[Beowulf] Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Mon, 26 Jun 2023 14:27:23 -0400, you wrote:

>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:

I think it is safer to say IBM's efforts.

>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.

I think that is unlikely given how unsuitable (at least in the Linux
world) long term stable distributions like RHEL are to the desktop
environment.

I always attributed that stuff to internal politics with the internal
Gnome team doing things to preserve their existence, particular when
they went different with Gnome 3.

>4. RH takes over control of CentOS, which at the time was the only 
>competitor to RHEL.

It was more a case of Red Hat rescuing CentOS.

At the time the CentOS project was in trouble as they struggled and
failed to bring out their versions in anything like a timely manner
after the RHEL release.  I suspect the IBM version of Red Hat would
have just let CentOS fail.

>Not long after, RHEL eliminates CentOS as a competitor by 
>changing it to "CentOS  Stream" so it's no longer a competitor to RHEL. 

No.

CentOS as part of Red Hat lasted almost 7 years (taken over by Red Hat
in January 2014, killed in December 2020)

Guesswork, but if IBM doesn't buy Red Hat it's possible CentOS still
exists.

>CentOS Stream is now a development version of sorts for RHEL, but I 
>thought that was exactly what Fedora was for.

Recent discussion on Fedora mailing list has it as major version of
RHEL split off from Fedora but CentOS Stream is used for minor
versions.

How long this remains to be true is debatable.

Red Hat/IBM recently eliminated a paid position dealing with Fedora,
they have killed off LibreOffice in RHEL (by not replacing an
employee) and thus its future in Fedora is dependent on new
maintainers stepping up.  Red Hat/IBM has also been looking at
stretching the Fedora rules for their OpenJDK support in Fedora with a
unsaid threat of we could stop providing OpenJDK packages in Fedora.

Also Fedora went to BTRFS as a default file system even though Red Hat
stopped supporting it.

>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.

ARM has a reasonable presence in the cloud providers and probably has
a bigger market share than POWER at this point.