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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don’t need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business.

    It seems like you don’t understand the actual motivations of the parties involved here.

    • Oracle’s goal with Oracle Linux is to undermine Red Hat profits to prevent Red Hat from competing with them on acquisitions. They also have a secondary goal of being able to offer their customers a “full stack” deployment (operating system plus application) of their core business products like Oracle Database.

    • SUSE’s goal is to attract new customers with a RHEL clone offering (tied in with their SUSE Manager product), which gives them a sales funnel to pitch their core business of SLES for those customers’ new deployments. They first did this with their “Expanded Support” offering, which was clone-style updates for existing RHEL and CentOS installs. They were working on converting this into a full distro offering named “Liberty Linux”, but abandoned the idea last minute. Instead they rebranded “Expanded Support” as “Liberty Linux”, causing much confusion for due to previous leaks about the full distro by the same name.

    • Kurtzer/CIQ/Rocky’s goal is selling a RHEL clone as a core business offering, at a price that undercuts Red Hat’s pricing. This is only financially viable because they’re not doing 99% of the engineering work to build the operating system.

    The parties involved have very different goals, but they’re aligned enough to partner up until one of them decides to screw the others over (see “United Linux”).

    They’re trying to give the community back what was lost.

    Don’t be fooled by them using the word “community” eleven times in the announcement. They’re doing this for their own business reasons, as detailed above. That’s why OpenELA is a trade association.

    A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests.

    The entire point is to protect the participants’ commercial interests.

    Anyone who was using a distro that was downstream of RHEL wasn’t looking for enterprise-level support in the first place so I don’t really understand your complaint there.

    You must not talk to many enterprises. Many of them are looking for enterprise-level support of RHEL clones to cut costs. All the ones that I’ve directly heard about making a switch eventually switched back to Red Hat after realizing that the third party support was insufficient for their needs. These third parties can’t fix bugs or add features to a clone of another distro they do not control.

    These two companies coming together to give back what the community lost, for free, is what FOSS is all about. Somehow I feel like that has gone right over your head.

    The F in FOSS stands for free as in libre, not free as in gratis. If you think that the point of FOSS is getting things for free (gratis), then I’m afraid you’re the one with things going over your head.


  • old versions of modules that come from the Ceph package got flagged by our security scan.

    RHEL uses a practice called backporting, where older versions of software in packages get fixes from newer versions of the software without changing the version. This means that scanners that only check the version number can give you false positives for CVEs that are actually fixed. Is there a specific CVE that your scanner mentions? If so, you can look it up in the Red Hat CVE database and check if the fix has been backported, and which release of the package includes said fix.




  • Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

    This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.

    To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn’t undo everything else Red Hat does.


  • Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice.

    Yes, we are. The latest build was two days ago.

    Fedora is a community distro. Any software that follows the packaging guidelines can be packaged by whoever is willing to maintain it. Fedora doesn’t block people from maintaining RPMs just because a flatpak is a available, like Canonical does with snaps in Ubuntu.

    Previously, the RHEL LibreOffice maintainers also maintained it in Fedora. This is common for the subset of Fedora packages (~10%) that are also in RHEL. RHEL deprecated LO, meaning it’s still in current RHEL versions but won’t be in a future major version. Because of that the RHEL maintainers orphaned the Fedora package and its dependencies. Pretty much immediately, Fedora community members adopted the packages to keep them around. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last.