I can say for certain that this started even before IBM took over Red Hat. All these decisions have been driven by Red Hat sales team in co-ordination with the upper management. They experimented with these ideas with the entrerprise edition of JBoss Application server (later called WildFly). There was a lot of internal friction when that happened and yet they moved ahead with similar decisions as what is repeated with RHEL today.
Why is SUSE so seldom talked about? I don't know much about the distro except it has been around a long time, has professional support, supposedly is popular in Europe, and isn't it an RPM distro?
Debian does not work as a replacement for RHEL for enterprises.. Only Ubuntu LTS is an option but it is not as good..
First because enterprises need a company behind offering support contract.
But more important, many enterprises are slow moving and unfortunately Debian lifecycle is not long enough for enterprises because of that..
I have at least one customer that migrated from RHEL 6 into newer versions last year, RHEL 6 was released on 2011, regular support ended on 2021 and extended support goes until next year. So it is currently still supported under their extended support.
The Debian version from 2011 was Debian 6 (Squeeze) that had an end of life in 2015, and long term support ended on 2016, it did not had extended LTS.
Just on the lifecycle of RHEL 6 Debian released versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 and with exception of the last two, 11 and 12, all other versions already reached end of life, additionally version 6 to 9 reached end of LTS, and version 7 reached end of ELTS, older versions did not had ELTS as far i could find.
Is is also worth noting that Debian LTS and ELTS are not handled by Debian security team, so anything after end of life would be a solid no from most enterprises.
Even Ubuntu is behind RedHat in this aspect, the oldest Ubuntu LTS release still supported by next year, when extended support for RHEL 6 will end, is Ubuntu 14.04 from 2014. Both Ubuntu 10.04 from 2010 and Ubuntu 12.04 from 2012, that is the last LTS release on or before 2011 and the following release, already reached end of life and support before RHEL 6 extended support ended.
Ah yes, you’re worried about open source so you should use Ubuntu, the distro that is pushing Snaps, the most open source unfriendly solution in probably the most open source part of the entire Linux ecosystem.
> It's not Red Hat's fault, I blame IBM for the company's recent Linux code licensing changes and all the misery it unleashed.
Even if we were to agree 100% that nobody at Red Hat wants to do this and it's all IBM's fault, surely we can fault Red Hat for selling to IBM in the first place? I mean, everyone and their dog predicted the decay of Red Hat once the acquisition was announced. Surely the fact that they still went through with it, and therefore these all-too-predictable consequences, is on Red Hat?
'Red Hat's open source rot' = they are no longer giving non-customers the RHEL sources for free, something that is completely within their right under the GPL, but it means I no longer benefit from those great free security and other patches republished by the rebuilders after stripping out the RHEL trademarks, so it's inconvenient for me.
RedHat has been trying to figure out how to both benefit from open source and also avoid helping others at the same time.. if you think of RedHat the OS as a combination of the linux kernel (worked on by many companies and individuals well beyond RedHat), tons of packages in userspace (of the millions of lines of code in these packages, probably a very very small fraction are from RedHat -- sure yes some important, some less important).
Examining the fact that RedHat in principle does some huge amount of testing of the packages and puts them all together -- lets think about that-- do they really? in many cases the upstream package maintainer(s) probably do most of that. So are they going to go build a ton of test vectors for each package and "test" them all .. I highly doubt that.. likely they have a set of tests that they do to try to hit a set of important things that "should work" and if a package happens to cause that to fail, then they roll it back. In the case that RH pushes a patch to the package maintainer -- does that mean they effectively "own" that software and people that want that updated version are trying to get stuff for "free"?
From the beginning people have questioned whether they should be able to hold back patches from other people -- in reality, they can try, but they also can't stop people from doing that same patch "somehow".. so effectively unless people can copyright a new patch to open source software and prevent others from doing that same patch, then they have no recourse.
Redhat should just lean really hard into the "support" side of things, and whatever margin exists with that, then fine. Sure, does it piss you off that other companies are making money off of your hard work, yes it does, but look at basically all of the other people who were ahead of you who you are also apparently ripping off RedHat..
Exactly, so: fuck them. Everyone is not only completely within their rights, but doing what they are supposed to do.
Red Hat is saying "we don't care about people who use a rebadged clone of our OS and pay us" (hard to find fault with that) and open-source users who don't pay for Red Hat are saying "fuck a Linux distro that hides source code" (ditto).
And we'll see who was right, in the sense of actually making a good decision, within a year or two. It might even be "both". (Although I personally suspect that Red Hat effectively removing RHEL (including its not-directly-money-making clones) from contention as a mainstream OS will have worse long-term effects on Red Hat than it will for anybody else... but we'll see.)
Autor, pleas... There is no RedHat anymore. There is only blob with tentacles not feeded and cut off when dry. And name is collected - absolutely no surprise when suddenly "RedHat" will start to sell dolls...
[+] [-] rhatexer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iruoy|2 years ago|reply
The future is unclear for the RHEL/CentOS clones
[+] [-] unethical_ban|2 years ago|reply
Is there any downside to its fully free spins?
[+] [-] tmottabr|2 years ago|reply
First because enterprises need a company behind offering support contract.
But more important, many enterprises are slow moving and unfortunately Debian lifecycle is not long enough for enterprises because of that..
I have at least one customer that migrated from RHEL 6 into newer versions last year, RHEL 6 was released on 2011, regular support ended on 2021 and extended support goes until next year. So it is currently still supported under their extended support.
The Debian version from 2011 was Debian 6 (Squeeze) that had an end of life in 2015, and long term support ended on 2016, it did not had extended LTS.
Just on the lifecycle of RHEL 6 Debian released versions 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 and with exception of the last two, 11 and 12, all other versions already reached end of life, additionally version 6 to 9 reached end of LTS, and version 7 reached end of ELTS, older versions did not had ELTS as far i could find.
Is is also worth noting that Debian LTS and ELTS are not handled by Debian security team, so anything after end of life would be a solid no from most enterprises.
Even Ubuntu is behind RedHat in this aspect, the oldest Ubuntu LTS release still supported by next year, when extended support for RHEL 6 will end, is Ubuntu 14.04 from 2014. Both Ubuntu 10.04 from 2010 and Ubuntu 12.04 from 2012, that is the last LTS release on or before 2011 and the following release, already reached end of life and support before RHEL 6 extended support ended.
[0] - https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases [1] - https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle
[+] [-] lockhouse|2 years ago|reply
Nothing has really changed for the companies that pay for RHEL. They do so for a good reason.
[+] [-] rhaway84773|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mort96|2 years ago|reply
Even if we were to agree 100% that nobody at Red Hat wants to do this and it's all IBM's fault, surely we can fault Red Hat for selling to IBM in the first place? I mean, everyone and their dog predicted the decay of Red Hat once the acquisition was announced. Surely the fact that they still went through with it, and therefore these all-too-predictable consequences, is on Red Hat?
[+] [-] op00to|2 years ago|reply
Jim had to take Ginny’s offer to the Board, and they decided to sell. That’s life in the big city.
[+] [-] RunningDroid|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawaramin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xt00|2 years ago|reply
RedHat has been trying to figure out how to both benefit from open source and also avoid helping others at the same time.. if you think of RedHat the OS as a combination of the linux kernel (worked on by many companies and individuals well beyond RedHat), tons of packages in userspace (of the millions of lines of code in these packages, probably a very very small fraction are from RedHat -- sure yes some important, some less important).
Examining the fact that RedHat in principle does some huge amount of testing of the packages and puts them all together -- lets think about that-- do they really? in many cases the upstream package maintainer(s) probably do most of that. So are they going to go build a ton of test vectors for each package and "test" them all .. I highly doubt that.. likely they have a set of tests that they do to try to hit a set of important things that "should work" and if a package happens to cause that to fail, then they roll it back. In the case that RH pushes a patch to the package maintainer -- does that mean they effectively "own" that software and people that want that updated version are trying to get stuff for "free"?
From the beginning people have questioned whether they should be able to hold back patches from other people -- in reality, they can try, but they also can't stop people from doing that same patch "somehow".. so effectively unless people can copyright a new patch to open source software and prevent others from doing that same patch, then they have no recourse.
Redhat should just lean really hard into the "support" side of things, and whatever margin exists with that, then fine. Sure, does it piss you off that other companies are making money off of your hard work, yes it does, but look at basically all of the other people who were ahead of you who you are also apparently ripping off RedHat..
[+] [-] veidr|2 years ago|reply
Red Hat is saying "we don't care about people who use a rebadged clone of our OS and pay us" (hard to find fault with that) and open-source users who don't pay for Red Hat are saying "fuck a Linux distro that hides source code" (ditto).
And we'll see who was right, in the sense of actually making a good decision, within a year or two. It might even be "both". (Although I personally suspect that Red Hat effectively removing RHEL (including its not-directly-money-making clones) from contention as a mainstream OS will have worse long-term effects on Red Hat than it will for anybody else... but we'll see.)
[+] [-] Woodi|2 years ago|reply
Autor, pleas... There is no RedHat anymore. There is only blob with tentacles not feeded and cut off when dry. And name is collected - absolutely no surprise when suddenly "RedHat" will start to sell dolls...
[+] [-] grahamm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawaramin|2 years ago|reply