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<p>Debian doesn't suck, and is fairly painless/consistent to admin.
Been running clusters on it for more than a decade.</p>
<p>RH/IBM's business is not to be an open source warrior, rather to
make money for their shareholders. Seen in this way, they are
trying to define a moat around RHEL so that they are the only
RHEL(alike) that is standing.</p>
<p>This was likely aimed at the other folks like Oracle who are
making money off of rebuilds and not so much at Alma/Rocky. Those
are collateral damage.</p>
<p>I've seen now a number of people just give up on them in the last
week. Doug Eadline put a message on twitter this morning from
Jeff Geerling (ansible guy). Gromacs looks like they are done
with specific support of RHEL(alike).</p>
<p>This was a dumb move on IBMs part, but entirely predictable. The
correct move would have been to make CentOS the on ramp to RHEL,
and encourage everyone to use it for non-enterprise (read as:
something you aren't making money with, where you need audit
trails). They chose instead to try to restrict a license that
says you can't restrict it. IBM is banking on having many
lawyers, to enforce this action.</p>
<p>It sucks, but maybe its time to move off RHEL. Ubuntu could be
ok, but it has some idiocy (snap/flatpak) in it as well. Debian
has no controlling corporation, no requirement to make returns for
shareholders, and its automation system is second to none. The
transition for me was easy.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/26/23 14:27, Prentice Bisbal via
Beowulf wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:6235f1c9-13a0-3598-b75b-768979447c60@pppl.gov">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<p>Beowulfers, <br>
</p>
<p>By now, most of you should have heard about Red Hat's latest to
eliminate any competition to RHEL. If not, here's some links: <br>
</p>
<p>Red Hat's announcement: <br>
<a target="_blank" class="c-link moz-txt-link-freetext"
data-stringify-link="https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream"
data-sk="tooltip_parent"
href="https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream"
rel="noopener noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream</a></p>
<p>Alma Linux's response: <br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/</a><br>
<br>
Rocky Linux's response:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/</a><br>
</p>
<p>Software Freedom Conservancy's anaylsis of the situation: <br>
<a target="_blank" class="c-link moz-txt-link-freetext"
data-stringify-link="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/"
data-sk="tooltip_parent"
href="https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/"
rel="noopener noreferrer" moz-do-not-send="true">https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/</a></p>
<p>I'm writing to get your thoughts on this situation, as well as
see what plans of action you are considering moving forward. <br>
</p>
<p>Here are my thoughts: <br>
</p>
<p>This is Red Hat biting the hands that feed them. Red Hat went
from a small company operating out of a basement to a large
global company thanks to open-source software. My first exposure
to Linux was Red Hat Linux 4 in December 1996. I bought a
physical, shrink-wrapped version with the commercial Metro-X X
server to start learning Linux at home in my spare time shortly
after graduation from college. I chose RHL because everything I
read said RPM made it super easy to install and manage software
(perfect for noobs like me), and the Metro-X X-server was far
superior to any open-source X-server available at the time
(which was just Xfree86, really). I felt good about giving RH my
$40 for this not just because it would make it easier for me to
learn Linux, but because it seemed like Red Hat were really the
company that was going to take this underdog operating system
and make it famous. <br>
</p>
<p>They certainly achieved that goal, but along the way, I've seen
them do a lot of anti-open-source things that I didn't like,
leading me to change my image of them from champion of the
underdog to the "Microsoft of Linux" to whatever my low opinion
of them is now (Backstabber? Ingrate? Hypocrite?): <br>
</p>
<p>1. When they weren't making any money off a product they were
giving away for free (Red Hat Linux, and "duh!"), they came out
with an "Enterprise" version, that would still GPL-compliant,
but you'd have to pay for subscriptions to get access to their
update mechanism. To get people to buy into this model, they
started spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), about
"non-enterprise" Linux distributions, saying that any Linux
distribution other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) wasn't
reliable for use in any kind of enterprise that needed
reliability. <br>
</p>
<p>2. When spreading FUD didn't work, RH killed of RHL entirely.
If you wanted a free version of Red Hat, your only option was
Rawhide, which was their development version for the next
generation of RHEL, which was too unstable and unpredictable for
enterprise needs (of course). <br>
</p>
<p>3. After RH starting contributing funding to GNOME development,
the next major version of RHEL didn't install other desktops
during the install. I remember RHEL saying this was a bug, but
I've always suspected it was a deliberate act to reduce KDE
market share and and give RH another area of the Linux ecosystem
it could control. This, to me, was identical to Microsoft
including IE with the OS to kill off Netscape. Now if you
excuse, me, I need to go fashion a hat out of tin foil...</p>
<p>4. RH takes over control of CentOS, which at the time was the
only competitor to RHEL. There used to be Scientific Linux (SL),
which was maintained by the DOE at FermiLab, but FermiLab
decided that the world didn't need both SL and CentOS, since
they were essentially the same thing. Not long after, RHEL
eliminates CentOS as a competitor by changing it to "CentOS
Stream" so it's no longer a competitor to RHEL. CentOS Stream is
now a development version of sorts for RHEL, but I thought that
was exactly what Fedora was for. <br>
</p>
<p>5. When Alma and Rocky pop-up to fill the void created by the
killing of CentOS, RH does what it can to eliminate their access
from RHEL source code so they can't be competitiors to RHEL,
which brings us to today. <br>
</p>
<p>Somewhere around event #3 is when I started viewing RHEL from
as the MS of the Linux world for obvious reasons. It seems that
RH is determined to make RHEL a monopoly of the "Enterprise
Linux" market. Yes, I know there's Ubuntu and SLES, but Ubuntu
is viewed as a desktop more than a server OS (IMO), and SLES
hasn't really caught on, at least not in the US.</p>
<p>I feel that every time the open-source community ratchets up
efforts to preserve free alternatives to RHEL, RH ratchets up
their efforts to eliminate any competition, so trying to stick
with a free alternative to RHEL is ultimately going to be
futile, so know is a good time to consider changing to a
different line of Linux distro. <br>
</p>
<p>The price of paying for RHEL subscriptions isn't the only
concern. Besides cost, one of the reasons Linux has become the
de facto OS for HPC was how quickly/easily/cheaply it could be
ported to new hardware. Don Becker wrote or modified many of the
Linux Ethernet drivers that existed in the mid/late 90s so they
could be used for Beowulf clusters, for example. When the
Itanium processor came out, I remember reading that a Linux
developer was able to port Linux to the Itanium and got Linux
running on it in only a matter of hours. <br>
</p>
<p>With RH (and IBM?) so focused on market dominance/profits, it's
not a stretch to think they they'll eventually "say no" to
supporting anything other than x86 and POWER processors, since
the other processors don't have enough market share to make it
profitable, or compete with IBM's offerings. I mean, right now
it's extremely rare to find any commercial application that
supports anything other than x86_64 (other than Mac applications
that now support Apple's M processors, which is a relatively new
development). </p>
<p>My colleagues here agree with my conclusions about the future
of RHEL and, we are certainly giving the thought of moving away
from RHEL some serious consideration, but it's certainly not
going to be cheap or easy. What are you thinking/doing about
this? <br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Prentice</pre>
<br>
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</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Joe Landman
e: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:joe.landman@gmail.com">joe.landman@gmail.com</a>
t: @hpcjoe
w: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://scalability.org">https://scalability.org</a>
g: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/joelandman">https://github.com/joelandman</a>
l: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman">https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman</a></pre>
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