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(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-rel

(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 ago
  It'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 ago
    Note 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 ago
      CentOS stream is "Red Hat right now". RHEL releases branch off CentOS.
  - matthews2 4y ago
    It'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 ago
RHEL is all open source. What makes you think it's comparable to a "fully commercial Unix"?
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  Because 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 ago
    They 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-...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - 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 ago
      Not 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.

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 ago
It'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 ago
  Note 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 ago
    CentOS stream is "Red Hat right now". RHEL releases branch off CentOS.
- matthews2 4y ago
  It'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 ago

RHEL is all open source. What makes you think it's comparable to a "fully commercial Unix"?

GekkePrutser 4y ago
Because 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 ago
  They 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-...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 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 ago
    Not 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.