• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don’t need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business.

    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”).

    They’re trying to give the community back what was lost.

    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.

    A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests.

    The entire point is to protect the participants’ commercial interests.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.






  • Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

    This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.

    To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn’t undo everything else Red Hat does.




  • Workstations:

    I’ve been using Fedora since 2014, so coming up on a decade. Runner up would be Arch for about three years from 2011-2014. Before that it was a blur of distro hopping.

    Servers:

    Been using a combination of RHEL and CentOS since 2011, so about twelve years. And yes, I’m still using CentOS even though it’s no longer a rebuild of RHEL. I actually think it’s better now, because bugs can actually be fixed instead of being closed as “reproducible on RHEL”.












  • Howdy, I’m the maintainer of the gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell Fedora package, which is likely how you installed it on Fedora since it’s not available from extensions.gnome.org. I’m glad you’re finding it useful.

    The pop-shell upstream is still being maintained by System76 engineers. Development work has slowed down since they started working on COSMIC DE, but they’re still fixing bugs and reviewing/merging contributions. When COSMIC DE was announced I asked them how long they would keep maintaining their GNOME extensions, and they said at least until the end of life of the PopOS versions the extensions are shipped in. So pop-shell has still got some life left in it, even for a few years after COSMIC DE becomes their default in a new release.