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RedHat's going to have a tough time
(www.oracle.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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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.