respect to CentOS Linux which was close to RHEL but came out of a different build system.
- rbanffy 4y agoCentOS stream is "Red Hat right now". RHEL releases branch off CentOS.
- matthews2 4y agoIt's not as if they'd suddenly dump breaking changes on CentOS users. Instead of there being a CentOS 8.1, 8.2 etc. there is just a CentOS 8. Similar to how you can enable the 'debian-updates' repository in Debian.
- dralley 4y ago>It's not even remotely the same. It's much closer to a rolling release distribution than a stable one No it isn't. CentOS Stream will never make a change which would be out of place for RHEL to make, which means ABI and APIs (and version numbers for the most part) remain stable for the entire lifetime of the distro. That is wholly incomparable with something like Debian Testing or Arch or Fedora Rawhide which "roll" through major updates all the time.
- rwmj 4y agoRHEL is all open source. What makes you think it's comparable to a "fully commercial Unix"?
- GekkePrutser 4y agoBecause it is fully comercialised? There isn't even a free personal version of rhel. The source is open but so were many of the one commercial unixes. In fact some customers in the early days of Unix used to change their codebase a lot. I don't think commercial and open source are mutually exclusive. Not the OP though so perhaps they meant something else. Personally I don't think open source would have to be free as in beer but I don't like it when big tech takes too big a role in it. Eventually it'll just become another cash cow.
- devonkim 4y agoThey recently added some “free” option for a few licenses as an individual developer https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux#general https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
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- dralley 4y ago>There isn't even a free personal version of rhel. Incorrect. https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-enterprise-linux https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
- j33zusjuice 4y agoNot to mention the binary compatible clone that this company chose to use. Wtf is this dude on about? Rocky couldn’t exist if RHEL weren’t open source. Idk where people come up with this stuff.
- koffiezet 4y ago> They were using CentOS for no cost previously and have switched to another no cost RHEL rebuild (Rocky). Since they involved CIQ, I'm pretty sure they are now paying support for Rocky, which, if you read the article, was clear they didn't mind paying for. It was the per-cpu subscription that was not realistic in their business model.
- j33zusjuice 4y agoBut you don’t pay per CPU for RHEL!
- jmclnx 4y agoThat is the way I read this, and Rakuten is a 1.6 trillion yen company. I wonder if they give back to the community ? I am fairly sure they do not, but this based upon the tone of the article :(
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago> I wonder if they give back to the community ? They're in the "Backed By" section of https://rockylinux.org/about/ https://rockylinux.org/about/ , so I'm going with "yes".
- freeCandy 4y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406027
- teh_klev 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33406027
- rvieira 4y agoThe CentOS/Rocky debate was about release targets and never about the Open Source nature of it. This seems simply another case of using something as the backbone of a business and demanding it to be free (as in beer).
- jeltz 4y agoThe issue with Redhat in my experience is not having to pay money for it (when I worked with Redhat it was for the government who had bought some huge bulk license and had no issues with paying that, still cheaper than many other licenses), it is that the license servers, etc always have broken while CentOS just have worked. More moving parts which can break. The act of checking licenses makes the product worse than the free one. And I have had similar issues with OpenShift. Edit: This reminded me of another story. I once had a long fight with Gitlab's support due to an issue with their billing. They failed to fix it so now we run on the community edition which just works. My preferens for free is due to there often being bugs in the billing/license checking.
- loudmax 4y agoAbsolutely this. Even if you've written off the cost of the licenses, you're still better off avoiding their licensing system entirely. Red Hat seems to have engineered a situation where their paid product is worse than the free product, even ignoring the price tag. Red Hat's business model was to both support and profit from open source. That is not an easy path, but they were mostly successful, at least until they were swallowed by IBM. If IBM manages to destroy Red Hat's value proposition, this opens a business opportunity for a company that takes a less antagonistic approach to its customers.
- curt15 4y agoHow about product life? CentOS used to be supported for ten years, just like RHEL. Each stream version only lasts five.
- rvieira 4y agoAll those points are separate from the OSS claim (or OSS "purity test"). Is Debian-Testing any less "true Open Source" than Debian-Stable?
- GuB-42 4y agoIt looks like Amin is confusing "open source" with "free" (as in free beer). He seems to be pissed off that Red Hat discontinued the free CentOS distribution. And instead of paying for Red Hat, it goes to Rocky Linux, a free fork of Red Hat, just like CentOS. It is fine (at least legally), but the paid Red Hat distribution is no less open-source than Rocky Linux, in fact, the latter exists because Red Hat is open-source. That's why I think this article particularly ironic, it says that Red Hat is not "true" open-source and then made a move that is only possible because Red Hat is open-source. It didn't even go to something like Debian, which is the most "free/libre/open-source" of the major distros, it went to the clone of the distro they criticize.
- bubblethink 4y ago>it says that Red Hat is not "true" open-source This is true though as RH will terminate your contract if you redistribute their binaries. So they use a contractual backdoor to undermine GPL. And before people talk about how GPL covers source but not binaries, it covers binaries. In fact, all of CentOS, Rocky, Alma, etc. is a massive waste of everyone's time, energy, land, and electricity. Something akin to crypto mining. Everyone could have used RHEL, but we need this complicated indirection for no reason.
- type0 4y agoIt covers binaries all right, the way I understand this RH is very aggressively pursues this as a trademark violation (which it shouldn't be unless it's deployed to third party that can give the blame to RH).
- izacus 4y agoWhen people say they want "true opensource", they usually mean they want to be the bosses and dictate how the product is being developed to the people who are actually doing all the work and giving all the funding.
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoHe is not a stupid person, he knows what he's talking about. Of course he doesn't wan to pay for RHEL licenses, and he explains why the licensing model used by RH now is a bad choice for a business with a high number of nodes.
- INTPenis 4y agoIt's kinda scary that there are so few mainstream Linux distros that people are willing to trust on their servers. Debian, RHEL, that's about it. And only one of those is commonly supported by major vendors like Dell, HPE and EMC.
- einpoklum 4y agoBoth of those have systemd, so some people are actually not willing to trust them...
- sofixa 4y agoWhat do you mean? Ubuntu is hugely popular (i recall some cloud provider saying it's the most popular distro they host), and so is SUSE in certain parts of the world (like Germany). I don't recall having problems with Dell server-related packages on Debian, even if their own crapware (OpenManage Essentials and then Enterprise, legitimately one of the worst pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure of using) for managing iDRACs and firmware came as a CentOS-based appliance.
- INTPenis 4y agoWell first of all Ubuntu is Debian based, so choosing one over the other is mostly semantics. And secondly, even if you can use Dell software, it's not supported. EMC for example will not support you if you don't use supported distros. It's still a frighteningly low number of distros considering we used to have an abundance of distros to hop around on for desktop use. Distrowatch.com for example, but for all those distros, when it comes to servers we narrow ourselves down to less than a handful.
- mekster 4y agoHow has desktop based distro got anything to do with server side distro? I don't care if DistroWatch shows bunch of random newbie friendly distro in the upper ranking, they're not corporate supported. Debian doesn't do clean 2 years LTS release cycle nor has 10 years extended support.
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- formerly_proven 4y agoBack in the day we'd have called Rakuten a leech.
- ebiester 4y agoBack in the day, IBM didn't own a distribution that worked to extract maximum cost to those already in the ecosystem. It sounds like Rakuten is paying CIQ instead of Red Hat on basis of a price increase from Red Hat.
- _fat_santa 4y ago> And it took a long time to get Rocky Linux to where Rakuten Mobile needed it. “To get Rocky Linux to deliver on the same performance of Red Hat for us was a 13-month process. It was not trivial… there are so many tweaks you have to do… and we took all of these tweaks we've done and we gave them back to the [Rocky Linux] community,” said Amin. Sounds like they worked with the developer of Rocky Linux for 13 months to get the realtime kernel where it needed to be, and I would assume the author did not work for free and was compensated by Rakuten. "We decided to move to fully open source software and paid the author to customize it for us and released our customizations as open source" doesn't sounds very leachy to me.
- kleiba 4y ago"Paying for a software license is killing my business model."
- rbanffy 4y ago"Paying for software with mandatory support contracts is reducing my profits"
- xnyan 4y agoI just moved into a role where I see the REHL bills. Total cost per license is more than what we pay for windows server, which was shocking to me.
- rbanffy 4y agoOTOH, it works much better than Windows Server.
- wink 4y agoThat may actually depend on which version of RHEL and in which decade the kernel was released... But yeah, that's more to blame the org that won't update and not on RH to provide weird backport kernels for a decade.
- rbanffy 4y agoYou shouldn't be running Pentium Pro servers at this point in time. I mean, companies should. I have a couple ;-) But they are loud and spend most of their time powered down.
- rcarmo 4y agoThe interesting thing is that pretty much every single RHEL customer kept CentOS on the side as an "alternative". Over the past few years a lot of those alternatives actually became production systems (support became an app thing with Docker, not an OS thing), and now _of course_ Rocky is a better option, due to the lower cost and community backing (or just moving the hosts to Ubuntu/Debian).
- pjmlp 4y agoApparently leeching the work of others is true open source.
- least 4y agoIs it leeching if they're paying the founder of CentOS and creator of Rocky Linux to help them build out the system to suit their needs and then contributing that code back upstream? I mean, I guess he could have been working for them for free for thirteen months, but that seems rather unlikely.
- mathverse 4y agoIt is. Rocky Linux is not in the same space like RHEL. They cant dictate the market prices. I very much doubt Rocky is a sustainable business model. Hell even RHEL was not... This is the aftermath of the enterprise/FOSS (pay for support/whatever model that never really worked) war on prices and we are basically going back to the era for paying for software and some people and businesses dont like it.
- ilyt 4y agoRHEL did just fine before IBM bought it, and most of the shittiness started after the buyout.
- least 4y agoI don't see how this is leeching. They did pay for the work to get the distribution ready for their needs (unless they didn't, in which case Greg Kurter must be a saint), that work ended up back upstream. Is your argument solely that Rocky Linux didn't extract the maximum amount of money they could from their client, or is there something else I'm missing here?
- zamalek 4y agoAlso, let's not forget that he also said that he's fine with paying for support - just not CPU cores (which also does imply the RT kernel work was paid for). Paying for support is categorically not leeching. > I shouldn't be forced to pay subscription fees… I have no problem to pay support [fees]
- DeathArrow 4y agoTLDR: Rakuten takes "free" as meaning "free beer".
- blowski 4y agoOn a sidenote, how does Rocky compare to CentOS (apart from still existing) and Debian, Ubuntu?
- flanked-evergl 4y agoIn what way does CentOS not exist anymore?
- simonh 4y agoIn the way that the thing we used to call CentOS is gone. The brand still exists, but it now refers to something else.
- blowski 4y agoI could have CentOS of 2015 era.
- sliken 4y agoCentOS used to a recompile of Redhat, guaranteed binary compatible, with a 10 year EoL. AFTER CentOS came out they changed it from 2029 to Jan 1st 2020. Now CentOS stream is not a recompile, but has less tested changes BEFORE RHEL, and is now a rolling release with a 5 year EoL. So for those that need compatibility with RHEL, that's broken.
- eusholli 4y agoJust to add some ”inside baseball” to this thread, I work for Rakuten Symphony so can give my take from my perspective, be they right or wrong. The open discussion and different points of view is what is so healthy if something wants to get stronger. We are breaking apart the traditional monolith deployments in radio base stations, that are deployed at a very large distributed scale. For example we are deploying 30,000 edge nodes to do real time processing of radio baseband signalling, 23,000 of them in the the next 10 months. Now these workloads have more in common with high performance computing than they do with running standard business application systems, so we are aware we have to modify the kernel to make it cope with the real time requirements. We are removing the monolithic model because we know we can reduce the costs and increase the deployment optionality. And the existing enterprise OS licensing model was prohibitively expensive at this scale. And then our open source choices were changed. We are happy to contribute our real time learnings back to a community since that helps us help the community to help us. What we have done is not for everybody, and others need to make their own choices for their own reasons. But we believe it is having those choices is what creates a healthy industry. And we no longer had the choices we wanted, so we want to contribute to making them for others.
- rossmohax 4y ago> To get Rocky Linux to deliver on the same performance of Red Hat for us was a 13-month process. It was not trivial… I wonder why is that, if Rocky is repackaging RHEL source performance should be identical, no? Article mentions realtime kernel. It seems they were working with RH on custom kernel (that's the support contract he mentioned), but started to be asked to pay for RHEL license to use it, which understandably pisses him off
- doubled112 4y agoLast I heard, package source is available but the system they use for packaging is not. Would you be mostly guessing for things like build flags and optimizations? Could something as simple as package build order affect performance?
- houseofzeus 4y agoI think it's two fold: 1) I am not sure Rocky were actually re-packaging the RT stuff originally, they've got it now though. 2) RT is pretty finicky to tune correctly for your use case at the best times, and especially for use cases as exacting as the 5G RAN. I assume there is a consulting aspect to this that they are paying the CIQ folks for, but probably based on man hours or a flat fee rather than the per socket/node subscription they might have paid Red Hat.
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- mjg59 4y agoCorporate support of a community-led RHEL compatible OS seems like an obviously good thing, and I'm surprised that so many people are worried about Red Hat's welfare? If someone doesn't feel that the costs of RHEL licensing outweigh the benefits then that's a reasonable choice for them to make, and contributing money to an existing community project that others can benefit from is way better than them doing it in-house. Open source isn't about getting everything for free, but it is about getting to choose to pay someone who fits your needs better rather than being tied to a specific vendor.
- mfru 4y agocan someone explain to me, now that CentOS is upstream of RHEL, what the difference between Fedora and Cent OS Stream is?
- IceWreck 4y agoEvery fourth version of Fedora gets forked into the new version of CentOS Stream. Then for these rest of its lifecycle it will be developed independently. Every change in this version will go into the corresponding RHEL version after existing for afew months.
- christophilus 4y agoFedora has a lot more churn and is more bleeding edge. Cent OS Stream is quite stable and is kind of like a thoroughly tested pre-release of the next version of RedHat.
- suprjami 4y agoCommits into CentOS Stream go through testing and become RHEL. Those commits are mostly from Red Hat developers, because all RHEL devel now happens in Stream first, but iiuc technically anyone could submit a PR, and maybe CentOS Stream community members do that from time to time. Fedora is entirely separate packages from CentOS/EL. Fedora is much closer to upstream projects. Fedora has shorter lifecycle, no API/ABI guarantee across releases, moves fasts and breaks more things, etc.
- dralley 4y agoCentOS Stream also provides a way for the communities of various clones to contribute back. Previously if you found a bug all you could do was report it against RHEL (not even CentOS) and wait for a RH engineer to get to it, then wait again for it to be released, before you'd have a chance of even testing the fix on your own systems.
- rubyist5eva 4y agoThe numbered version of CentOS Stream is only "upstream" of the same numbered Enterprise Linux version. RHEL and CentOS 9 are both forked from Fedora 34, for example.
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- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoRed Hat lost my respect when they joined the bandwagon of denigrating RMS a while ago. This was wrong on so many levels.
- xcrunner529 4y agoHe shouldn’t be be a pedo creep and they wouldn’t have.
- zokula 4y ago
- photochemsyn 4y agoIt'd be such a relief if online Linux threads focused mostly on the technology itself and not on the various personalities historically associated with it.
- xcrunner529 4y agoSo you’d associate with a local pedo?
- bastardoperator 4y agoI've played the OS switcheroo game previously, it's wasteful and expensive. At this point I won't touch anything RHEL based. I have no doubts someone at IBM is working on making RHEL incompatible with other clones. The answer is simple, Debian. True freedom.