this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
It seems like you don't understand the actual motivations of the parties involved here.
Oracle's goal with Oracle Linux is to undermine Red Hat profits to prevent Red Hat from competing with them on acquisitions. They also have a secondary goal of being able to offer their customers a "full stack" deployment (operating system plus application) of their core business products like Oracle Database.
SUSE's goal is to attract new customers with a RHEL clone offering (tied in with their SUSE Manager product), which gives them a sales funnel to pitch their core business of SLES for those customers' new deployments. They first did this with their "Expanded Support" offering, which was clone-style updates for existing RHEL and CentOS installs. They were working on converting this into a full distro offering named "Liberty Linux", but abandoned the idea last minute. Instead they rebranded "Expanded Support" as "Liberty Linux", causing much confusion for due to previous leaks about the full distro by the same name.
Kurtzer/CIQ/Rocky's goal is selling a RHEL clone as a core business offering, at a price that undercuts Red Hat's pricing. This is only financially viable because they're not doing 99% of the engineering work to build the operating system.
The parties involved have very different goals, but they're aligned enough to partner up until one of them decides to screw the others over (see "United Linux").
Don't be fooled by them using the word "community" eleven times in the announcement. They're doing this for their own business reasons, as detailed above. That's why OpenELA is a trade association.
The entire point is to protect the participants' commercial interests.
You must not talk to many enterprises. Many of them are looking for enterprise-level support of RHEL clones to cut costs. All the ones that I've directly heard about making a switch eventually switched back to Red Hat after realizing that the third party support was insufficient for their needs. These third parties can't fix bugs or add features to a clone of another distro they do not control.
The F in FOSS stands for free as in libre, not free as in gratis. If you think that the point of FOSS is getting things for free (gratis), then I'm afraid you're the one with things going 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.