What’s the point of AlmaLinux if not for 1:1 RHEL compatibility? Might as well use CoreOS Stream cause the compatibility is good enough. Time to switch to Rocky Linux I guess.
Whole situation is ridiculous. People can’t expect enterprise features and support infrastructure for free. But enterprises need to offer more price tiers.
I always thought the Red Hat business model was based around service and support with the OS being a secondary product which is why the free forks existed. When did the OS become the product?
When did the OS become the product?
When other companies made a business out of building a clone distro from the source RPMs with trademarks removed.and selling support contracts for it. Oracle being the absolute worst about it. Fuck Oracle.
When other companies made a business out of building a clone distro from the source
This has a name… someone help… tip of my tongue… aaaaah… FREE SOFTWARE?
Did Red Hat invent linux? Did Red Hat write bash?
No, but Red Hat created the following major projects:
- Wayland
- PipeWire
- PulseAudio
- systemd
- FreeIPA
- Keycloak
- OpenStack
- NetworkManager
- Ceph
They’re also major contributors of the following projects:
- Xorg
- GNOME
- LibreOffice
- radeon
- Linux kernel
If you use Linux, you directly use or benefit from Red Hat contributions. As simple as that.
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This is an ethical problem. You can rebrand RHEL as Oracle Linux, copy Red Hat’s business model, and dump the work on Red Hat, but should you do that? Nobody at Oracle stopped to think about that question. According to the software license, sure. But is it ethical to exploit the good will of foss to these extremes? I would personally say no, especially considering Red Hat reinvests money into foss. Money now in the pockets of Oracle.
Imagine you develop a foss and license the software under MIT like everybody else does. Now a company roams around and makes your foss a core part of their business after a massive success. Perhaps they’re the next FAANG company, who knows. You generated billions of dollars in revenue for that company, and never saw any of that. You regret your careless licensing decision, yeah. But at the end of the day, you will feel exploited.
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People can’t expect enterprise features […] for free
Hmm? Does Red Hat have *anything* you couldn’t install in *any* linux distro?
support infrastructure for free
Alma sells support IIRC don’t they? Or are you saying we need to fire all Windows IT specialists that are not Microsoft employees?
Does Red Hat have anything you couldn’t install in any linux distro?
Can you install Satellite servers on your fleet of Ubuntu machines? OpenShift isn’t free. I don’t think there’s anything that RHEL does that any other enterprise vendor can’t do. And I don’t support Red Hat (IBM) closing access to the source RPMs. But it costs money for vendors to develop their enterprise management platforms, the storage and bandwidth for geo-cached mirrors of updates, and all that. And if you’re in an organization with a fleet of thousands of installations you need enterprise management platform.
Alma sells support IIRC don’t they?
Exactly. It costs Alma money to have the resources to do that. So customers will need to pay the support costs to keep Alma viable. Just like with RedHat. But enterprises a freaking out about needing a new free enterprise distro, because RH is too expensive to license on thousands of machines. So RH should be finding more flexible price models, instead of trying to squeeze out competition.
Can you install Satellite servers on your fleet of
Use Rauncher from SUSE instead, they may be a corp but they’re committed to Free Software at the moment.
So RH should be finding more flexible price models
Care to check for how many BILLIONS Red Hat was sold for? It is more than profitable enough, capitalism propaganda won’t fly this time around.
Use Rauncher from SUSE instead, they may be a corp but they’re committed to Free Software at the moment.
The free stuff is subsidized by enterprise subscriptions (and YaST sucks). That’s all I’m saying. Alma has a free option and paid subscription. So does Rocky. So does Ubuntu. So does Suse. RedHat has free stuff too. (CentOS Stream, Fedora, and free RHEL developer license, and ubi). If you want the enterprise features of RedHat, pay the enterprise price. And if you don’t want to (I sure don’t), then use something else, because like you said we have choices.
capitalism propaganda won’t fly this time around
You’re way off the mark here. I haven’t used RH in like 20 years, since they first introduced RHEL and killed its predecessor because screw that greedy shit. But I also haven’t been trying to use 1:1 rebuilds of RHEL. Employers have made us use CentOS to because customers use RedHat but no we won’t pay for RedHat but also no we can’t use CentOS because no enterprise management to push security updates without the application updates but also no we won’t pay for RedHat. It’s stupid. Either pay for RedHat because you need it, or shut up and move onto something that isn’t RedHat.
