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Openela releases Red Hat source code on GitHub
- chasil 3y agoI wonder if this consortium will end up defining "enterprise" Linux in the same way that POSIX forcibly seized the standards for UNIX from the control of AT&T and Sun. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
- mbakke 3y agoThe only "enterprise" feature of RHEL is Red Hat support. There is nothing to standardise. If anything we need more commercially backed distributions to tear down the monoculture.
- chasil 3y agoRhel does things to their distribution that customers do not want. This is well-known. Two shining examples are the removal of older SAS controllers in the kernels of newer versions, and the fate of btrfs. OpenELA could easily grow in influence to a point where rhel will lose customers if they try it again. It will be interesting if such decisions push effective control of rhel to OpenELA. It could easily happen.
- nolist_policy 3y agoRedhat doesn't ship btrfs because they don't have any engineers working on it and thus can't provide support for it. Anything that ships in RHEL is comes with a strong support guarantee that they just couldn't hold up for btrfs. The SAS controllers may be a similar thing, maybe they don't have the hardware anymore to regression test against.
- chasil 3y agoAmazing how well btrfs works in Fedora. The first thing to do with a rhel install to restore complete functionality is to remove the stock kernel. With extreme prejudice.
- FireBeyond 3y agoWhat support "guarantees" does Fedora come with? The two are not contradictory. Fedora's btrfs functionality can absolutely be exceptional - nothing about that means that Red Hat has engineers working on or able to effectively support it. Disclaimer: I am an ex-Red Hat employee, though I was nowhere near RHEL.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- chasil 3y agoIf there is no value in the technology within it, then why grasp it? Let it go, and cut the Fedora/rhel tie. Conversely, there is no value in the limitations imposed upon rhel. OpenELA gives us a voice in letting them go.
- em-bee 3y agorather they don't have any customers demanding it. if they had, hiring engineers to support that should not be the problem. incidentally, i never had a chance to figure out what the big deal was with the centos stream change, because i was already forced to switch to debian because btrfs was removed from the centos kernel.
- chasil 3y ago> i was already forced to switch to debian because btrfs was removed from the centos kernel. Funny!
- p_l 3y agoCentOS being in lock-step with RHEL minus support also included certain certifications that applied to RHEL also applied to CentOS, most importantly if you were in the business of selling to US government or related customer.
- ungamedplayer 3y agoBtrfs was tech preview. There is no support or guarantee that tech previews remain in a release.
- chasil 3y agoAnd there is no guarantee that we will not use the UEK, because the feature is compelling.
- ungamedplayer 3y agoAnd you have that right. If uek meets your needs of support and gives you what you need and rhel does not you absolutely should use it.
- spandextwins 3y agoIt's enterprise in that you pay for it, but their support sucks. We had lots of open tickets they never solved. Total waste of money. Instead of fixing the problems they went back and forth with us asking for more log files until they just closed out the ticket because of lack of activity. It was their lack of activity. At least Canonical/Ubuntu enterprise support stumbles into a solution and helps out.
- chasil 3y agoOracle's UEKR4 stopped updating Intel microcode for several months (in the middle of the spectre/meltdown hysteria). After a community forum post, they demanded an open SR so I had the pleasure of explaining all of this again. Even with a support contract, sometimes they are amazingly obtuse. We dumped support. We are paying enough for the database as it is.
- averageRoyalty 3y agoReally? It's been a while, but 5 years ago I worked for a company with a Red Hat support contract, and we found them incredibly helpful. Everyone we spoke to had deep Linux knowledge, and their team solved issues and gave us real worldn advice much faster and better than any vendor. I'd be sad if that's no longer true.
- spandextwins 3y agoI remember thinking why don't they just do a WebEx with us to see what's going on. Nope, never. They just wanted us to ship logs to them and try random crap until they closed the ticket. Total waste of time and money.
- ungamedplayer 3y agoBecause there is legal complications in giving someone remote admin.
- spandextwins 3y ago
- bastard_op 3y agoThis is likely just defining a baseline to build on or off of. Ideally off.
- amelius 3y agoI'm an avid Linux user, but never heard of OpenELA before.
- Shadowmist 3y agoIt’s less than 3 months old. https://openela.org/news/hello_world/ https://openela.org/news/hello_world/
- klooney 3y agoIt's really only relevant if you have Big Business Problems and also don't want to pay Red Hat to solve them.
- fffrantz 3y agoI wonder what it means for SuSE Enterprise Linux in the long run. Are they going to migrate SLE to be bug-for-bug RHEL compatible but keep their own tools on top? What about OpenSUSE? I'm an avid SLE/OpenSUSE user and it was chosen specifically because it's not an RHEL clone.
- chasil 3y agoSuSE uses btrfs for the root filesystem, and although this can be quite dangerous if it fills up, it does allow much greater flexibility in rolling back the OS to a working state. It would be interesting if this capability returned to OpenELA. It could be done with rhel7 (and clones). There are likely some users who consider this a must-have.
- nolist_policy 3y agoI can guarantee you that SuSE will only ever support btrfs with their own kernel. There are a ton of fixes backported in theirs. At which point you are running SLES anyway.
- chasil 3y agoOracle's UEK also has btrfs support, and I use it. It is designed to be installed over rhel. A further collaboration on an OpenELA btrfs-enabled kernel incorporating both SuSE and Oracle requirements will easily supplant stock rhel. For one thing, the UEK returns support for a large array of hardware that has been removed from stock. This list is very large.
- arianvanp 3y agoit's 3000 repositories - one per package- all containing just a spec file and some patches. How is this remotely maintainable? Is this also how redhat upstream works? (I'm coming from nixpkgs where everything is in one mono-repo; which is great for cross-cutting concerns) How do you make cross-operating system changes? Or are they just planning to ship Redhat verbatim and never make their own stuff?
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoAt least in Fedora it’s exactly like that: many repos, one per source package. Guess CentOS/RHEL are doing it in the same fashion. Fedora has had 39 versions so far, it’s alive and kicking, so my guess is it’s maintainable enough.
- nolist_policy 3y agoI'd say the majority of distributions work this way. At least Debian[1], Fedora/CentOS/RHEL[2], SUSE[3], Arch[4], ... [1] https://salsa.debian.org/public https://salsa.debian.org/public [2] https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms [3] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Factory https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Factory [4] https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages
- eraser215 3y ago"Or are they just planning to ship Redhat verbatim and never make their own stuff?" That is their stated mission.
- spandextwins 3y agoAnybody can do that with open source as long as they make the source code available. That shouldn't surprise anyone. Source code is free and open.
- wmf 3y agoDid you miss the discussion about RHEL source code being kind of hidden?
- spandextwins 3y agoGreat! Redhat and IBM can kiss my a*
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoBut you want their sources. Which is it?
- spandextwins 3y agoIt's open source. That's the deal.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoThis confuses me. I feel like we have a good thing going here between Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL. If they succeed and kill RHEL profitability are we really better off?
- spandextwins 3y agoYes, because everyone else figured it out except Red Hat (IBM)
- oneplane 3y agoBut that's the thing, there is no good thing going. CentOS used to be a community rebuild of RHEL, and you could then use that if you didn't want support from Red Hat. But that is no longer the case since Red Hat killed that. CentOS is now more like a beta version of RHEL and not a binary compatible build. At the same time, patches are made for RHEL that are kept secret and not published for CentOS. And all of this is extra bad since those masses of CentOS installs exist because people don't really want to deal with Red Hat, but some other vendor just happened to not test their application on another distro, and corporate policies then don't allow you to run it on a non-binary-compatible system. If there would be different packages, i.e. just an OCI image or a single statically linked program, or perhaps a vended virtual machine image, none of this OS vendor BS would exist. You would be able to run wherever you want to run, on whatever you want to run it. And some people and companies would still choose Red Hat, but anyone who has used anything else would probably not.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago> there is no good thing going. Strong disagree. I benefit greatly from Fedora and CentOS Stream.
- oneplane 3y agoStrong disagree. Fedora and CentOS Stream (well, C8 Stream is dead, but the other stream-position I suppose) add no value to me whatsoever and working with it is a net negative. The only reason we're still touching it is because vendors like Manhattan (logistics and warehousing) can't seem to get their head out of their ass.
- voidr 3y agoI reckon most people complaining about RHEL: - never really needed to use an enterprise OS, they could have just used any other *nix. - don't understand that what Red Hat is doing is perfectly in line with not only Open Source but also Free Software If you hate Red Hat or IBM, just don't use it and move on, use a community driven OS which is a lot easier and is probably a lot more flexible, you are not going to convince any enterprise to drop their RHEL subscriptions. As many have pointed out: the support is RHEL, not the code, the code without Red Hat support and contracts is useless.