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NASA secures contract with Rocky Enterprise Linux
- orev 3y agoThe more I think about the RedHat source code restrictions, the more I think this could be the reason. RedHat has mostly tolerated the free rebuilds, but now that one of them is encroaching into providing paid support (RedHat’s bread and butter), that’s a step too far and it could have poisoned the well for everyone.
- aardvarkr 3y agoOut of curiosity, what makes this notable?
- spicyusername 3y agoIt's another link in the Red-Hat-CentOS-drama chain. I think many IT employees have a vested interest in Red Hat and the direction of "enterprise Linux". Seeing an organization like NASA show a willingness to use a Red Hat alternative gives credibility to that alternative.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- osigurdson 3y agoOf course, if we do get an established leader, it will ultimately see the same fate as Centos.
- _joel 3y agoIt's by the guy who setup CentOS originally, no?
- dralley 3y agoGiving users the ability to have a choice in the direction of "enterprise linux" is a large part of the reason that CentOS Stream exists. Previously if you wanted some bug fixed or some feature added you needed to beg Red Hat for it or hope that a paying customer needed it too. Now external parties can contribute to the future release of RHEL (and Rocky, Alma, etc.) So let's say that some Rocky or Alma Linux user or developer wants to make a change. They are RHEL clones, so they can't do that. But they can now contribute the change to CentOS Stream, which is the upstream for both RHEL and their own distro. That change can be reviewed and tested by the community + Red Hat, and then land in RHEL a few months later. This isn't theoretical, to use one example, Facebook uses CentOS Stream in production and contributes back a significant amount. Disclosure: I do work for Red Hat. But it never made sense to me why people say that the "CentOS community was destroyed" when it didn't really have much of a community, it had _users_, which is different. It has more of a "community" now than it did previously, because the development is actually open as opposed to Android-style "throwing bundles of code over the wall".
- adql 3y ago> Giving users the ability to have a choice in the direction of "enterprise linux" is the entire reason CentOS Stream exists. Pretty sure it's just for free beta testing
- freedomben 3y agoMore than one thing can be true at a time. GP's explanation is one of the reasons. IMHO it's not the primary reason, but it is a legit entry in the "pro" column
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 3y agoIf Red Hat hadn't sunset CentOS/RHEL parity, none of this would have happened, maybe. Rocky wouldn't exist.
- Covzire 3y agoWould this have happened if IBM hadn't bought Redhat?
- away271828 3y agoProbably. Red Hat acquiring and then maintaining a failing CentOS was one of those solved a problem at a couple times things that just didn't make a lot of sense in the long run (and was almost certainly a mistake).
- axus 3y agoCentOS was great and I'm still using CentOS 7 until EOL. I learned a lot from "the mouse" in the CentOS support forum, and I hope the CentOS people made a living from the deal. I've got no bad feelings towards Red Hat, as long as they weren't coercing anyone against their will. For new systems I use both Red Hat and Rocky.
- Atreiden 3y agoI think this is notable because in the wake of RedHat changing CentOS model changing from stable to bleeding-edge, there has been a niche to fill in the enterprise-grade Linux space. Esp for people running on-prem infra e.g. HPC. Do we settle on Rocky? Alma? Amazon Linux2? NASA seems to be taking the lead here and saying "we're going with Rocky". I think this move will encourage others on the fence to do the same, and build more of a community around the product not owned/maintained by Amazon.
- dralley 3y ago>bleeding-edge CentOS Stream is not "bleeding edge". Every update that goes into CentOS Stream has already gone through the Red Hat QA process, and the updates are restricted to only the kinds of things which previously would have gone into RHEL. That is, mostly security updates and bugfixes. It's a little bit ahead of RHEL, but it's not like Fedora, much less Rawhide.
- anyoneamous 3y ago> Esp for people running on-prem infra e.g. HPC. Do we settle on Rocky? Alma? Amazon Linux2? Given the stage of the lifecycle, you'd be pretty silly to adopt AL2 on-prem at this point. AL2023 probably won't be appropriate either. Rocky is the way to go.
- freedomben 3y ago> in the wake of RedHat changing CentOS model changing from stable to bleeding-edge CentOS is now bleeding edge? Would you describe Debian Stable as bleeding edge also? On your contiunuum, where would you place Arch and Fedora?
- spicyusername 3y agoOut of curiosity what do others see as viable Red Hat Linux alternatives? If I was choosing a server OS today, I personally would probably pick Debian.
- akvadrako 3y agoGo with an immutable distribution, something like CoreOS. Then run everything in containers. Major version upgrades have less risk of breaking, while rollbacks become an option. And the attack surface is lower.
- oneshtein 3y agoAttack surface will be sum of CoreOS surface and surface of containers. It can be lower only if surface of containers will be negative. :-/
- mirekrusin 3y agopopOS - it really surprised me after long time Ubuntu, before Debian user.
- leonheld 3y agopopOS as a server operating system? That doesn't make much sense.
- mirekrusin 3y agoMy bad, somehow I missed server part.
- frantathefranta 3y agoAlmaLinux is being heavily floated as an option in my place of work. We have RHEL7 and 8 licenses but due to pricing might switch.
- derekp7 3y agoThere are a number of shops where it is advantageous to have a paid RHEL subscription, mostly when there are non-technically-focused management involved. When there is an issue I've had managers in the past say "Quit dicking around on the internet and get someone on the phone". For these shops, you don't need the paid enterprise offering across the board (dev, testing, etc) so that is where an EL rebuild is handy. In those cases you don't want too much different between prod and test/dev, but you don't need the paid support or priority patches on internal test hosts.
- mrmattyboy 3y agoLooking at the "statement of work", unless I'm misunderstanding - it's 3 user (workstation?) licenses? To me, it's more like 3 engineers at NASA are interested in it and got their boss to get them 3 licenses? As opposed to "NASA moves all RHEL licenses to Rocky after Redhat destroys CentOS community"? Edit: I know nothing of how govournment agencies (and certainly not US ones) work.. I assume all purchases go through some process where they're all made public?
- jaimehrubiks 3y agoThat seems very likely, either for personal preference or for testing the distribution
- tssva 3y agoThey didn't purchase licenses. They purchased support.
- imachine1980_ 3y agoYes for 3 workstation, they are probably testing the support
- tyingq 3y agoThe pdf mentions renewal, so maybe not even that. Just 3 people renewing a support contract. "The item described in the table below is for the FY23 CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Renewal."
- tssva 3y agoOr possibly a project installed Rocky Linux because it was easier, faster and cheaper than procuring RHEL licenses. It was found in an audit and now they had to procure and switch to RHEL or procure support for Rocky Linux. A complete wild ass guess but I have seen it happen at other agencies with open source software. Since I retired on Friday, my experience with government IT and procurement is slightly out of date but based upon my knowledge of it until that point I would consider it a better wild ass guess than NASA procured 3 Rocky Linux workstation support contracts to test it before making some agency wide switch.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y agoI wonder why they didn't follow Fermilab and CERN and choose AlmaLinux. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33904336
- leocrat 3y agoBecause Alma has ties to Russia.
- jaboutboul 3y agoThis is totally FUD
- zxspectrum1982 3y agoNo, it's not. Alma was founded by CloudLinux, which is a Russian company with a Russian owner, mostly Russian and Eastern Europe developers and fake US address. As of today, CloudLinux still plays a critical role in Alma.
- heywoodlh 3y agoAside from CloudLinux's involvement with AlmaLinux[0], I can't find much online that verifies any of this information. For those of us interested in investigating, could you provide any information to support these claims? It looks like FUD when these claims have no backing information associated with them -- but if there is more information available I would love to know. According to his Linkedin[1] and an interview[2] the CEO of CloudLinux -- Igor Seletskiy -- lives in California. From some brief reading it seems his company is remote and I think I saw some content that he may have Russian employees, but didn't see anything notable that was worth linking here. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloudLinux_OS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloudLinux_OS [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/iseletsk https://www.linkedin.com/in/iseletsk [2] https://lowendbox.com/blog/interview-with-igor-seletskiy-ceo-of-cloudlinux-on-project-lenix-centos-changes-and-much-more/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/interview-with-igor-seletskiy-ceo...
- jmclnx 3y agoWhat I find interesting is all the bureaucracy needed to get 3 licenses for a "Free" RHEL Clone. I wonder of Rocky got some real $ from NASA ?
- tssva 3y agoThey didn't get 3 licenses for a "Free" RHEL Clone. You can't purchase licenses for Rocky Linux. What they purchased was support.
- aednichols 3y agoHow do I choose between Rocky and Almalinux? Or is it just not a big enough difference to worry about?
- bityard 3y agoLast I looked, there was no real difference. I don't know if there would be any politics preventing it, but I would not be too surprised if they merged at some point.
- infinet 3y agoAlmalinux releases faster, and patches faster than Rocky.
- bongobingo1 3y agoThey have different organisation structures, where Alma is a 501c Non-profit and Rocky is a backed by a B-Corp, so in my head I read one of those as a community linux ie. Debian-feeling, and the other aims to make money ie: Ubuntu-feeling. That's an extremely crude interpretation though, both need cash to support themselves, so both need to make money some how. Day to day they should be by design, interchangeable. Rocky has a nicer logo... This kind of ugly exchange on reddit[0] always sort of soured my impression of Rocky though, didn't really pass the lebowski test. 0. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qv6mg2/were_the_almalinux_os_foundation_team_ama/hkvxy62/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/qv6mg2/were_the_alma...
- lockhouse 3y agoAlma has been faster with releasing updates and security patches from what I’ve seen.
- senknvd 3y agoThis seems to be true. However, looking at https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-9-2-ga-release https://rockylinux.org/news/rocky-linux-9-2-ga-release: 9.2 Release for PowerPC (ppc64le) architecture held back During testing, we discovered an architecture-specific issue on ppc64le systems with the bundled version of Python 3.9. This issue not only prevents installing, but may break existing installations. This issue is reproducible on CentOS Stream 9 and RHEL 9.2. We have opened a bug report upstream at rhbz#2203919 and are working to fix the issue. Seems like they hold back releases to do additional testing. In this case, they avoided a bug that was present on RHEL (and presumably AlmaLinux).
- tkuraku 3y agoI don't understand why they don't buy RHEL. Rocky is essentially RHEL. If RHEL isn't supported there is no Rocky.
- p_l 3y agoIt's probably an evaluation in preparation for removing CentOS in ways other than buying RHEL. Federal agencies can't really use CentOS after 2024-06-30, so everyone dealing with federal clients is working on an upgrade path (CentOS was a major solution due to piggy backing on RHEL certifications )
- dralley 3y agoThere is no Rocky Linux 7, and CentOS 8 is already EOL, so I think it's a valid question.
- p_l 3y agoThere's a lot of CentOS 7 in various USGOV and adjacent (suppliers/service providers) who are stuck facing purchase of RHEL8/9 licenses or migrating to other distros - as CentOS 7 going EOL on 2024-06-30 means you can't use it for federal systems without each federal client getting a waiver. You have to either go with another distro or provide your own support (essentially your own fork). Those who want to stay with RHEL-like but not deal with actual RHEL licensing are often going with Alma or Rocky.
- mrweasel 3y agoThere's also the question: If I buy support from Rocky Linux and they provide a fix for something, then they'd need to upstream it, or how much can they allow Rocky to drift from RHEL, and for how long? What if they surplant RedHat, can they afford to undermine RedHat long term, or is there a point where they fork? Rocky Linux, and CentOS before it, is a strange product for people who want the benefits of RHEL, but don't want to pay for RedHat work. If you don't want support, then I think is fine, that the cost RedHat pays to be an open source company, but when you then turn to another company who rebadge RHEL and charge for support, it gets a little weird.
- op00to 3y agoWhat a weird way to spend federal money. I say it's weird because NASA almost certainly has its own internal Linux support paid through overhead in one form or another, and again the incremental cost of adding "developer" support from Red hat is way, way cheaper than Rocky. Finally, I doubt Rocky's support can perform as well as Red Hat's. No, I'm not talking about the people who talk on the phone when you break something. If you find a bug in a package, will Rocky be able to quickly and effectively upstream the fix, or will Rocky end up maintaining you on a custom patchlevel forever? I doubt Rocky has the ability to truly fulfill 24/7 support. It's difficult to build a deep bench for support, and nearly impossible to make sure you're keeping up 24/7 capability for other Maintenance Engineering type tasks. And if none of these reasons are important enough to stop you from paying them, maybe the thing you're doing isn't important enough to warrant paying for support anyway.
- aaomidi 3y agoHonestly I suspect rocky support to be faster than red hat.
- Kaytaro 3y agoWhat makes you think a company with 89 employees that just clones Red Hat's source code would be faster than Red Hat with 19,000?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aaomidi 3y agoThe mythical man month. More people can very easily lead to nothing getting done.
- op00to 3y agoThis doesn't really apply to support. With support, there is generally 1 engineer assigned to one customer for the life of the case. If a patch is needed, a software maintenance engineer may be added. You can't throw extra people at a support case and expect it to complete faster. You can, however, throw more people at a support TEAM and handle more cases.
- jabl 3y agoWonder if the timing of this is a coincidence, considering that RedHat just announced they're stopping releasing RHEL sources except to paying customers: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s... Link submitted by someone at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417070
- totallywrong 3y agoI'd been wondering when that was going to happen. There's got to be a point when you grow tired of Oracle, Rocky and the like taking customers from you using your very own sources. That said, it didn't seem to be a major issue before the CentOS mess they created all by themselves.
- jacooper 3y agoBut oracle or rocky can just subscribe to RHEL and continue having access to the source code, right?
- totallywrong 3y agoI suspect that republishing the sources will be against the terms you agree to in your subscription.
- jacooper 3y agoThey can't add more terms on the GPL and call it GPLv3.
- pavon 3y agoYes they must abide by the terms of the licenses of the software they redistribute. But they could start licensing the parts they write more restrictively, like RPM spec files. I don't think this will happen given how much back and forth there is between RHEL and Fedora, but IBM is in charge now.
- prpl 3y agoAgain, like large corporations, this doesn’t mean much. NASA is big and diverse, and each facility is unique and mostly independent, with lots of unrelated projects within a facility.
- Nifty3929 3y agoThis headline reads backwards to me. While it would be true either way, it seems more intuitive to say "Rocky Enterprise Linux secures contract with NASA"
- activiation 3y agoHow new is sam.gov?
- linuxdude314 3y agoVery old.
- Luctct 3y ago[flagged]
- neilv 3y agoWikipedia: > Rocky Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, which is a privately owned benefit corporation that describes itself as a "self-imposed not-for-profit". Is this only a structure set up to fund whatever needed to be done to rebrand RHEL? Or does anyone have shares that could be worth significant money?