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I think the main thrust of all of this is to de-commodify Linux. To make RHEL really be in people's minds it's own operating system outside of Linux. It's hard

I think the main thrust of all of this is to de-commodify Linux. To make RHEL really be in people's minds it's own operating system outside of Linux. It's hard to do when it's really just a ball of generic open source components. Hence, this hostile behaviour. They don't want to be Linux, they want to be RHEL and ask not about the man behind the curtain.

jzb 3y ago
Just the opposite, I think. Red Hat is fighting the idea that the operating system is a commodity, and demonstrating that the RHEL subscription does have value. Red Hat's competitors have tried really really hard to undermine RHEL as something of value. The cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide their own base Linux distros to run workloads on. They'd love to cut Red Hat out of the picture. Oracle wants to convince customers to give it all their money to run workloads, hence Oracle Linux -- that's based on RHEL. If RHEL were, as you say, "a ball of generic open source components" then you wouldn't see all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about making it harder for Alma and Rocky to claim "bug for bug" compatibility with RHEL. Nobody would care. Note that this has been going on for more than 20 years, and this isn't the first time. I've been writing about this on my blog, but we've seen this story before and the only thing that has changed are the names of the vendors / projects and the version numbers. (See: https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-ii-a-history-of-the-early-2000s-linux-landscape/ https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clon...)
- parasubvert 3y ago
  Not the opposite. You're agreeing with the parent that Red Hat is viewing to de-commodify Linux. You just can't seem to see why this a bad thing. Red Hat does not have the interests of the community in mind any longer, which was inevitable when IBM purchased them.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    The parent comment is a bit confusing in that it says de-commoditizing Linux, which is one thing, but then talks about de-commoditizing RHEL. Yes, Red Hat wants to show that Linux can be treated as a commodity except when it can't; that the work on a distro can be separated into parts that can be shared with the community and parts that people are willing to pay for; that rebuilders are reducing the value of the latter and the only game-theoretical outcome is that no one will have the money to do this work. Without going into the discussion of whether that's correct or not, it's not a particularly new stance. It was the whole point of separating Fedora and RHEL in 2004.
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jzb 3y ago

Just the opposite, I think. Red Hat is fighting the idea that the operating system is a commodity, and demonstrating that the RHEL subscription does have value. Red Hat's competitors have tried really really hard to undermine RHEL as something of value. The cloud providers like AWS and Azure provide their own base Linux distros to run workloads on. They'd love to cut Red Hat out of the picture. Oracle wants to convince customers to give it all their money to run workloads, hence Oracle Linux -- that's based on RHEL. If RHEL were, as you say, "a ball of generic open source components" then you wouldn't see all this wailing and gnashing of teeth about making it harder for Alma and Rocky to claim "bug for bug" compatibility with RHEL. Nobody would care. Note that this has been going on for more than 20 years, and this isn't the first time. I've been writing about this on my blog, but we've seen this story before and the only thing that has changed are the names of the vendors / projects and the version numbers. (See: https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clone-wars-ii-a-history-of-the-early-2000s-linux-landscape/ https://dissociatedpress.net/2023/06/26/red-hat-and-the-clon...)

parasubvert 3y ago
Not the opposite. You're agreeing with the parent that Red Hat is viewing to de-commodify Linux. You just can't seem to see why this a bad thing. Red Hat does not have the interests of the community in mind any longer, which was inevitable when IBM purchased them.
- bonzini 3y ago
  The parent comment is a bit confusing in that it says de-commoditizing Linux, which is one thing, but then talks about de-commoditizing RHEL. Yes, Red Hat wants to show that Linux can be treated as a commodity except when it can't; that the work on a distro can be separated into parts that can be shared with the community and parts that people are willing to pay for; that rebuilders are reducing the value of the latter and the only game-theoretical outcome is that no one will have the money to do this work. Without going into the discussion of whether that's correct or not, it's not a particularly new stance. It was the whole point of separating Fedora and RHEL in 2004.

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