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Rocky Linux, Reflections on Three Years of Growth
- repelsteeltje 3y agoYet another Rocky post that craftfully manages not to mention Red Hat or RHEL by name. [added] And CentOS, but not CentOS Stream.
- DarkmSparks 3y agoProbably following my grans advice. If you cant say anything nice dont say anything at all.
- bayindirh 3y agoWhat should have they done? Thank them and IBM for setting the landscape ablaze, and dropping a couple of napalms on top by stopping white-box SRPM distributions?
- freedomben 3y agoAh yes, the Rocky Linux attitude in action. Red hat has done and continues to do absolutely nothing deserving of thanks. Not for their work on fedora, not centos stream, not the myriad of projects that they maintain, absolutely nothing.
- nuker 3y agoBut RHEL is under GPL licence, right? So what Rocky does is covered by GPL, thanks aside. No thanks expected when it is a war :)
- freedomben 3y agoNo, RHEL is not under GPL. Only about 1/3 of it is.
- DarkmSparks 3y agoGPL applies to the distribution as a whole, so even if parts are say MIT licenced at source they still need to distribute it under GPL.
- bayindirh 3y agoWhat they have done made great waves in scientific research communities. They had an unwritten agreement starting with ScientificLinux and CentOS took its place, which allowed tons of places from CERN to universities worldwide to use a standard base for software development. Now this base is gone, and we're still trying to find our new base. This is highly damaging. I'm not keeping sides (Rocky vs. Alma, etc.), but it was a rugpull for us, worldwide.
- freedomben 3y agoFully agree, the rug pull sucked and they should not have done that
- bayindirh 3y agoI have no hard feelings with RedHat or IBM at the end of the day, but being labeled as a freeloader just because we can handle our problems ourselves without a license is a bit insulting to be honest. I know it's said that "freeloader" is a term used for companies abusing their license terms or using loopholes by buying 10 licenses and using the KB with 10K CentOS nodes, but it didn't help at the end. So, RedHat/IBM handled this very badly and roughly. Their perception slipped from "One of the oldest distributions we respect as a community" to "Another tech company which wants money" very fast and very abruptly. This is sad.
- freedomben 3y agoI think it's important to point out that the "freeloader" comment was not something that Red Hat or IBM said. It's something that one or two people said internally or on mailing, as part of a larger conversation where the context isn't that clean. Muy memory is hazy but I dont' think they actually used the word "freeloader" specifically, I think that was a paraphrase in a news article or something. I'll see if I can find a link. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36481006
- bayindirh 3y ago
- bclemens 3y agoWe thank our upstream often, in person, in social media, etc. We sponsor the Fedora Flock conference, the only opportunity to fiscally support Fedora, and will continue to do so. Same with the CentOS Connect conference. Those checks get written directly to Red Hat, by the way. Given you work for Red Hat, we can even say we've paid you a little! :)
- freedomben 3y agoThank you for sharing that, that is great to hear! (Small note, I left red hat several years ago so no longer work there)
- nhanlon 3y agoWe do love collaborating with our upstreams--I myself recruit folks into Fedora and CentOS whenever I can, in addition to Rocky. It's more than words and sponsorship--I really do mean it when I say I want to empower the Enterprise Linux community, and I'm thrilled that Rocky is at a point where we're able to do so.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoFedora, perhaps, but any goodwill they might have gotten from releasing Stream was burned when they killed CentOS. You don't get thanks for making something available when it's worse than the thing it replaced.
- bclemens 3y agoProjects have always done this, as Red Hat has always been rather litigious and it's unwise to give them any unnecessary ground for legal complaints. The common euphemism has been "Prominent North American Enterprise Linux Vendor" since the early days of CentOS. Back in 2007, CentOS's self-description was "CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendor's redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free".
- chasil 3y agoInterestingly, Oracle does not remove the /etc/redhat-release file. That would be an interesting fight.
- nazunalika 3y agoThere's actually a (very silly) reason for not removing /etc/redhat-release. There's many applications out there that rely on that file's existence, even if it's just a symlink to the proper file. Some apps use this as a way to figure out "what kind of system" it is (e.g. is it a red hat like system?) or as a way to figure out what the system is and version it is running. It's a bit annoying, as sometimes these apps either read it or they don't, so it's inconsistent. It gets even more weird when you consider /etc/os-release has better information (in my opinion) then the {redhat,system}-release file would ever provide. There's also the random situations where if redhat-release doesn't exist, an app may look for system-release and do some sort of parsing to figure it out (again, ignoring os-release) and may get it wrong. That's part of why you'll find Oracle Linux, CentOS Stream, Fedora Linux, and even us with /etc/redhat-release existing as a symlink to our own. I find it to be the odd bandaid to something that shouldn't be a problem, but sometimes life just isn't straightforward.
- bclemens 3y agoRocky Linux has /etc/redhat-release as well. Reason being that some software checks that file for version / compatibility information, and we want to avoid breaking it. (They should be checking /etc/os-release, but it is what it is.)
- nuker 3y agoMy default Linux for stuff. Just installed it as a VM on my Proxmox box for an SFTPgo instance. I think it is the best choice today for RPM based distro.
- opentokix 3y agoJust give up on that RedHat trash
- bayindirh 3y agoDepends on what you are, and what you do. If you don't have the expertise, and you run non-standard hardware (IB cards, GPU farms, or semi-complex storage to begin with), having a RH subscription is a plus IMHO. If you believe that you can handle all of that yourself (and you can do if you're willing to do), go with one of the free alternatives.
- tutfbhuf 3y agoI don't know. All that I read from them over and over again is that they celebrate themselves and that they made the right decisions. What I really would like to read are more detailed writings about their challenges, especially legal concerns.
- bayindirh 3y agoAFAIK, they don't detail these for a reason.
- bclemens 3y agoWe aim to be as transparent as possible. The only information that we don't share publicly is the obvious stuff (PII, sensitive infrastructure information, etc). The information regarding source access / challenges / etc is available at https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/ https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/.
- bclemens 3y agoWe have a whole blog post about exactly that, here: https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/ https://rockylinux.org/news/keeping-open-source-open/
- tutfbhuf 3y agoI had already read that when it was published, and I think it's very vague. > Fortunately, there are alternative methods available to obtain source code, and we would like to highlight two examples Okay, you list two options for obtaining the source of any RHEL binaries, but which one of these do you currently use? Or can't you say anything about it due to legal reasons? > These methods are possible because of the power of GPL. No one can prevent redistribution of GPL software. Not every RHEL binary is GPL-licensed, though. How do you plan to obtain the source for non-GPL-licensed binaries, where there might be no legal guarantee to obtain the source?
- 3y ago
- mihalycsaba 3y agoWhat's the difference between Rocky and AlmaLinux? Why would one choose one over the other?
- bayindirh 3y agoRocky mirrors RHEL exactly, aiming to be a bug for bug compatible release with RHEL itself. Alma Linux decided to mirror CentOS stream, being an independent RHEL clone, only with ABI compatibility guarantee [0]. They are taking slightly different routes as alternatives, Rocky taking a harder approach, if you pardon the pun. [0]: https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/ https://almalinux.org/blog/future-of-almalinux/
- jaboutboul 3y agoWouldn’t rebuilding from the RHEL sources be the easier approach? Also Alma doesn’t mirror Stream, they pull sources from several unencumbered places including stream.
- kijin 3y agoThe RHEL sources aren't freely available. They are only provided to RHEL customers. Red Hat strongly discourages said customers from leaking the sources to Rocky, so Rocky won't say anything that might reveal where they got the sources. [1] The GPL only requires that you provide sources to those to whom you distribute binaries, not to the general public. [1] Red Hat can probably figure it out anyway. For example, they could slightly alter the sources and/or assets provided to each customer in a way that doesn't affect the functionality, and see which version turns up in Rocky's repository. But the leaky customer might too big for Red Hat to punish. Government maybe.
- nuker 3y ago> The GPL only requires that you provide sources to those to whom you distribute binaries, not to the general public. Interesting. I looked at Wikipedia GPL page and saw this: "The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses or copyleft that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software.[7] " So any user of GPL covered software can share it with anyone. Right? Can any RHEL user share sources to Rocky? And to public?
- gtirloni 3y agoI can't be see parallels with "Don't just build a wrapper around OpenAI's API".
- mvavassori 3y agoTBF if I were to start a company today i would never choose a RHEL-based distro over a Debian-based one. As a matter of fact almost all startups are already on Ubuntu... To my perspective playing corporate games with the open source community have hurt the public image of "stability" of RHEL-based distros. (Obviously Rocky and Alma have no fault on this)
- nuker 3y ago> As a matter of fact almost all startups are already on Ubuntu... To my perspective playing corporate games with the open source community ... "Canonical Ltd.[4] is a UK-based privately held computer software company founded and funded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth" [0] Lol, Canonical is as corporate as they go. I think using Ubuntu is a dumb choice. Canonical is unpredictable. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)
- cpach 3y agoYeah, IMHO Debian feels much more dependable.
- bclemens 3y agoHappily surprised to see this hit the front page! If anyone is interested, I keep track of some statistics regarding Rocky Linux usage at https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com/auto.html https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com/auto.html Note that those statistics are only really useful for determining relative usage of Enterprise Linux distros as it's derived from EPEL logs. I haven't gotten around to attempting to derive statistics from the Rocky Linux logs because it's an intimidating amount of data. (It's supposed to be automatic, but it seems the GitHub CI is having an issue with one of the dependencies for the past week. Guess now's a good time to fix it, and maybe make the page look more aesthetically pleasing...)
- nuker 3y agoOfftopic. I watched this post rankings [0] and saw a huge drop from 6 to 75, a minute ago. Damn algorithms, lol [0] https://hnrankings.info/39286209/ https://hnrankings.info/39286209/