4 ms·

why not use alpine instead?

by MichaelMoser123 3y ago

okasaki 3y ago
Because we've built up services, applications, and thousands of lines of ansible that only work on RHEL?
- stephen_g 3y ago
  I think the way this is going to play out is that a lot of that distro-specific code is going to have to be re-written. I’m lucky that my CentOS/Rocky exposure is not huge (maybe a dozen virtual machines) so it’s not a big deal for me to change. Of course, having had licensed RHEL machines and VMs in the past, this whole thing makes me much less likely to ever pay RedHat/IBM for them again… Definitely already time to look for alternatives. It is really quite a shame though, given the amount of Linux and related open source development RedHat developers did.
- housemusicfan 3y ago
  At any point in building your entire business' infrastructure so it was dependent on RHEL, or more likely an ersatz clone, did you ever consider you might have to buy a license at some point? It's like building a diet exclusively based on eating the free samples at Costco then going "oh those evil bastards, I'll starve to death" when they take them away. Maybe use platform-agnostic architecture next time or don't build your house of cards on proprietary-adjacent distros.
  - mort96 3y ago
    Red Hat never indicated that they had any trouble with CentOS, rather the opposite; their disposition towards it has always been very positive until recently. It would have been like using Ubuntu Server and worrying that Canonical might kill it off and force you to buy Ubuntu Pro; not completely out of the question, but also not something you would expect.
    - housemusicfan 3y ago
      That's because CentOS didn't meaningfully cut into their major business which is support. Anyone running CentOS outside of a lab setting understood they were on the hook for their own support. Most CentOS users were never going to be paying RHEL customers. You can't lose what you didn't have to begin with. Along came Oracle which is taking big customers and literal bags of money away from RH's core business by reselling a warmed over version of their own product at a lower cost.
      - mort96 3y ago
        Well apparently CentOS somehow became a big enough problem for Red Hat for them to kill it off...
  - adr1an 3y ago
    Nice example, but to be fair your analogy is flawed since there's no consideration on the GNU Public License, which is at the center of this conflict. Those free food samples were part of the 'contract' Costco made with the food producers... ;)
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      The licence is being followed to the letter.
      - sudosysgen 3y ago
        Maybe, maybe not. The GPL does not allow any restriction on the redistribution of sources. Is retaliation in this manner a restriction? It is to a layman, lawyers are not in consensus. The Software Freedom Conservancy has warned Red Hat they believe this is not following the letter of the law, for example.
      - Qem 3y ago
        There's some controversy on that: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
        pjmlp 3y ago
        "Now, to be clear, the GPL agreements did not obligate Red Hat to make its CCS publicly available to everyone. This is a common misconception about GPL's requirements"
        Qem 3y ago
        On further reading: "Due to this ongoing bad behavior by IBM's Red Hat, the situation has become increasingly complex and difficult to face. No third party can effectively monitor RHEL compliance with the GPL agreements, since customers live in fear of losing their much-needed service contracts. Red Hat's legal department has systematically refused SFC's requests in recent years to set up some form of monitoring by SFC. (For example, we asked to review the training materials and documents that RHEL salespeople are given to convince customers to buy RHEL, and Red Hat has not been willing to share these materials with us.) Nevertheless, since SFC serves as the global watchdog for GPL compliance, we welcome reports of RHEL-related violations." TL;DR: To be sure they were complying, marketing department is as important as the legal one, and they were fearful of people taking a good look there.
  - adr1an 3y ago
    (deleted)
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  As someone who's not a coder, out of curiosity, what kind of services and applications can only work on RHEL, and how hard would it be to make those distro-agnostic?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - okasaki 3y ago
    It depends. Most of them are undocumented, have no testing and have accumulated years of RHEL specific stuff (RPMs, using EPEL for dependencies, ansible). At the same time they service hundreds of important users per day, making them difficult to change. Our "cloud" also only offers RHEL-like images (Centos and now Rocky), so getting another distro involves getting a special exception and installing it from iso.
  - drdebug 3y ago
    Often things can be ported easily without much effort, but the issue lies in validation and testing, there are often corner cases that need to be identified and tested, it can cost a lot of time and effort and it's not always feasible. Redhat knows it may be cheaper to purchase RHEL subscriptions in that case.
nikau 3y ago
Because busy box and musl suck
- anthk 3y ago
  You can use coreutils on top with no issues. Also, on musl, ahem. Security CVE's say otherwise.
  - nikau 3y ago
    You can, but every wannabe "mah security" expert builds docker images without coreutils and it makes life needlessly difficult. Every time you ask why use busybox for userland utilities its always some bullshit reason around security or resource usage that doesn't hold water.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Alpine and OpenWRT are pretty much related. You haven't seen how well does Alpine Linux run on the desktop, kinda like OpenWRT in legacy devices.
      - nikau 3y ago
        yes - I've used openwrt since the original wrt54gl and I understand the rationale for it. My time is more valuable than shaving off a few milliseconds running gimped core utilities with major functionality missing on a non embedded system.
        anthk 3y ago
        I repaet, you are not bound to Busybox. You can install coreutils/findutils and so on if you want under Alpine with no issues. Symlinks are replaced.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Musl sucks far less than glibc. As far as I can tell it's the best libc under Linux. What're your objections to it?
stevefan1999 3y ago
Alpine does not have the full fledged enterprise features (failover, distributed storage, iSCSI management)

why not use alpine instead?

okasaki 3y ago

Because we've built up services, applications, and thousands of lines of ansible that only work on RHEL?

stephen_g 3y ago
I think the way this is going to play out is that a lot of that distro-specific code is going to have to be re-written. I’m lucky that my CentOS/Rocky exposure is not huge (maybe a dozen virtual machines) so it’s not a big deal for me to change. Of course, having had licensed RHEL machines and VMs in the past, this whole thing makes me much less likely to ever pay RedHat/IBM for them again… Definitely already time to look for alternatives. It is really quite a shame though, given the amount of Linux and related open source development RedHat developers did.
housemusicfan 3y ago
At any point in building your entire business' infrastructure so it was dependent on RHEL, or more likely an ersatz clone, did you ever consider you might have to buy a license at some point? It's like building a diet exclusively based on eating the free samples at Costco then going "oh those evil bastards, I'll starve to death" when they take them away. Maybe use platform-agnostic architecture next time or don't build your house of cards on proprietary-adjacent distros.
- mort96 3y ago
  Red Hat never indicated that they had any trouble with CentOS, rather the opposite; their disposition towards it has always been very positive until recently. It would have been like using Ubuntu Server and worrying that Canonical might kill it off and force you to buy Ubuntu Pro; not completely out of the question, but also not something you would expect.
  - housemusicfan 3y ago
    That's because CentOS didn't meaningfully cut into their major business which is support. Anyone running CentOS outside of a lab setting understood they were on the hook for their own support. Most CentOS users were never going to be paying RHEL customers. You can't lose what you didn't have to begin with. Along came Oracle which is taking big customers and literal bags of money away from RH's core business by reselling a warmed over version of their own product at a lower cost.
    - mort96 3y ago
      Well apparently CentOS somehow became a big enough problem for Red Hat for them to kill it off...
- adr1an 3y ago
  Nice example, but to be fair your analogy is flawed since there's no consideration on the GNU Public License, which is at the center of this conflict. Those free food samples were part of the 'contract' Costco made with the food producers... ;)
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    The licence is being followed to the letter.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. The GPL does not allow any restriction on the redistribution of sources. Is retaliation in this manner a restriction? It is to a layman, lawyers are not in consensus. The Software Freedom Conservancy has warned Red Hat they believe this is not following the letter of the law, for example.
    - Qem 3y ago
      There's some controversy on that: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis...
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        "Now, to be clear, the GPL agreements did not obligate Red Hat to make its CCS publicly available to everyone. This is a common misconception about GPL's requirements"
        Qem 3y ago
        On further reading: "Due to this ongoing bad behavior by IBM's Red Hat, the situation has become increasingly complex and difficult to face. No third party can effectively monitor RHEL compliance with the GPL agreements, since customers live in fear of losing their much-needed service contracts. Red Hat's legal department has systematically refused SFC's requests in recent years to set up some form of monitoring by SFC. (For example, we asked to review the training materials and documents that RHEL salespeople are given to convince customers to buy RHEL, and Red Hat has not been willing to share these materials with us.) Nevertheless, since SFC serves as the global watchdog for GPL compliance, we welcome reports of RHEL-related violations." TL;DR: To be sure they were complying, marketing department is as important as the legal one, and they were fearful of people taking a good look there.
- adr1an 3y ago
  (deleted)
vladvasiliu 3y ago
As someone who's not a coder, out of curiosity, what kind of services and applications can only work on RHEL, and how hard would it be to make those distro-agnostic?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- okasaki 3y ago
  It depends. Most of them are undocumented, have no testing and have accumulated years of RHEL specific stuff (RPMs, using EPEL for dependencies, ansible). At the same time they service hundreds of important users per day, making them difficult to change. Our "cloud" also only offers RHEL-like images (Centos and now Rocky), so getting another distro involves getting a special exception and installing it from iso.
- drdebug 3y ago
  Often things can be ported easily without much effort, but the issue lies in validation and testing, there are often corner cases that need to be identified and tested, it can cost a lot of time and effort and it's not always feasible. Redhat knows it may be cheaper to purchase RHEL subscriptions in that case.

nikau 3y ago

Because busy box and musl suck

anthk 3y ago
You can use coreutils on top with no issues. Also, on musl, ahem. Security CVE's say otherwise.
- nikau 3y ago
  You can, but every wannabe "mah security" expert builds docker images without coreutils and it makes life needlessly difficult. Every time you ask why use busybox for userland utilities its always some bullshit reason around security or resource usage that doesn't hold water.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Alpine and OpenWRT are pretty much related. You haven't seen how well does Alpine Linux run on the desktop, kinda like OpenWRT in legacy devices.
    - nikau 3y ago
      yes - I've used openwrt since the original wrt54gl and I understand the rationale for it. My time is more valuable than shaving off a few milliseconds running gimped core utilities with major functionality missing on a non embedded system.
      - anthk 3y ago
        I repaet, you are not bound to Busybox. You can install coreutils/findutils and so on if you want under Alpine with no issues. Symlinks are replaced.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Musl sucks far less than glibc. As far as I can tell it's the best libc under Linux. What're your objections to it?

stevefan1999 3y ago

Alpine does not have the full fledged enterprise features (failover, distributed storage, iSCSI management)