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> Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones? > We cannot speak to Red Hat’s intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had

> Is Red Hat trying to kill downstream clones? > We cannot speak to Red Hat’s intentions, and can only point to the things they have said publicly. We have had an incredible working relationship with Red Hat through the life of AlmaLinux OS and we hope to see that continue. Reading between the lines, it sounds like they have a similar relationship to Red Hat that I do: tons of great folks who still work there and weren't burned by the IBM acquisition... but officially it doesn't seem like community downstreams that filled in the role CentOS used to play have a good relationship with Red Hat. Otherwise this change (which some people are saying is fine, just poorly communicated) would've been announced with time for the community to adapt to it, rather than being announced in a blog post a week or two after the technical/process change was made!

OldManRyan 3y ago
This response reads like the responses third-party reddit client developers gave when the API changes were announced. "What's going to happen? We don't know but we have a great working relationship with reddit and they said it SHOULD be fine..." and we all know how that turned out.
- jtriangle 3y ago
  Except reddit actually controls all of the keys to castle in that example, whereas in this one IBM controls very little. They also lack the ability to whack-a-mole people legally sharing source code with distro maintainers. Their only way out is to close-source all of RHEL, which, good luck re-writing all that GPL code... not gonna happen. Not to mention, even if they did, they'd end up in a compatibility nightmare, where they're constantly fixing packages when GNU diverges from what they've done internally, or package maintainers intentionally making it difficult to run their packages on RHEL-OS, which will absolutely happen given the amount of bad blood they'd create from all that. This move is clearly to make it more difficult for Oracle, and I'd imagine they'll keep playing nice with everyone else because it's in their best interests to do so.
awill 3y ago
Exactly right on the lack of notice. What happens to people relying on Alma/Rocky? They're possibly screwed. Of course, RHEL (or others) could say that if you're depending on a free product, you're to blame. That's where I would disagree a bit. Many of these really large customers could just have easily chosen Debian, or something else. They simply don't need and don't want to pay for support. With Alma/Rocky, they had a perfect option, a no-support, free EL distro. RHEL did not lose these customers to Alma/Rocky. Those customers would have just chosen a different free distro. This is downhill for RHEL
- littlestymaar 3y ago
  > This is downhill for RHEL It has been since IBM's acquisition ans we can't even say we're suprised. Capitalism greed destroying something that was perfectly profitable already…

OldManRyan 3y ago

This response reads like the responses third-party reddit client developers gave when the API changes were announced. "What's going to happen? We don't know but we have a great working relationship with reddit and they said it SHOULD be fine..." and we all know how that turned out.

jtriangle 3y ago
Except reddit actually controls all of the keys to castle in that example, whereas in this one IBM controls very little. They also lack the ability to whack-a-mole people legally sharing source code with distro maintainers. Their only way out is to close-source all of RHEL, which, good luck re-writing all that GPL code... not gonna happen. Not to mention, even if they did, they'd end up in a compatibility nightmare, where they're constantly fixing packages when GNU diverges from what they've done internally, or package maintainers intentionally making it difficult to run their packages on RHEL-OS, which will absolutely happen given the amount of bad blood they'd create from all that. This move is clearly to make it more difficult for Oracle, and I'd imagine they'll keep playing nice with everyone else because it's in their best interests to do so.

awill 3y ago

Exactly right on the lack of notice. What happens to people relying on Alma/Rocky? They're possibly screwed. Of course, RHEL (or others) could say that if you're depending on a free product, you're to blame. That's where I would disagree a bit. Many of these really large customers could just have easily chosen Debian, or something else. They simply don't need and don't want to pay for support. With Alma/Rocky, they had a perfect option, a no-support, free EL distro. RHEL did not lose these customers to Alma/Rocky. Those customers would have just chosen a different free distro. This is downhill for RHEL

littlestymaar 3y ago
> This is downhill for RHEL It has been since IBM's acquisition ans we can't even say we're suprised. Capitalism greed destroying something that was perfectly profitable already…