This seems like a golden opportunity for distros like Suse and Ubuntu, who offer enterprise support for their free product, to poach some RHEL customers.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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I wish Ol' Debian would get the love it deserves, especially for enterprise where their "stability over the latest flashiest software" philosophy should really shine. People on the desktop side criticizing how slowly Debian packages update is generally responded with "well it's a server OS first and foremost, the Debian derivatives are more suited for desktop," so why does no one use Debian for servers? And as far as I know Debian has always prioritized stability and reliability above anything else, and have never pulled any sort of corporate antics even close to what Canonical and Red Hat have pulled.
I'm using it. Almost 200 servers at work. No problems whatsoever. I almost smile reading news like this, because it shows me I did the right thing betting on debian
I hope you can correct me here, but I don't believe Debian offers any commercial support. That's what people are paying for. It is kind of amazing to be able to call a reliable OS vendor when your hardware vendor is blaming the OS and you need a third party to get involved.
@AgreeableLandscape we use it on all of our cloud servers. I don’t think we have any metal servers anymore.
Might even end up with Suse shops outside of Germany lol.
I literally just got Rocky installed on two servers. We were going to field test before migrating to a paid subscription. That sure as hell isn’t happening now. If IBM cannot help but to bite the hand that fed it, then I have little confidence they aren’t going to turn into another Oracle.
If IBM cannot help but to bite the hand that fed it
Which hand was feeding them and how are they biting it?
Idc about IBM but the saying makes little sense to me here. It's not like Ubuntu annoying Debian which at one point was their upstream. They find upstream up to fedora and beyond.
If anything, Distros like Alma and Rocky bite the hand that feeds them by offering paid support contracts. Nothing is illegal about that. But I think the saying fits the reverse better.
The hand feeding them is the cross-pollination of community clones to paid subscriptions. RedHat would have never grown as big as it has if it didn’t have the backing of people who learned how to use it, and enterprises who built things to run on it. We use Rocky because it allows us to rapidly test ideas without having to deal with licensing issues. When we are ready to deploy, we use RHEL so we can leverage the paid support. I myself only learned RedHat systems because CentOS was free and had a vibrant community. They have killed off CentOS and are now playing games with community distros, removing that onramp for learners and potential paying customers.
Moving distros is an issue primarily due to the differences between them for configuration and compliance, but it is a cost that comes once. If they continue to squeeze customers, those who can move will.
Ok I'll bite.
What's wrong with CentOS Stream specifically when you're just talking about POC before buying RHEL?
It's literally RHEL in the form of the next/unreleased point release. If your configs/software breaks between RHEL 8.6->8.7 or 8.7->8.8... Then sure, CentOS Stream won't work for you.
If like MOST users of RHEL you build out a config on RHEL 7.x or RHEL 8.x and dnf update from there between the point releases: I don't see the difference.
Debian has always been Ubuntu's upstream and still is.
Interesting, I was under the impression that Ubuntu by now was a completely independent distribution and only relying on Debian for specific tools like apt.
But I've left the ecosystem about 15 years ago so my knowledge of the current state of things is limited to the occasional news.
You make a good point. I imagine RedHat is doing this less because of Rocky/Alma, and more so because of Oracle.
Oracle might be another one, though I guess that as weird as that sounds, at least they add value by providing their "unbreakable enterprise kernel".
I guess Oracle will be hit the least as they do have the manpower to make sure their distribution stays RHEL compatible, but at a higher cost.
Yeah, I have witnessed a lot of outrages in the linux community in my time, but I'm not sure what the big deal is with this one. Can you not still get a free rhel account and download the source code anyways?
What will they do with rhel dev accounts, if you have one they should give you the source also, due to the gpl license, or will they kill dev accounts.
Having watched Redhat shoot themselves in the foot for the last 2 years, that's not off the table.
Suse here I come!
Wil this also have impact on Oracle Linux?
Yes
Between this and the Fedora team wanting to force telemetry on users, I'm starting to shy away from Red Hat.
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