Debian doesn't suck, and is fairly painless/consistent to admin. Been
running clusters on it for more than a decade.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
On 6/26/23 14:27, Prentice Bisbal via Beowulf wrote:
Beowulfers,
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:
Red Hat's announcement:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream
<https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream>
Alma Linux's response:
https://almalinux.org/blog/impact-of-rhel-changes/
Rocky Linux's response:
https://rockylinux.org/news/2023-06-22-press-release/
Software Freedom Conservancy's anaylsis of the situation:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
<https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/>
I'm writing to get your thoughts on this situation, as well as see
what plans of action you are considering moving forward.
Here are my thoughts:
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.
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?):
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
--
Prentice
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list,Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe)
visithttps://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
--
Joe Landman
e:joe.land...@gmail.com
t: @hpcjoe
w:https://scalability.org
g:https://github.com/joelandman
l:https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelandman
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
https://beowulf.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
