this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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I think you're missing the point. Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don't need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business. I don't know why you think SUSE is unable to "create or maintain a Linux distribution," they're one of the oldest distros out there. SLES and SLED are extremely well regarded, and SUSE is doing further work/research into immutable server distros for the future. They certainly can "create a Linux distribution". Oracle has a mixed history but certainly anyone could view them as successful overall.
No, what they're actually doing is creating a clone for the downstream packagers so they aren't suddenly cutoff by Red Hat's (IBM's) decision. They're trying to give the community back what was lost. A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests. They're not really doing anything other than restoring things to the way they were. Anyone who was using a distro that was downstream of RHEL wasn't looking for enterprise-level support in the first place so I don't really understand your complaint there.
I mean, really, the whole Linux ethos is community. These two companies coming together to give back what the community lost, for free, is what FOSS is all about. Somehow I feel like that has gone right over your head.
What is your definition of FOSS?
This is an initiative to create a bug for bug copy of RHEL For the end users, the only value in that is getting something that normally costs money for free. Free as in beer, not as in freedom.
Why are these companies doing it?
Well, Oracle only has a “quite successful commercial offering” as you put it if they can copy Red Hat exactly. They have not created a distribution of their own. Their interests are commercial, not community.
SUSE does actually make an enterprise distribution of their own. It seems though that it is not commercially successful enough for it to be their only business. So they also resell support for Red Hat’s distribution. That is their Liberty Linux initiative. Except they cannot support “real” RHEL because only people subscribing to RHEL have that software. So, SUSE really sells support for RHEL clones. They cannot do that if the RHEL clones disappear. They need to create their own RHEL clone now so that they have something to support.
Where is the community people keep talking about? The distribution is not “community” created. They cannot even fix a bug in RHEL without destroying their value proposition. Is it the people that use the software? Again, by definition they cannot contribute. So this is a “community” that explicitly just wants something for free.
I think this is really smart of SUSE and I support them. This is all Red Hat really wanted in the end anyway. It is smart of SUSE to include Rocky and even Oracle in their foundation as it makes them the “official” source for unofficial RHEL. This is good for their support business. Oracle and Rocky just want to keep getting RHEL sources without doing all the work. So, win win all around.
So, this is a great move by the companies and good news for us freeloaders as well. Let’s just stop pretending this does anything to advance FOSS or “the community” though. Be serious.
I've heard plenty of stories of sysadmins whose managers would simply not be willing to pay for rhel, and the transition would be costly. So that's why many companies actually list Rocky as the distro that they would liks to see supported by the new Linux Sysadmin they're looking for. Of course, the job listinga are written by HR, so it's all just buzzwords, but it shows that there are companies out there that just will not pay for rhel, and as a sysadmin, you will be the one to blame if you have to do a transition to Debian, for example, for no reason (from management's POV). Or at least that's what I hear.
Your talking about "restoring back what was lost" seems to be missing one key point: why was it lost, and why is it good to restore it? It was lost because it meant a company, the company, the one who was investing the most in improving the ecosystem, found out that this model let other companies compete with them by offering support while freeloading on their efforts. That's stealing in my world. Stealing in a perfectly legal way. That was OK, but was not good. They found out that, with the Stream model (which, BTW, offers more support timeframe than what whatever its competitors did) let them keep having a free solution for some people that might need/want it, while still keeping some of their competitive advantage. And what's more, they even accepted happily Alma's decision to work with Stream as their upstream to build their own RHEL clone with the full 10 years of support and pushing for changes/patches that might be needed. Notice I'm not saying if it's OK to restore it. I'm not, because it's perfectly legal. But it's certainly not good. The RHEL ecosystem is in much better shape now, and what Alma did was fantastic and, IMO, the way to go.