AlmaLinux also reaffirmed their commitment to being fully open-source and good open-source citizens.
Thank you, AlmaLinux team. It is truly an unfortunate sight to see so many corpo-apologists in a Linux sub. You're doing a beautiful work.
If there’s anyone that hates what Red Hat has done here, it’s me, but what AlmaLinux is doing is exactly what Red Hat was aiming for according to their statement, which is that clones would use CentOS Stream as their upstream and develop and contribute their own patches instead of copying RHEL bug-for-bug. The other reason is of course to convert people that need that bug-for-bug clone to paying customers.
With SUSE having announced a RHEL compatible alternative, I’m hoping that some people/businesses will consider switching their environment over to them as a more OSS friendly competitor that also offers support. If that distribution gains some traction, I foresee that some of the clones might use that as their upstream and that OEMs will follow suit and test their drivers on those distributions. There are enough people/businesses that are reliant on a mixture of RHEL and Alma/Rocky and for those life got a bit harder because of RHEL’s actions.
With SUSE having announced a RHEL compatible alternative,
Bummer. I know there's a market for customers who want it, but I'd prefer to finally rip the bandaid off and just leave RHEL compatibility behind.
This seems like a wise move for the time being. I am an Alma fan and supporter so I get that the foundation is trying to do everything it can to stay relevant.
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.
Good for Alma, I say. Why base your business model on RedHat not finding a way to kill it? RedHat is a de facto enterprise standard in part because of the existence of free source-rebuild distributions allowing for small FOSS developers to ensure compatibility. They said so themselves, they want users to either switch to another distribution or pay for RedHat. So let's give them what they want and abandon RHEL compatibility.
Won't Rocky have the same issue as Alma? RedHat has made RHEL closed source, so how can they maintain compatibility?
I suspect Rocky and other source rebuilds just haven't made the announcement yet. Alma was merely the first to make an official statement.
Rocky has announced their plan to continue as a 1:1 source rebuild. They're looking at using sources from RedHat's Universal Base Image Docker images, and also using cloud instances with consumption based pricing. With the latter option you spin up an instance on AWS/Azure/DigitalOcean/etc and it has a license for that instance, so you get the sources for the package versions on that instance. But since the license was temporary, then there's nothing for RHEL to terminate when you redistribute the sources.
RedHat says they don't want clones of RHEL. I say give it to them, lets have a landscape where they're no longer the de facto standard because there are no other distributions targeting RHEL compatibility.
RedHat has made RHEL closed source,
You've said the words, corpo-apologists will start haunting you now, good luck fending them off.
Welp. In rocky we trust to keep it 1 to 1 I guess
They better be careful, Papa Red Hat is coming after them next. Expect legal issues to unfold in the upcoming months.
Yeah precidents are about to get set
I wonder then how PCI compliance will be effected. Given CVEs can be patched by Alma now, however they'll need to maintain their own list of CVE's to track/fix
You should be fine for PCI compliance as long as you are on a current release (Been there already, a few times). Also AlmaLinux already has an Announce mailing list (announce@lists.almalinux.org) where they release update notifications (including Security releases) just like CentOS did.
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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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