"Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered... Another method... is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata."
> We have not yet heard anything from Oracle, which hopefully implies that these changes are not a problem.
Giant corps move slowly, and companies like Oracle will require official communication only, which moves even slower. I think it's too early to read anything into it.
AlmaLinux should just start their own RHEL, with blackjack and hookers...
They have a company behind them, they have values, so why ride Red Hats coattails? Start your own distro.
They could even try and make it somewhat compatible with RHEL, in the sense that famous proprietary software like EMC and Dell stuff could run on it. A lot of times it's just a matter of having the right RPMs, environments and strings in all the right places to get them to run.
> Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license. But they don't actually want the code because as I've said over and over, its not about the code (Free as in freedom). The code is out there (as proven by the fact that none of these rebuilders stopped nor will they stop)
It's clear that all the misinformation about RHEL, misinterpretations of the GPL, et al. are not actually about those issues. There is a concerted effort to attack Red Hat.
Become familiar with the "Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation" [2] and you will see them everywhere.
> Ubuntu tried that, with AFAIK limited success. Yet another player would inevitably fizzle.
They also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping free install CDs to people all over the world and piggy-backing off of the Debian community's progress. All so they could (almost two decades later) put small dent into Red Hat's enterprise entrenchment.
You would need to offer a significantly better product than RHEL, if you hoped to unseat them.
AlmaLinux, thank you for taking the constructive/positive approach that you do. Red Hat is not our enemy, and although they've made decisions that are disappointing, I deeply appreciate that you aren't antagonistic toward them, and in fact add value to them. This is why I chose and use AlmaLinux for many things. The contrast between you and the others is big, and I'm very grateful that you are what you are. And thank you for improving this ecosystem!
> We have also enriched the upstream community. AlmaLinux community members have submitted PRs to projects such as RPM, AWX, and VirtualBox. Our community has sent over 50 PRs to GlusterFS and also extended openQA. A Red Hat employee even thanked us for enabling Fedora tests to run on ELN and RHEL. An AlmaLinux contributor (who was formerly an ArchLinux user) was so fired up by our community that he now maintains over 600 Fedora and Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) packages, including some widely-used ones like certbot, brotli, iperf3, imapsync, and countless Python libraries, many of them as the primary contributor maintaining them for the greater Fedora and Enterprise Linux ecosystem. EPEL is tremendously important to both Red Hat and RHEL users.
I wasn't aware of this. So it's looks like RH/IBM argument that they don't contribute back is bullsh*t.
So it doesn't count when AlmaLinux does contribute upstream, but somehow counts when RH contributes and has this "100% upstream policy"? Is this RH's argument?
This situation is somewhat confusing, as someone who doesn't have a RedHat subscription. Rocky and Alma claim that RH's new policy is a hindrance to the re-distribution of RH's code, while RH's staff claims that "Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license".
Some genuine questions:
1. If Bob doesn't currently have a RedHat subscription, does he have a way to obtain RHEL source code, legally, continuously, without the help of a current subscriber, and for free?
2. If Bob has a RedHat subscription, and has access to RHEL source code through the customer portal, is he free to continuously re-publish the source code else where? (in other words, facing no legal threat, and won't be cut off the subscription)
3. RH's staff mentioned "GPL'ed code", so it sort of implies the possibility that some other code are not GPL'ed, and might be subject to less favorable terms regarding redistribution. So, are all the code authored by RH and re-distributed by Rocky/Alma licensed with GPL? Or in other words, are there code whose re-distributability changes with the new policy of RedHat?
I evaluted SUSE quite a bit some years ago, and I ran into a handful of problems that were (at the time at least) showstoppers. The biggest one was that not all packages could be reliably installed from the command line. There was a GUI package manager application that used a different system than the command line, which for me was super confusing but also not viable on headless systems (which is most of them). There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs.
This was all at least 5 years ago, maybe 10, so take with a grain of salt.
I'm sure if I really learned the system it would be fine, but I've got two decades of the Red Hat Way engrained in me. It would be hard to change.
>The biggest one was that not all packages could be reliably installed from the command line. There was a GUI package manager application that used a different system than the command line
This doesn't make any sense. I've been using OpenSUSE for a decade and there's no package that can be installed via Yast (the GUI) but not via zypper (the CLI).
>There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs.
Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format.
People with tight dependency with RHEL usually have a hard time migrating to SuSE Linux, and vice versa. For example, SuSE Linux is popular among meteorologists running their own weather models. A few years ago, I was trying to run a popular open source weather model on CentOS and failed to do so after a few days of full time tinkering with the source. Gave up and installed OpenSuSE and I got it up and running in a couple hours.
Place I used to work at in Australia 15+ years ago used SUSE. Novell owned it and they positioned it as their replacement for NetWare, and a lot of ex-NetWare sites ending up running it (at least for a while). But even that place, we had more Oracle Linux than SUSE. Everything that ran on Solaris got migrated to Oracle Linux (e.g. Oracle RDBMS); everything that ran on NetWare (GroupWise, eDirectory) got migrated to OES (SUSE plus extra ex-NetWare bits). But then I think most of the SUSE went away when GroupWise/eDir were replaced by Exchange/AD on Windows. Whereas they are probably still using Oracle Linux today. Actually, originally we were going to use RHEL, but found Red Hat’s sales team too difficult to deal with, whereas we already were an Oracle customer.
EPEL Fedora maintainers should just stop updating their packages, if RHEL uses Fedora packages, just stop updating them or make them available explicitly for Red Hat through closed sources that you need to pay for. Fight fire with fire.
I have little faith that RHEL will change, especially after that blog post from the vice-president calling AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux "freeloaders" and that they bring no value to RHEL. They are the reason RHEL is as big as it is today and they're actively fighting against what made them big.
Red Hat never called anyone "freeloaders" in any of their blog posts.
Also, there is nothing wrong with making people pay for free software. That is explicitly in the philosophy of free software and the GNU Project.
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
Lol, "new"... Iirc, KDE almost self-destroyed by chasing the dream of making tablets; Nokia took half a decade to build a working linux-based OS (and then binned it); same for Intel...
Consumer hardware is hard to pull off, to start with. Then there are tons of components requiring closed-source drivers that don't play well with Linux; you can spend a lot of money to rewrite them, or you can build piles of weak hacks that will crash your OS every few hours. You need deep pockets to get OEMs to pay attention to your needs, rather than the needs of giant manufacturers hungry for their production lines. Managing prices on small runs is extremely hard, so your 1.0 is going to be prohibitively expensive, which means it won't sell, which means you won't have the money to fix all the problems
I think the Framework laptop is pretty much as close to a "Linux" laptop as we're gonna get, at least for the foreseeable future. Shipping computers without Windows licences by default and supporting hackers with plenty of documentation on repairing the hardware and making custom modules seem to be pretty in line with the open source mentality.
Something like 90% of webservers are running Linux. Alma, RedHat, etc are primarily focused on enterprise servers, not consumer devices.
But since you are looking for consumer devices running Linux, I recommend you check out Android, which is running on nearly 3/4 of mobile devices globally.
This is unrelated, as Almalinux is largely a server distro.
But Linux has System76, Tuxedo and Slimbook, also Dell and Framework, though they aren't Linux first.
Readit News
Alma had previously stated that Oracle would be an upstream source.
"In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released."
https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
Rocky has said that they have found "a path forward," but have not divulged it.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripp...
IBM can go after then in court if they want but they know that Oracle has pockets just as deep as IBM to fight them off..
I bet they will reach an agreement before this ever see a court room..
"Using the UBI image, it is easily possible to obtain Red Hat sources reliably and unencumbered... Another method... is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata."
Giant corps move slowly, and companies like Oracle will require official communication only, which moves even slower. I think it's too early to read anything into it.
They have a company behind them, they have values, so why ride Red Hats coattails? Start your own distro.
They could even try and make it somewhat compatible with RHEL, in the sense that famous proprietary software like EMC and Dell stuff could run on it. A lot of times it's just a matter of having the right RPMs, environments and strings in all the right places to get them to run.
> Anyone is allowed to create an account, get GPL'ed code and redistribute that code as much as they want according to the license. But they don't actually want the code because as I've said over and over, its not about the code (Free as in freedom). The code is out there (as proven by the fact that none of these rebuilders stopped nor will they stop)
[1]: https://teddit.net/r/linux/comments/14l2t86/im_done_with_red...
It's clear that all the misinformation about RHEL, misinterpretations of the GPL, et al. are not actually about those issues. There is a concerted effort to attack Red Hat.
Become familiar with the "Twenty-Five Rules of Disinformation" [2] and you will see them everywhere.
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin....
https://blog.cloudlinux.com/cloudlinux-os-8-and-9-in-post-re...
Distros for a lot of corps are sticky. People just want their RPMs/scripts/etc to work, and not have to pay Red Hat.
Hopefully this changes more with time to a more best-man-wins system, as there are a lot of really good distros out there already.
They also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars shipping free install CDs to people all over the world and piggy-backing off of the Debian community's progress. All so they could (almost two decades later) put small dent into Red Hat's enterprise entrenchment.
You would need to offer a significantly better product than RHEL, if you hoped to unseat them.
I wasn't aware of this. So it's looks like RH/IBM argument that they don't contribute back is bullsh*t.
tl;dr: there are some contributions, mostly not to RHEL but to the surrounding ecosystem (including RHEL's upstream), so it apparently doesn't count.
Some genuine questions:
1. If Bob doesn't currently have a RedHat subscription, does he have a way to obtain RHEL source code, legally, continuously, without the help of a current subscriber, and for free?
2. If Bob has a RedHat subscription, and has access to RHEL source code through the customer portal, is he free to continuously re-publish the source code else where? (in other words, facing no legal threat, and won't be cut off the subscription)
3. RH's staff mentioned "GPL'ed code", so it sort of implies the possibility that some other code are not GPL'ed, and might be subject to less favorable terms regarding redistribution. So, are all the code authored by RH and re-distributed by Rocky/Alma licensed with GPL? Or in other words, are there code whose re-distributability changes with the new policy of RedHat?
This was all at least 5 years ago, maybe 10, so take with a grain of salt.
I'm sure if I really learned the system it would be fine, but I've got two decades of the Red Hat Way engrained in me. It would be hard to change.
This doesn't make any sense. I've been using OpenSUSE for a decade and there's no package that can be installed via Yast (the GUI) but not via zypper (the CLI).
>There were also something different about their RPMs, where even though it was RPM based you couldn't use centos/fedora RPMs.
Obviously. They're different distros with different package names and library paths. "RPM" is just a file format.
I have little faith that RHEL will change, especially after that blog post from the vice-president calling AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux "freeloaders" and that they bring no value to RHEL. They are the reason RHEL is as big as it is today and they're actively fighting against what made them big.
Also, there is nothing wrong with making people pay for free software. That is explicitly in the philosophy of free software and the GNU Project.
> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.
> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.
Read more: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
macOS has Macbooks. Windows has surface, Samsung.
Linux has ???
That's a new startup idea, right there.
Consumer hardware is hard to pull off, to start with. Then there are tons of components requiring closed-source drivers that don't play well with Linux; you can spend a lot of money to rewrite them, or you can build piles of weak hacks that will crash your OS every few hours. You need deep pockets to get OEMs to pay attention to your needs, rather than the needs of giant manufacturers hungry for their production lines. Managing prices on small runs is extremely hard, so your 1.0 is going to be prohibitively expensive, which means it won't sell, which means you won't have the money to fix all the problems
But since you are looking for consumer devices running Linux, I recommend you check out Android, which is running on nearly 3/4 of mobile devices globally.
Famously, the Raspberry Pi.
Dead Comment