this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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What I just read: "Companies coming together to develop a new better Enterprise Linux solution with standards, etc." which seems like a good thing.
What I also just read: "A bunch of companies that couldn't create or maintain a Linux distribution on their own are joining forces to attempt to create a clone of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux offering." which isn't a good thing.
Serious question: Why would I get support from any of these companies? Don't get me wrong, Oracle and Suse have very talented and valuable employees (I don't know enough about CIQ but I'm sure they have smart people over there too!) that contribute to open source communities. But the message I just read is "Our current offerings are all inferior to RHEL".
That is not a message to be celebrated.
Why is anyone celebrating this? If I were employed at any of these companies I would be worried about the future of my job. Am I missing something obvious?
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.
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.