On Mon, Jun 26, 2023 at 02:27:23PM -0400, 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. > HPC is a *very* small world: Moving beyond the hand built Beowulf clusters this list started with, the top 500 have thousands of nodes. All run Linux - many of them still run Red Hat but mediated by the cluster hardware vendors, system integrators, specialist interconnect providers - or a one-stop shop. HPE (ex-Cray) will integrate a whole computer, tweak the linux, add secret sauce and performance tuning, for example, with various sub teams and field engineers doing this. The large clusters will have their own engineers - if you were to ask a Red Hat certified architect to deal with a large supercomputer, he might well be sunk (and that's before you consider catering to the specialist requirements of the user communities who want to run meteo forecasting models or whatever). > 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. > Back in the early days of RGB, Don Becker and so on, Extreme Linux was a single CD Beowulf in a disk. I suggested that the community went Debian at the time, I think - but meh. If you have several hundred / several thousand machines - whether as a cluster or as a web hosting datacentre - you'll have your own engineers. CentOS was ideal because it would allow you to use any server that was qualified to run Red Hat (HP/IBM/Dell/Lenovo) and know it would "just work" The marginal cost savings are small but significant - not least because you wouldn't have to keep count on licence numbers/struggle with Satellite or similar. I've seen people who want to become Red Hat certified engineers/sysadmins who used CentOS to do this. Red Hat make $$$$ for certifications if you follow them all through. Red Hat are losing expertise and goodwill from Fedora/CentOS/Rocky/Alma folks who might still have suggested fixes/reported bugs/acted as advocates for the RPM way. The long term denizens of this list probably don't care *which* Linux it is that underlies the workload - Linux is Linux is Linux - if you're having to deal with user requirements that transcend distro packaging, your customisations will mean you can't get support and you become your own expert. > 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. > Anybody else remember the Red Hat customisations and gcc 2.96? Other unfortunate Red Hat problems like breaking RPM ... it wasn't a picnic to run commercial Red Hat at the time > 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). <big snip> > > 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. > There's an element of laziness from hardware vendors / specialist software vendors here (high end interconnects / EDA or whatever massively expensive CAD _demand_ Red Hat often at a specific point release from which you can't update safely) and so the default is RHEL. > 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). > The Beowulf / HPC / SPC world is pretty much either X86 or ultra-bespoke ARM anyway or depends on GPU for the hard yards. > 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? > As a long term Debian user (and lurker here with occasional comments for about 25 years) move to Debian for everything: tell your hardware vendors to get with the programme. Ubuntu if not - but there's a few things that don't sit well like snaps though in this community they're probably irrelevant. > -- > Prentice There's a gap in the archives for a couple of years, I think. Those with the longest memories here may remember my good friend Martin Wheeler from the 90s. He died a short while ago and I'm heading to his funeral tomorrow. I'll remember him for all sorts of things - not least for persuading me that this list was worth following. It's been our great pleasure to follow this community - polite, helpful, technical and a model of how to do this technical stuff well on the Internet. I thank you all for the example you have set, are setting and continue to set. Andrew Cater [amaca...@einval.org / amaca...@debian.org] > _______________________________________________ > 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 _______________________________________________ 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
