Red Hat just erected a paywall in front of the source code to their Linux distribution.Are they burning bridges to the wider open source ecosystem?Referenced...
An exceptionally well explained rant that I find myself in total agreement with.
This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.
I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don’t see why he can’t just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.
Oracle really does eat Red Hat lunch. Oracle practically recommends using Oracle Linux to their own customers. After paying a lot of money to Oracle, you probably aren’t thrilled to pay for yet another expensive license and just install oracle linux.
Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)
|
|
v
CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
|
|
v
RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
You can absolutely run important services on Fedora server edition. Most of the stuff in containerized anyways, so having a more up to date version of the base system is actually an advantage.
It is really only those large corps with massive closed source lagacy applications and loads of compliance regulation that need a stale but long term supported distribution like RHEL.
I design/build/maintain servers & networks for a living and have for over a decade. At every company that I’ve ever worked at, large or small, even proposing the idea to run production servers on Fedora would get you laughed out of the room, and probably get your competence questioned if you’re serious about it. I’m not saying it must be RHEL, because Debian & Ubuntu Server do exist and you can get support on them, but there is no universe that exists in which Fedora is suitable as a production server.
I respect your opinion, but it does not match up with any business reality, no matter the size of that business.
Maybe not Fedora specifically, but modern cloud environments run on significantly more bleeding edge Linux versions than RHEL and that is no problem at all given the redundancy all these systems work at.
doesn’t Fedora drift fairly well ahead of RHEL with new major releases of components from upstream with every release? Especially with the kernels getting so far out of sync with between the two.
As far as kernels go, I wonder if it is at all practical to do what Arch does and provide a linux-lts package. Maybe they do and I am simply not aware of it. I haven’t used Fedora in a while.
This is not about an individual sharing the source. This is about near verbatim copy distributions like Oracle Linux. And they can easily see who contributes code from RHEL into those distributions.
I think Jeff has a point that a Linux distribution is a collective effort, but I honestly don’t see why he can’t just target Fedora which is for all intends and purposes the testing release for RHEL and most of the development work that Red Hat does goes directly into Fedora. RHEL adds little of value to that other than some compliance BS for large companies.
Oracle really does eat Red Hat lunch. Oracle practically recommends using Oracle Linux to their own customers. After paying a lot of money to Oracle, you probably aren’t thrilled to pay for yet another expensive license and just install oracle linux.
https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/23/ladbi/operating-system-checklist-for-oracle-database-installation-on-linux.html
Fedora isn’t the testing distribution for RHEL, CentOS is. Fedora is upstream of CentOS and could be viewed as the bleeding edge in that regard. CentOS used to be downstream of RHEL, but that changed a few years ago when IBM did its first shitty thing at Red Hat. The tree is like:
Fedora (Top of code stream, “unstable” from a business perspective)
|
|
v
CentOS (midstream, much less frequent feature updates)
|
|
v
RHEL (end of stream, stable/predictable/reliable/etc)
And I couldn’t disagree more about RHEL adding little value. You’re not going to run a server on Fedora for something you want/need to rely on, and especially rely on not to change much/cause breaking changes. That’s what RHEL is for and it is the gold standard in that regard.
And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Red Hat support is some of the absolute best in the world. Motherfuckers will write a bespoke kernel module for you if that’s what it takes to fix your issue. Not sure if that’s still true after the IBM takeover though, but that was my experience with them before that.
You can absolutely run important services on Fedora server edition. Most of the stuff in containerized anyways, so having a more up to date version of the base system is actually an advantage.
It is really only those large corps with massive closed source lagacy applications and loads of compliance regulation that need a stale but long term supported distribution like RHEL.
I design/build/maintain servers & networks for a living and have for over a decade. At every company that I’ve ever worked at, large or small, even proposing the idea to run production servers on Fedora would get you laughed out of the room, and probably get your competence questioned if you’re serious about it. I’m not saying it must be RHEL, because Debian & Ubuntu Server do exist and you can get support on them, but there is no universe that exists in which Fedora is suitable as a production server.
I respect your opinion, but it does not match up with any business reality, no matter the size of that business.
Maybe not Fedora specifically, but modern cloud environments run on significantly more bleeding edge Linux versions than RHEL and that is no problem at all given the redundancy all these systems work at.
doesn’t Fedora drift fairly well ahead of RHEL with new major releases of components from upstream with every release? Especially with the kernels getting so far out of sync with between the two.
As far as kernels go, I wonder if it is at all practical to do what Arch does and provide a linux-lts package. Maybe they do and I am simply not aware of it. I haven’t used Fedora in a while.
Yeah, but that is Red Hat’s problem then, no?
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