[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[John Hanks]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 12:27 PM Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf <
beowulf at beowulf.org> wrote:

> This is Red Hat biting the hands that feed them.
>
And that is the perfect summary of the situation. More and more I view "EL"
as a standard, previously created/defined by Redhat but due to the behavior
you accurately documented here, they have decided to delegate to the
community. Oracle's inclusion of a more recent kernel in OEL while
still guaranteeing binaries will run and Alma's inclusion of ZenBleed fixes
while Redhat took the "not our problem" position are two great examples of
how RHEL is simply not the best EL you can get by a long shot. Throw in the
extremely heavy handed management tools RHEL licensing requires and you
have a product that isn't just more costly in licenses but more costly in
the effort required to deploy/run/manage it. It's a great tool to build
large IT organizations full of drones around, but not the best choice if
you want to keep as much of your budget as possible focused on the science
and in the lab.

What Redhat failed and continues to fail to grasp with its
management blinded by greed is that the power of a standard lies entirely
in how many people use it. If not for the rebuild projects would EPEL exist
and if not for EPEL would RHEL proper even be usable in a general purpose
context? When's the last time you set up any EL distribution without the
first thing to do being installing epel-release?

The second part of the power of "EL" as a standard is how many ISVs list it
in some form as "supported". Do they still invest the effort to keep that
"supported" status if the entire EL customer base is solely paid Redhat
subscriptions? RHEL doesn't, AFAICT, even have the largest market share of
EL installations. If they waved a magic wand and wiped all rebuild installs
out of existence, I think a lot of ISVs no longer see that as a large
enough market to continue officially supporting.

I'm completely content to keep using "downstream" EL rebuilds as they
become peer distributions rather than downstream. And IMO becoming peer
distributions is a huge step forward for the EL ecosystem, which will lead
to better EL distributions overall.

Redhat management doesn't recover from this. Once you've drawn the
proverbial line in the sand like this you can't walk it back and save face,
so a clean sweep of the involved C-suites is required to change course.
Barring an announced leadership change probably combined with a split of
Redhat from IBM or sale to another company, this is the beginning/middle of
the end for RHEL as the apparent leader in the EL space and I'd expect them
to increasingly lose paid market share to supported rebuilds and other
distros as they continue to slip into decline.

At the risk of being snarky, it'll be interesting to see how long it is
before Canonical/Ubuntu has stockholders and enters and completes this same
cycle so that people are rage-switching distro to the next-big-"free"
thing. In the end a distro is just a kernel, a glibc and a collection of
libraries/packages some group of people agreed on the version of, which is
another way of saying that a distro is just a shared belief among a group
so they can combine efforts and share the benefits. Arguing which one is
"best" is, well, as long as we aren't shooting each other over this shared
belief then I guess it's not the worst one humans have come up with
throughout our history.

As for what my plans are, I plan to keep using and supporting the EL
community by using Fedora/Rocky/Alma/OEL, by paying those entities for
support when I am able and by contributing back bug reports and QA effort.
And also the most important part in my view: by helping other people in the
community using the same distros in whatever forums where I participate
to help keep those communities strong.

Also using a free Red Hat developer subscription to access their knowledge
base when I have a problem makes me feel a little like a pirate, and that's
fun while it lasts.

griznog
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20230809/2a5b33ca/attachment.htm>