[Beowulf] [External] Re: Your thoughts on the latest RHEL drama?

[Prentice Bisbal]

On 6/27/23 11:59 AM, Chris Samuel wrote:
> On 26/6/23 11:38, Joe Landman wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> From memory (insert sirens, klaxons and other warnings sounds here) 
> Oracle was the target for Red Hat's obfuscating of their kernel 
> sources to make it harder for them to do their kernel variants.
>
> It would horribly ironic if this move pushed more people towards using 
> OL given Oracle seem to give that away for free. :-/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_justice

This could the point where the OL forks from RHEL even moreso. 
Considering that many corporations are already spending $$$ for Oracle, 
and Oracle has the resources to do the same dev work that they were 
"letting" RH do, I think Oracle could certainly challenge RHEL for 
corporate dominance if they wanted to. Of course, none of that affects 
us since most of us are using the free rebuilds, but it would be funny 
to watch from the sidelines.

>
> I've not had to use RHEL since leaving Australia for the US but my 
> experience with their support was pretty poor up to that point. They 
> had a nasty habit of breaking Mellanox drivers and not being able to 
> fix them for extended periods of time (we had one in RHEL5 that was 
> still unresolved when we went to RHEL6, and one in RHEL6 that would 
> crash our PPC64 BG/Q management node in RHEL 6.2 through 6.4 before it 
> got fixed - we were stuck on a RHEL 6.1 kernel until they finally 
> fixed it). Hopefully things have improved since then.

That was the ironic thing about paying for RHEL "support"  - they never 
fixed anything! I only worked for a paying customer for a few years of 
my career. The few bugs I found and reported to RHEL were never fixed, 
or even acknowledged. They were just silently closed by being marked 
WONT_FIX in their bugtracker. Never understood what I was paying for.


--
Prentice