15 ms·

CIQ, Oracle, SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association

163 points by LaSombra 3y ago

whalesalad 3y ago
https://openela.org https://openela.org
- systems 3y ago
  i am getting a warning from chrome about this site certificate , or is it just me
  - jhalstead 3y ago
    No issues when I opened it on mobile Chrome.
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    no warning Google Chrome 112.0.5615.165 (Official Build) (64-bit) Revision c262f36e6b1d711ee42d4fbe1343b49960593f18-refs/branch-heads/5615@{#1297} OS Linux JavaScript V8 11.2.214.14 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Command Line /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --origin-trial-disabled-features=WebGPU Executable Path /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    Are you going through a corporate proxy? Some of them will MITM newly-registered domains but not established ones.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pxc 3y ago
  > It will provide an open process to access source code that organizations can use to build distributions compatible with RHEL So they're not trying to create something like RHEL but in a way that is committed to being more 'open' somehow. They're still shooting for the bug-for-bug stuff, and still an effort that's parasitic on RHEL in terms of its substantive development. This whole situation sucks.
  - eraser215 3y ago
    100%
  - ddtaylor 3y ago
    If you don't want other people using your source code should you be making open source software?
  - uberduper 3y ago
    Seems like an obvious next step is to get enterprise hardware and software vendors to begin certifying on OpenELA in addition to RHEL. OpenELA10 or w/e could stand on its own as a competing enterprise linux standard that everyone is free to build from.
    - pxc 3y ago
      > OpenELA10 or w/e could stand on its own as a competing enterprise linux standard that everyone is free to build from. Idk. How is that standing on its own? SUSE already has a perfectly good enterprise Linux distro in SLE. If the point is to have an alternative standard that anyone can build from, why not just use that as the base?
      - uberduper 3y ago
        Sure. SLE could become (the basis for) OpenELA10? Seems to me that all the RHEL derivatives were perfectly content to let RH set the standards for enterprise linux. RH doesn't like that arrangement. SUSE probably wouldn't mind it. All the derivatives have their EL8 and EL9 based distributions they've committed themselves to support for some time, so I'm sure they'll maintain bug for bug compatibility as best they can given the circumstances. No reason for them to keep following RH after that.
  - CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
    RHEL does a lot of work, yes, but a lot of that comes from volunteers. RHEL does contribute kernel patches; but Oracle and SUSE contribute there, too.
infamouscow 3y ago
I wish they went for a 501(c)3 non-profit, rather than a 501(c)6 trade organization. The incentives between these two structures make a world of difference.
- verdverm 3y ago
  can you elaborate?
  - infamouscow 3y ago
    Sure! IANAL, just a dev, but my understanding from seeing this play out over the last 20 years is the following broken down first by public vs. private benefit: 501(c)(3): Organizations under this classification must primarily serve a public interest and not a private interest. Any private benefit must be insubstantial. 501(c)(6): These organizations are designed to serve the private interests of their members, as long as those interests align with the broader industry or line of business. Everything else follows from this distinction IMHO. You see it play out in the Linux or Rust foundation, in contrast to the Python or Zig software foundation. It's easier to get attention and members with a trade organization, but over time, over the long term, there's a stark difference that I believe is not disputed.
- bragr 3y ago
  Just skimming the regulations, I don't believe that it would qualify as a 501(c)3 as they don't receive "broad public support" [1] whereas the criteria for a 501(c)6 match exactly with their goals. Additionally the (c)6 allows for political activity related to the purpose of the organization, which seems like a good ability given the current intersection of politics, regulation, and tech. [2] I'm not sure what you mean by "incentives". Perhaps you could elaborate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Types [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Contributions_and_activities_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Contributi...
  - vulcan01 3y ago
sproketboy 3y ago
[dead]
verdverm 3y ago
Is this IBM|RedHat's Elasticsearch vs Opensearch moment?
- nazgulsenpai 3y ago
  Funny you mention that as Oracle has also "migrated" everything to OpenSearch. They're really big proponents of (other people's) free and open-source software!
- jrpelkonen 3y ago
  Interesting observation. I recently watched a documentary about Compaq, and this saga reminds me of a previous time when IBM tried to put the genie back in the bottle with MicroChannel architecture. Let’s see if they fare any better this time
  - mongol 3y ago
    Ah, MicroChannel. The reason I was late into Linux. My PC was a PS/2 Model 70. Was only when I bought a Pentium 75 PC that I could join the party.
1MachineElf 3y ago
I suppose this is both good and bad. I wonder if Red Hat/IBM anticipated this, and how they will respond to it.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  Eh, it's good. IBM didn't want to continue supporting community things and so here we are, the RedHat business model was a bit tricky and increasingly so because of cloud computing. The great value of RedHat was supported software. You could buy one of those $10,000 per seat software packages for some engineering discipline that was guaranteed to work by RedHat and the vendor and if it wasn't they were quite motivated and helpful in fixing your problem quickly. RedHat also was trusted to monitor and fix security problems quickly, and was in the privileged position of getting notifications about them before they were public so they could be fixed. The question is how do you get people to fund these two things?
  - eraser215 3y ago
    It's been made abundantly clear by many people in many places that this isn't an IBM thing.
    - colechristensen 3y ago
      It is not clear what you mean.
    - CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
      Links pls?
    - geerlingguy 3y ago
      There have been numerous employees, former employees, and even VP level folks who have said this direction comes from Red Hat, and not IBM. I'm inclined to believe them, with the caveat that this reality may not have come to be had IBM never bought Red Hat. That still doesn't imply IBM forced the change. It's public record that Paul Cormier has considered the way CentOS worked a problem for years... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRol3YAV-E&t=360s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRol3YAV-E&t=360s
mulmen 3y ago
I am SUSE-curious after all the drama and lost trust with RedHat and IBM but any partnership with Oracle makes me uncomfortable.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Well it was SCO back in the United Linux days--albeit it wasn't the evil SCO yet at that time. (Though as others have remarked, there's a different objective at play here.)
  - pxc 3y ago
    Wym? SUSE was owned by Novell, not SCO. Evil SCO stabbed Novell and SUSE in the back.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      SUSE was bought by Novell later. Per Wikipedia: "United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, so as to minimize duplication of engineering effort and form an effective competitor to Red Hat. The founding members of United Linux were SUSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva (now merged with MandrakeSoft to form Mandriva) and Caldera International (later renamed to The SCO Group). The consortium was announced on May 30, 2002. The end of the project was announced on January 22, 2004." It never really worked from a business perspective but Caldera becoming faux-SCO was pretty much the final straw.
- Kaytaro 3y ago
  I'd like to point out that SUSE has never made their source code as available as Red Hat, even after the changes that caused all the drama. The only way to get SLES source code is to sign up for a 90-day evaluation or request it by mail, whereas signing up for a free Red Hat account gives you full access indefinitely. Yet they accuse Red Hat of hurting the open source community by...operating the same way they've always done? It's frankly embarrassing how easy the tech communities been misled with these marketing campaigns. If IBM wasn't such an easy target, people might see this for what it is- a bad faith attempt to clone an open source project and siphon the sponsors customers with their own support contracts.
roschdal 3y ago
OpenSuse is wonderful
- BossingAround 3y ago
  What's the differentiator from the Fedora/Centos/RHEL line?
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    For me: yast (easy to use GUI/TUI for many administration tasks — useful for less experienced admins), snapper (filesystem snapshot management tool which automatically creates them before and after package management operations and allows you to boot into them or roll back if anything goes wrong. Quite similar to FreeBSD boot environments.) zypper is probably the best 'classic' package manager there is (although dnf is great too; it's more of an argument against Debian and its derivatives). Then there is https://build.openbuildservice.org https://build.openbuildservice.org which automatically builds packages for all supported distributions and architectures from a single RPM spec file and creates a ready to use repository for you. OpenSUSE Leap is built from SLES sources and is thus comparable in its stability guarantees to the old CentOS (or any of the current RHEL rebuilds).
    - Espionage724 3y ago
      I found YaST to get in my way at times; I particularly remember YaST's Network panel hanging because I had StevenBlack's huge HOSTS file. I do like the network panel though for changing static IPs; I had to do some searching to try to figure out how to do that on Fedora, and ended up using Cockpit instead (not sure how to do it cli). I'm confused on the differences in repo priority between zypper (oS TW) and dnf (Fedora). Apparently dnf also allows setting repo priority, but I've never had to do it, and packages seem to come from expected repos without having to specify (stuff comes from RPM Fusion if I have those repos added). On TW I had to manually specify repo priority to something other than 99 and set a flag to allow vendor changes to have similar behavior; I like that kind of control but I didn't need to do it on Fedora. OBS is nice in-concept but I don't like the idea of using it outside of openSUSE. I think Launchpad/PPAs for Ubuntu, Copr for Fedora, and AUR for Arch. I think OBS for openSUSE and don't like the idea of using OBS for other distros, even if that's one of the big benefits and point to OBS.
CrLf 3y ago
This is United Linux 21 years later. But this time, instead of building a distribution to compete with Red Hat, it's based on Red Hat (in practice, it is Red Hat). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux > "No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome." I'm sure they're trying to be cheeky. But it also comes off as confirming Red Hat's position. OpenELA isn't about community, it's about having a base (i.e. bug-for-bug RHEL clone) upon which to sell support contracts. If you really want to stay in the Red Hat ecosystem, I'd suggest going with AlmaLinux instead. They seem to have a more honest understanding of what "community" means. Some people are throwing the word "freeloaders" around. It seems clear that "freeloaders" are not people running RHEL clones, but indeed there are some "freeloaders" in the community.
- ddtaylor 3y ago
  Most of the businesses that want to run Red hat compatible Linux probably don't care about any of that stuff. They just want to run Linux and have it be essentially as difficult to maintain as their landscaping or electricity.
- creatonez 3y ago
  If you're unsure which enterprise linux fork to go with, here is a panel discussion between AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, and Oracle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFMPjt_RgXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFMPjt_RgXA. They all lay out their philosophy and discuss the changes going forward. Unfortunately a SUSE representative couldn't make it, but you can fill in the gaps from their press material. I tend to respect the AlmaLinux way of doing things, but I respect where the others are coming from.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Thanks for recovering that, I had completly forgot about it, I bet still have some Linux Journal issues talking about it.
davidw 3y ago
Hrm. Just going to keep sticking with Debian and Ubuntu like I've been doing since ... wow, 1997.
- BossingAround 3y ago
  For personal and small business needs, you can stick to whatever you'd like, even Arch Linux if that's your poison. That's not the aim of the announcement though.
  - davidw 3y ago
    It's my point though: rather than navigate between what RH is doing and what Oracle is doing, I'll just stick with a solid open source distribution. Lindy effect and all...
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      Except that Ubuntu isn't "solid" any more, not since they moved to those damn snaps. I'm looking at moving to openSUSE Tumbleweed now because I've had it with Ubuntu.
- lproven 3y ago
  The first version of Ubuntu was 4.10 "Warty Warthog" in October 2004. I used Warty myself. But while Debian was around in 1997, Ubuntu was not.
  - davidw 3y ago
    That's correct. Ubuntu branched off of Debian at a certain point.
    - lproven 3y ago
      You miss my point. You can't have been using Ubuntu in 1997 because it didn't exist yet. I also would add a question: Debian in 1997 did not have automatic package dependency resolution yet, AIUI, because this was before APT. So, what made Debian worth using before APT?
korpsey 3y ago
Re-United Linux!
raverbashing 3y ago
So what's the story again? You either die a hero or you live enough to see yourself becoming the villain? And now even Oracle is looking like the reasonable player?
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > And now even Oracle is looking like the reasonable player? A broken clock and so on. Oracle has absolutely no reason to misbehave here, and everything to gain by being ethical. At this point, they would only do something wrong if the compulsion was too strong.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
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tlhunter 3y ago
I love how they throw Java into the trademarks section. Java isn't even mentioned anywhere. Looks like a case of Oracle being Oracle.
- papercrane 3y ago
  I think it's because they used the trademark "Oracle" so they just included Oracle's standard trademark disclaimer. If you search for that paragraph, you'll find lots of examples of it being reproduced verbatim.
- paulddraper 3y ago
  "Write once, trademark everywhere"
linuxftw 3y ago
Part of the justification at the time for getting rid of CentOS proper in favor of CentOS "Stream" was that poor Red Hat was doing all the work and spending all the cash in support of CentOS. Red Hat even went as far to say that the CentOS leadership (board?) was in full support. Red Hat never allowed CentOS to have any kind of election. It was never a community driven project after Red Hat bought it. So, very interesting to see these companies banding together to give us back CentOS by another name. It will be interesting to see what Rocky and Alma do.
- gangohango 3y ago
  CIQ is rocky.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    I was thinking one of the distros was backed by CIQ, but I couldn't remember which, thanks.
    - nhanlon 3y ago
      CIQ is a sponsor of Rocky (and my employer, to be transparent) - but they do not have a say over what Rocky does.
  - nhanlon 3y ago
    We (RESF/Rocky) are _not_ CIQ, and do not take direction from CIQ. End of story.
    - gareim 3y ago
      I knew you'd show up and say this. CIQ's CEO claims to have founded Rocky and is the current president of RESF, is Rocky's most prominent sponsor, and Rocky's recent moves have been in the same direction that CIQ requires in order to survive. Regardless of direct control or not, Rocky's financial incentives align with CIQ's. As you so point out your bias, it would be really nice if you didn't speak on behalf of your employer and let others make their own conclusions without hearing from those biased.
Espionage724 3y ago
Why would anyone use a server OS that's a fork of another server OS, provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros? I'm sure there's a reason for it with all the discussions, but if I want to use CentOS, why wouldn't I just use CentOS Stream that RH is providing? If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. If I want to see the future of RHEL, there's Fedora Server. And if I believed RH was being intentionally hostile, why would I support them at all and not go with a completely unrelated distro like SUSE?
- josephcsible 3y ago
  > If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. You can't get RHEL for free.
  - eraser215 3y ago
    Yes you can. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterpri...
    - anyoneamous 3y ago
      This falls under the heading of "technically correct" - in the sense that the limit is high enough for people to make the argument you are, and yet too low for most enterprise use-cases. Worse, the offer could be withdrawn at any time.
      - Espionage724 3y ago
        If you're enterprise with more than 16 machines, you can and should probably be paying for RHEL. What I'm not understanding is why people need to use RHEL and would resort to free random forks of it, instead of just using CentOS Stream or Fedora that are basically the same thing, actually from RH, and 100% free. RHEL is not that special.
Timber-6539 3y ago
I like this solution way much better. Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux. Maybe it's not too late to make a U-turn and join this new group so that Redhat alone can be responsible for contributing to RHEL as intended.
- eraser215 3y ago
  How is red hat being the only contributor a good thing?
  - Timber-6539 3y ago
    It may not be a good thing to anyone looking at this whole mess but it's clearly what Red Hat wants. After all, their VP did lament that they were doing all this work for "free" just so that the other enterprises can rebuild their product.
- lproven 3y ago
  > Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux. Just FWIW I can point to a dozen other CentOS Linux rebuilds, at least one backed by Huawei and another backed by HPE. So no, this is badly wrong.
fweimer 3y ago
Based on https://openela.org/about/ https://openela.org/about/ this appears to be a source-only distribution. They do not speak of binary builds (just “buildable”), that's apparently up to the downstream participants.
- ticviking 3y ago
  I'm not sure that's a bad thing given that the previous approach was hampered so much by confusion about where the value is. If this is a commitment to a set of source then the players can compete on ease of use, support or other stuff.
  - CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
    Right now I'm thinking about it in the way that I think about Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt has their own infrastructure, governance, etc., but I don't use Let's Encrypt products to interact with Let's Encrypt. Instead, I interact with Let's Encrypt via products like Certbot from the EFF. If OpenELA's going to provide source, and I access that source through builds provided by CIQ or SUSE or someone else, then I'll be thinking of it in the same way as I think about Let's Encrypt.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Or java.
Dulat_Akan 3y ago
Oh big stones companies moving to the Talent side of Open Source developers. Good but needed to act little bit earlier. Yes better late then never)
loph 3y ago
Simply put, I'm not using anything with 0racle's name on it. Free software from 0racle? There are gonna be strings attached... to lawyers.
- creatonez 3y ago
  Oracle Linux, surprisingly, is no strings attached. The licensing is straightforward GPL, the download pages are freely accessible. In this case, it might be Oracle's lawyers preventing them from being aggressive, because they wouldn't fare well trying to challenge Red Hat. If they screw up their treading-lightly strategy, or if they get into legal trouble, there could no longer be a suitable operating system to run Oracle Database on.
  - toyg 3y ago
    It's because they are the underdog, in no position to impose anything. They do the work because they need it for strategic reasons, so they might as well give it away for goodwill.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, it's not because they are the underdog. They need to give it away for those same strategic reasons that they created it.
- SahAssar 3y ago
  Are you tying to make 0racle the new Micro$oft/M$? Whats the zero supposed to represent?
  - loph 3y ago
    My contempt is so great I will not even type their name.
- ftaghn 3y ago
  As much as people may hate oracle, they employ significant contributors to the Linux kernel. https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ Many in very important subsystems. The XFS maintainer (who just recently stepped down from this role) and contributor Darrick Wong works for Oracle. Meanwhile, btrfs is the creation of Chris Mason, who worked there until 2012. Modern filesystems on linux owe a decent debt to Oracle. Good luck running an Oracle-free linux. I often find it interesting when people imply the company is freeloading for having chosen the path of making an RHEL clone. They cloned RHEL because an unhealthy, dependent ecosystem was built around the one, singular linux distribution, not because they are unwilling to fund work. Giving some serious competition to Red Hat can only be a good thing.
pygar 3y ago
Probably a dumb question, as I'm not really on the enterprise side of Linux but: Isn't Canonical in the same business as Red Hat? Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"? Come to think of it, why is SUSE considered as a serious replacement for RHEL and not Ubuntu?
- creatonez 3y ago
  > Come to think of it, why is SUSE considered as a serious replacement for RHEL and not Ubuntu? SLES and RHEL are somewhat similar, in that they both use the RPM package format, and they both have a 10 year support lifecycle. They are not entirely compatible though. They also make management software that is supposed to be as interoperable as possible with competitor distributions. Anyways, last month SUSE announced they would be making an actual RHEL fork, so that's the real reason they are joining this new partnership -- it's not related to SLES, but a new distro they are making. As for Ubuntu -- it is often touted as an alternative to RHEL. However, people don't like the weird ways in which Ubuntu diverges from the rest of the Linux community (Snap, LXD, ufw, etc.), so some attention is diverted towards Debian and RHEL, which are more focused on packaging software that is already proven. Red Hat does their innovation in Fedora, waits a few years to see if it catches on, then implements it in RHEL. This tends to have a greater degree of success than pushing it suddenly on users like Ubuntu does.
- dralley 3y ago
  >Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"? I don't think there are any corporate entities reselling a rebuilt Ubuntu
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Are there any reselling a rebuilt RHEL?
    - rodgerd 3y ago
      Oracle have a sales pitch - I've been on the end of Oracle's - that is "we'll sell it for less, we don't care, name a price we just want to hurt Red Hat." OEL is just rebuilt RHEL.
DarkmSparks 3y ago
I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And tbh, these days, with whatever bad medicine google feels like foistering on us this week, Oracle are truly beginning to look more and more like the "good guys". As much as any large evilcorp can be the good guys anyway.
pelasaco 3y ago
As openSUSE user, the only answers that I care from SUSE are: - Are you going to kill Leap and Tumbleweed? - Are you going to handle the "community" as you do with the openSUSE community?
- stockerta 3y ago
  I loved SUSE for a long time, but their future plans for Leap had me looking elsewhere. They want to make the next Leap microOS bases, so a transactional immutable base. No thanks I don't need that. Moreover they want to kill yast for some web based stuff with way less feature.
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    That's news to me. Source? MicroOS is and will be its own cool thing AFAIK. I'm guessing they will provide a MicroOS based on Leap in the future.
jasoneckert 3y ago
I remember when Sun Microsystems and AT&T teamed up in the late 1980s and Sun announced the next version of their OS would be based on SysV UNIX instead of BSD UNIX. Since Sun was this massive force in the UNIX market back then, other UNIX vendors formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) in protest. In many ways, Red Hat and IBM are the modern Sun Microsystems and AT&T, so it's not surprising that their competitors are essentially doing the same thing.
- the_why_of_y 3y ago
  > their competitors are essentially doing the same thing. OSF was developing an operating system[1] based on Mach, a file system from IBM, and BSD's IP stack, that intentionally had very little in common with AT&T UNIX. OpenELA is trying to create a carbon copy of their competitor's product, guided by the slogan "bug-for-bug compatible". These reactions couldn't be further apart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1
lproven 3y ago
Also on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079769 (ZDnet story, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078603 (Phoronix story; no comments on HN) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085519 (ZDNet again, no comments)

163 points by LaSombra 3y ago

whalesalad 3y ago

https://openela.org https://openela.org

systems 3y ago
i am getting a warning from chrome about this site certificate , or is it just me
- jhalstead 3y ago
  No issues when I opened it on mobile Chrome.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  no warning Google Chrome 112.0.5615.165 (Official Build) (64-bit) Revision c262f36e6b1d711ee42d4fbe1343b49960593f18-refs/branch-heads/5615@{#1297} OS Linux JavaScript V8 11.2.214.14 User Agent Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Command Line /usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end --origin-trial-disabled-features=WebGPU Executable Path /opt/google/chrome/google-chrome
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Are you going through a corporate proxy? Some of them will MITM newly-registered domains but not established ones.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pxc 3y ago
> It will provide an open process to access source code that organizations can use to build distributions compatible with RHEL So they're not trying to create something like RHEL but in a way that is committed to being more 'open' somehow. They're still shooting for the bug-for-bug stuff, and still an effort that's parasitic on RHEL in terms of its substantive development. This whole situation sucks.
- eraser215 3y ago
  100%
- ddtaylor 3y ago
  If you don't want other people using your source code should you be making open source software?
- uberduper 3y ago
  Seems like an obvious next step is to get enterprise hardware and software vendors to begin certifying on OpenELA in addition to RHEL. OpenELA10 or w/e could stand on its own as a competing enterprise linux standard that everyone is free to build from.
  - pxc 3y ago
    > OpenELA10 or w/e could stand on its own as a competing enterprise linux standard that everyone is free to build from. Idk. How is that standing on its own? SUSE already has a perfectly good enterprise Linux distro in SLE. If the point is to have an alternative standard that anyone can build from, why not just use that as the base?
    - uberduper 3y ago
      Sure. SLE could become (the basis for) OpenELA10? Seems to me that all the RHEL derivatives were perfectly content to let RH set the standards for enterprise linux. RH doesn't like that arrangement. SUSE probably wouldn't mind it. All the derivatives have their EL8 and EL9 based distributions they've committed themselves to support for some time, so I'm sure they'll maintain bug for bug compatibility as best they can given the circumstances. No reason for them to keep following RH after that.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
  RHEL does a lot of work, yes, but a lot of that comes from volunteers. RHEL does contribute kernel patches; but Oracle and SUSE contribute there, too.

infamouscow 3y ago

I wish they went for a 501(c)3 non-profit, rather than a 501(c)6 trade organization. The incentives between these two structures make a world of difference.

verdverm 3y ago
can you elaborate?
- infamouscow 3y ago
  Sure! IANAL, just a dev, but my understanding from seeing this play out over the last 20 years is the following broken down first by public vs. private benefit: 501(c)(3): Organizations under this classification must primarily serve a public interest and not a private interest. Any private benefit must be insubstantial. 501(c)(6): These organizations are designed to serve the private interests of their members, as long as those interests align with the broader industry or line of business. Everything else follows from this distinction IMHO. You see it play out in the Linux or Rust foundation, in contrast to the Python or Zig software foundation. It's easier to get attention and members with a trade organization, but over time, over the long term, there's a stark difference that I believe is not disputed.
bragr 3y ago
Just skimming the regulations, I don't believe that it would qualify as a 501(c)3 as they don't receive "broad public support" [1] whereas the criteria for a 501(c)6 match exactly with their goals. Additionally the (c)6 allows for political activity related to the purpose of the organization, which seems like a good ability given the current intersection of politics, regulation, and tech. [2] I'm not sure what you mean by "incentives". Perhaps you could elaborate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)(3)_organization#Types [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Contributions_and_activities_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization#Contributi...
- vulcan01 3y ago

sproketboy 3y ago

[dead]

verdverm 3y ago

Is this IBM|RedHat's Elasticsearch vs Opensearch moment?

nazgulsenpai 3y ago
Funny you mention that as Oracle has also "migrated" everything to OpenSearch. They're really big proponents of (other people's) free and open-source software!
jrpelkonen 3y ago
Interesting observation. I recently watched a documentary about Compaq, and this saga reminds me of a previous time when IBM tried to put the genie back in the bottle with MicroChannel architecture. Let’s see if they fare any better this time
- mongol 3y ago
  Ah, MicroChannel. The reason I was late into Linux. My PC was a PS/2 Model 70. Was only when I bought a Pentium 75 PC that I could join the party.

1MachineElf 3y ago

I suppose this is both good and bad. I wonder if Red Hat/IBM anticipated this, and how they will respond to it.

colechristensen 3y ago
Eh, it's good. IBM didn't want to continue supporting community things and so here we are, the RedHat business model was a bit tricky and increasingly so because of cloud computing. The great value of RedHat was supported software. You could buy one of those $10,000 per seat software packages for some engineering discipline that was guaranteed to work by RedHat and the vendor and if it wasn't they were quite motivated and helpful in fixing your problem quickly. RedHat also was trusted to monitor and fix security problems quickly, and was in the privileged position of getting notifications about them before they were public so they could be fixed. The question is how do you get people to fund these two things?
- eraser215 3y ago
  It's been made abundantly clear by many people in many places that this isn't an IBM thing.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    It is not clear what you mean.
  - CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
    Links pls?
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    There have been numerous employees, former employees, and even VP level folks who have said this direction comes from Red Hat, and not IBM. I'm inclined to believe them, with the caveat that this reality may not have come to be had IBM never bought Red Hat. That still doesn't imply IBM forced the change. It's public record that Paul Cormier has considered the way CentOS worked a problem for years... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRol3YAV-E&t=360s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRol3YAV-E&t=360s

mulmen 3y ago

I am SUSE-curious after all the drama and lost trust with RedHat and IBM but any partnership with Oracle makes me uncomfortable.

ghaff 3y ago
Well it was SCO back in the United Linux days--albeit it wasn't the evil SCO yet at that time. (Though as others have remarked, there's a different objective at play here.)
- pxc 3y ago
  Wym? SUSE was owned by Novell, not SCO. Evil SCO stabbed Novell and SUSE in the back.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    SUSE was bought by Novell later. Per Wikipedia: "United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, so as to minimize duplication of engineering effort and form an effective competitor to Red Hat. The founding members of United Linux were SUSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva (now merged with MandrakeSoft to form Mandriva) and Caldera International (later renamed to The SCO Group). The consortium was announced on May 30, 2002. The end of the project was announced on January 22, 2004." It never really worked from a business perspective but Caldera becoming faux-SCO was pretty much the final straw.
Kaytaro 3y ago
I'd like to point out that SUSE has never made their source code as available as Red Hat, even after the changes that caused all the drama. The only way to get SLES source code is to sign up for a 90-day evaluation or request it by mail, whereas signing up for a free Red Hat account gives you full access indefinitely. Yet they accuse Red Hat of hurting the open source community by...operating the same way they've always done? It's frankly embarrassing how easy the tech communities been misled with these marketing campaigns. If IBM wasn't such an easy target, people might see this for what it is- a bad faith attempt to clone an open source project and siphon the sponsors customers with their own support contracts.

roschdal 3y ago

OpenSuse is wonderful

BossingAround 3y ago
What's the differentiator from the Fedora/Centos/RHEL line?
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  For me: yast (easy to use GUI/TUI for many administration tasks — useful for less experienced admins), snapper (filesystem snapshot management tool which automatically creates them before and after package management operations and allows you to boot into them or roll back if anything goes wrong. Quite similar to FreeBSD boot environments.) zypper is probably the best 'classic' package manager there is (although dnf is great too; it's more of an argument against Debian and its derivatives). Then there is https://build.openbuildservice.org https://build.openbuildservice.org which automatically builds packages for all supported distributions and architectures from a single RPM spec file and creates a ready to use repository for you. OpenSUSE Leap is built from SLES sources and is thus comparable in its stability guarantees to the old CentOS (or any of the current RHEL rebuilds).
  - Espionage724 3y ago
    I found YaST to get in my way at times; I particularly remember YaST's Network panel hanging because I had StevenBlack's huge HOSTS file. I do like the network panel though for changing static IPs; I had to do some searching to try to figure out how to do that on Fedora, and ended up using Cockpit instead (not sure how to do it cli). I'm confused on the differences in repo priority between zypper (oS TW) and dnf (Fedora). Apparently dnf also allows setting repo priority, but I've never had to do it, and packages seem to come from expected repos without having to specify (stuff comes from RPM Fusion if I have those repos added). On TW I had to manually specify repo priority to something other than 99 and set a flag to allow vendor changes to have similar behavior; I like that kind of control but I didn't need to do it on Fedora. OBS is nice in-concept but I don't like the idea of using it outside of openSUSE. I think Launchpad/PPAs for Ubuntu, Copr for Fedora, and AUR for Arch. I think OBS for openSUSE and don't like the idea of using OBS for other distros, even if that's one of the big benefits and point to OBS.

CrLf 3y ago

This is United Linux 21 years later. But this time, instead of building a distribution to compete with Red Hat, it's based on Red Hat (in practice, it is Red Hat). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux > "No subscriptions. No passwords. No barriers. Freeloaders welcome." I'm sure they're trying to be cheeky. But it also comes off as confirming Red Hat's position. OpenELA isn't about community, it's about having a base (i.e. bug-for-bug RHEL clone) upon which to sell support contracts. If you really want to stay in the Red Hat ecosystem, I'd suggest going with AlmaLinux instead. They seem to have a more honest understanding of what "community" means. Some people are throwing the word "freeloaders" around. It seems clear that "freeloaders" are not people running RHEL clones, but indeed there are some "freeloaders" in the community.

ddtaylor 3y ago
Most of the businesses that want to run Red hat compatible Linux probably don't care about any of that stuff. They just want to run Linux and have it be essentially as difficult to maintain as their landscaping or electricity.
creatonez 3y ago
If you're unsure which enterprise linux fork to go with, here is a panel discussion between AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, and Oracle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFMPjt_RgXA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFMPjt_RgXA. They all lay out their philosophy and discuss the changes going forward. Unfortunately a SUSE representative couldn't make it, but you can fill in the gaps from their press material. I tend to respect the AlmaLinux way of doing things, but I respect where the others are coming from.
pjmlp 3y ago
Thanks for recovering that, I had completly forgot about it, I bet still have some Linux Journal issues talking about it.

davidw 3y ago

Hrm. Just going to keep sticking with Debian and Ubuntu like I've been doing since ... wow, 1997.

BossingAround 3y ago
For personal and small business needs, you can stick to whatever you'd like, even Arch Linux if that's your poison. That's not the aim of the announcement though.
- davidw 3y ago
  It's my point though: rather than navigate between what RH is doing and what Oracle is doing, I'll just stick with a solid open source distribution. Lindy effect and all...
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Except that Ubuntu isn't "solid" any more, not since they moved to those damn snaps. I'm looking at moving to openSUSE Tumbleweed now because I've had it with Ubuntu.
lproven 3y ago
The first version of Ubuntu was 4.10 "Warty Warthog" in October 2004. I used Warty myself. But while Debian was around in 1997, Ubuntu was not.
- davidw 3y ago
  That's correct. Ubuntu branched off of Debian at a certain point.
  - lproven 3y ago
    You miss my point. You can't have been using Ubuntu in 1997 because it didn't exist yet. I also would add a question: Debian in 1997 did not have automatic package dependency resolution yet, AIUI, because this was before APT. So, what made Debian worth using before APT?

korpsey 3y ago

Re-United Linux!

raverbashing 3y ago

So what's the story again? You either die a hero or you live enough to see yourself becoming the villain? And now even Oracle is looking like the reasonable player?

marcosdumay 3y ago
> And now even Oracle is looking like the reasonable player? A broken clock and so on. Oracle has absolutely no reason to misbehave here, and everything to gain by being ethical. At this point, they would only do something wrong if the compulsion was too strong.

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tlhunter 3y ago

I love how they throw Java into the trademarks section. Java isn't even mentioned anywhere. Looks like a case of Oracle being Oracle.

papercrane 3y ago
I think it's because they used the trademark "Oracle" so they just included Oracle's standard trademark disclaimer. If you search for that paragraph, you'll find lots of examples of it being reproduced verbatim.
paulddraper 3y ago
"Write once, trademark everywhere"

linuxftw 3y ago

Part of the justification at the time for getting rid of CentOS proper in favor of CentOS "Stream" was that poor Red Hat was doing all the work and spending all the cash in support of CentOS. Red Hat even went as far to say that the CentOS leadership (board?) was in full support. Red Hat never allowed CentOS to have any kind of election. It was never a community driven project after Red Hat bought it. So, very interesting to see these companies banding together to give us back CentOS by another name. It will be interesting to see what Rocky and Alma do.

gangohango 3y ago
CIQ is rocky.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  I was thinking one of the distros was backed by CIQ, but I couldn't remember which, thanks.
  - nhanlon 3y ago
    CIQ is a sponsor of Rocky (and my employer, to be transparent) - but they do not have a say over what Rocky does.
- nhanlon 3y ago
  We (RESF/Rocky) are _not_ CIQ, and do not take direction from CIQ. End of story.
  - gareim 3y ago
    I knew you'd show up and say this. CIQ's CEO claims to have founded Rocky and is the current president of RESF, is Rocky's most prominent sponsor, and Rocky's recent moves have been in the same direction that CIQ requires in order to survive. Regardless of direct control or not, Rocky's financial incentives align with CIQ's. As you so point out your bias, it would be really nice if you didn't speak on behalf of your employer and let others make their own conclusions without hearing from those biased.

Espionage724 3y ago

Why would anyone use a server OS that's a fork of another server OS, provided by a group of 3rd-parties with their own competing enterprise distros? I'm sure there's a reason for it with all the discussions, but if I want to use CentOS, why wouldn't I just use CentOS Stream that RH is providing? If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. If I want to see the future of RHEL, there's Fedora Server. And if I believed RH was being intentionally hostile, why would I support them at all and not go with a completely unrelated distro like SUSE?

josephcsible 3y ago
> If I want RHEL, I'll go get RHEL that afaik is also free. You can't get RHEL for free.
- eraser215 3y ago
  Yes you can. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-programs-easier-ways-access-rhel https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/new-year-new-red-hat-enterpri...
  - anyoneamous 3y ago
    This falls under the heading of "technically correct" - in the sense that the limit is high enough for people to make the argument you are, and yet too low for most enterprise use-cases. Worse, the offer could be withdrawn at any time.
    - Espionage724 3y ago
      If you're enterprise with more than 16 machines, you can and should probably be paying for RHEL. What I'm not understanding is why people need to use RHEL and would resort to free random forks of it, instead of just using CentOS Stream or Fedora that are basically the same thing, actually from RH, and 100% free. RHEL is not that special.

Timber-6539 3y ago

I like this solution way much better. Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux. Maybe it's not too late to make a U-turn and join this new group so that Redhat alone can be responsible for contributing to RHEL as intended.

eraser215 3y ago
How is red hat being the only contributor a good thing?
- Timber-6539 3y ago
  It may not be a good thing to anyone looking at this whole mess but it's clearly what Red Hat wants. After all, their VP did lament that they were doing all this work for "free" just so that the other enterprises can rebuild their product.
lproven 3y ago
> Now the only player that's missing here is Almalinux. Just FWIW I can point to a dozen other CentOS Linux rebuilds, at least one backed by Huawei and another backed by HPE. So no, this is badly wrong.

fweimer 3y ago

Based on https://openela.org/about/ https://openela.org/about/ this appears to be a source-only distribution. They do not speak of binary builds (just “buildable”), that's apparently up to the downstream participants.

ticviking 3y ago
I'm not sure that's a bad thing given that the previous approach was hampered so much by confusion about where the value is. If this is a commitment to a set of source then the players can compete on ease of use, support or other stuff.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y ago
  Right now I'm thinking about it in the way that I think about Let's Encrypt. Let's Encrypt has their own infrastructure, governance, etc., but I don't use Let's Encrypt products to interact with Let's Encrypt. Instead, I interact with Let's Encrypt via products like Certbot from the EFF. If OpenELA's going to provide source, and I access that source through builds provided by CIQ or SUSE or someone else, then I'll be thinking of it in the same way as I think about Let's Encrypt.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Or java.

Dulat_Akan 3y ago

Oh big stones companies moving to the Talent side of Open Source developers. Good but needed to act little bit earlier. Yes better late then never)

loph 3y ago

Simply put, I'm not using anything with 0racle's name on it. Free software from 0racle? There are gonna be strings attached... to lawyers.

creatonez 3y ago
Oracle Linux, surprisingly, is no strings attached. The licensing is straightforward GPL, the download pages are freely accessible. In this case, it might be Oracle's lawyers preventing them from being aggressive, because they wouldn't fare well trying to challenge Red Hat. If they screw up their treading-lightly strategy, or if they get into legal trouble, there could no longer be a suitable operating system to run Oracle Database on.
- toyg 3y ago
  It's because they are the underdog, in no position to impose anything. They do the work because they need it for strategic reasons, so they might as well give it away for goodwill.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Well, it's not because they are the underdog. They need to give it away for those same strategic reasons that they created it.
SahAssar 3y ago
Are you tying to make 0racle the new Micro$oft/M$? Whats the zero supposed to represent?
- loph 3y ago
  My contempt is so great I will not even type their name.
ftaghn 3y ago
As much as people may hate oracle, they employ significant contributors to the Linux kernel. https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/ Many in very important subsystems. The XFS maintainer (who just recently stepped down from this role) and contributor Darrick Wong works for Oracle. Meanwhile, btrfs is the creation of Chris Mason, who worked there until 2012. Modern filesystems on linux owe a decent debt to Oracle. Good luck running an Oracle-free linux. I often find it interesting when people imply the company is freeloading for having chosen the path of making an RHEL clone. They cloned RHEL because an unhealthy, dependent ecosystem was built around the one, singular linux distribution, not because they are unwilling to fund work. Giving some serious competition to Red Hat can only be a good thing.

pygar 3y ago

Probably a dumb question, as I'm not really on the enterprise side of Linux but: Isn't Canonical in the same business as Red Hat? Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"? Come to think of it, why is SUSE considered as a serious replacement for RHEL and not Ubuntu?

creatonez 3y ago
> Come to think of it, why is SUSE considered as a serious replacement for RHEL and not Ubuntu? SLES and RHEL are somewhat similar, in that they both use the RPM package format, and they both have a 10 year support lifecycle. They are not entirely compatible though. They also make management software that is supposed to be as interoperable as possible with competitor distributions. Anyways, last month SUSE announced they would be making an actual RHEL fork, so that's the real reason they are joining this new partnership -- it's not related to SLES, but a new distro they are making. As for Ubuntu -- it is often touted as an alternative to RHEL. However, people don't like the weird ways in which Ubuntu diverges from the rest of the Linux community (Snap, LXD, ufw, etc.), so some attention is diverted towards Debian and RHEL, which are more focused on packaging software that is already proven. Red Hat does their innovation in Fedora, waits a few years to see if it catches on, then implements it in RHEL. This tends to have a greater degree of success than pushing it suddenly on users like Ubuntu does.
dralley 3y ago
>Why doesn't Canonical seem to care about alleged "freeloaders"? I don't think there are any corporate entities reselling a rebuilt Ubuntu
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Are there any reselling a rebuilt RHEL?
  - rodgerd 3y ago
    Oracle have a sales pitch - I've been on the end of Oracle's - that is "we'll sell it for less, we don't care, name a price we just want to hurt Red Hat." OEL is just rebuilt RHEL.

DarkmSparks 3y ago

I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And tbh, these days, with whatever bad medicine google feels like foistering on us this week, Oracle are truly beginning to look more and more like the "good guys". As much as any large evilcorp can be the good guys anyway.

pelasaco 3y ago

As openSUSE user, the only answers that I care from SUSE are: - Are you going to kill Leap and Tumbleweed? - Are you going to handle the "community" as you do with the openSUSE community?

stockerta 3y ago
I loved SUSE for a long time, but their future plans for Leap had me looking elsewhere. They want to make the next Leap microOS bases, so a transactional immutable base. No thanks I don't need that. Moreover they want to kill yast for some web based stuff with way less feature.
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  That's news to me. Source? MicroOS is and will be its own cool thing AFAIK. I'm guessing they will provide a MicroOS based on Leap in the future.

jasoneckert 3y ago

I remember when Sun Microsystems and AT&T teamed up in the late 1980s and Sun announced the next version of their OS would be based on SysV UNIX instead of BSD UNIX. Since Sun was this massive force in the UNIX market back then, other UNIX vendors formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF) in protest. In many ways, Red Hat and IBM are the modern Sun Microsystems and AT&T, so it's not surprising that their competitors are essentially doing the same thing.

the_why_of_y 3y ago
> their competitors are essentially doing the same thing. OSF was developing an operating system[1] based on Mach, a file system from IBM, and BSD's IP stack, that intentionally had very little in common with AT&T UNIX. OpenELA is trying to create a carbon copy of their competitor's product, guided by the slogan "bug-for-bug compatible". These reactions couldn't be further apart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSF/1

lproven 3y ago

Also on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37079769 (ZDnet story, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37078603 (Phoronix story; no comments on HN) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37085519 (ZDNet again, no comments)