Introducing Incus [LWN.net]

The Linux Containers project has announced the addition of Incus, which is a fork of LXD 5.16 started by Aleksa Sarai. Incus was created in response to Canonical's removal of LXD from Linux Containers.

After some discussion with Aleksa and a fair bit of encouragement from our community, we have made the decision to take Incus under the umbrella of Linux Containers and will commit to it the infrastructure which was previously made available to LXD.
The goal of Incus is to provide a fully community led alternative to Canonical's LXD as well as providing an opportunity to correct some mistakes that were made during LXD's development which couldn't be corrected without breaking backward compatibility.
In addition to Aleksa, the initial set of maintainers for Incus will include Christian Brauner, Serge Hallyn, Stéphane Graber and Tycho Andersen, effectively including the entire team that once created LXD.

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Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 15:12 UTC (Mon) by atnot (guest, #124910) [Link] (15 responses)

It is worth noting that canonical not only moved the project away from linux containers, a questionable move, but then immediately, removed the rights maintainers that were not canonical employees [1], a baffling and reprehensible move.

It seems canonical is intent on destroying any remaining goodwill they have left in the community so: Long live Incus, may LXD go the way of all other projects where canonical thought they could just go on their own.

[1] https://mastodon.social/@brauner/110781239093096206

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 15:51 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Based on what interaction I've had with Canonical management, I'm not surprised they'd pull this kind of alienating move.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 16:41 UTC (Mon) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

At the time this was announced Stéphane Graber was still at Canonical, but it turns out he was leaving: https://stgraber.org/2023/07/10/time-to-move-on/

> As I’ve told colleagues and upper management, Canonical isn’t the company I excitedly joined back in 2011 and it’s not a company that I would want to join today, therefore it shouldn’t be a company that I keep working for either.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 21:06 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (12 responses)

I've tried to maintain the impression that Canonical were bumbling, merely a bit incompetent and not actively hostile, and were playing a role of maintaining healthy competition in the non-grassroots Linux space. 2023 is where I run out of patience with these type of corporations.

What's left that hasn't completely shrivelled into W95-era Microsoft behaviour? SuSE? Anyone know what they're up to? I assume no news is good news but I'm bracing to be wrong.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 5:27 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

There are the community distros—Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Alpine (which Drew DeVault recently praised because it "does not make the news")... I will consider one of those for my next machine.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 5:31 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (10 responses)

(yes, I am a SUSE employee, and no, I certainly don’t speak in the name of anybody else than my wife, cat, and children)

As far as I know we are just doing the same: preparing new distro(-s), continuing working on our rolling distro, just going on, looking slightly bewildered what the world around us is doing.

(and concerning Red Hat: no, I don’t like their decisions about CentOS, but I really do not think that it is an evilness on the same level as what Canonical did here).

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 12:47 UTC (Tue) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] (6 responses)

People are also blaming RH and IBM for it without recognising the huge role that Oracle plays as a parasite on open source supporting companies.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 16:34 UTC (Tue) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link] (3 responses)

Characterizing Oracle as a parasite is inaccurate, see also https://lwn.net/Articles/935627/ . They do a lot of upstream kernel maintenance (searching for "oracle" in MAINTAINERS will get you some of it, but also note there are Oracle folks with kernel.org addresses, e.g., Darrick Wong, who is mentioned in the article) and they regularly show up in the list of top contributors, there is Java of course (which Red Hat makes a lot of money off of), they're active in Xorg upstream, etc. I have no sympathy for Oracle as a company (and this is somewhat personal, they acquired a startup I interned at and promptly dropped support for everything except Oracle Linux), but this characterization is unfair to the sizable number of upstream developers who work at Oracle.

If you want to talk about parasitism and the business motivation for Red Hat's decision, blame the bug-for-bug compatible rebuilds, which allow large companies to run a small percent of their machines with actual Red Hat, the rest of their machines with a binary-equivalent rebuild, and report issues through Red Hat's support contract regardless of which machine it's on. This completely breaks Red Hat's business model, which is that they'll provide you expert engineering and support services in proportion to how much you use their product. If there are tricky locking bugs with a one-in-a-thousand chance of hitting them, and you want ten of them fixed, it makes economic sense for Red Hat to do it if you pay them for ten thousand support contracts; it doesn't make economic sense if you pay them for five and you claim you ran into all of those bugs on five machines.

Oracle Enterprise Linux (which doesn't even default to the Red Hat kernel) does not break the business model: it just competes with Red Hat because they provide their own engineering and support services which they also bill per-machine - and SUSE's Liberty product does exactly the same thing!

Of course, the rebuilds are entirely within their rights to be bug-for-bug compatible rebuilds and the customers who use them this way are mostly within their rights to do so (they're certainly within their rights to deploy the rebuilds; whether they can use Red Hat's support contract to have them fix issues on a large fleet that were reproduced on a small fleet is debatable), because it's open source and the entire idea of open source is that there's no such thing as a parasite.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 23:06 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> because it's open source and the entire idea of open source is that there's no such thing as a parasite.

What do you mean there is no such thing as a parasite? A parasite feeds on its host without contributing back (as opposed to a symbiote, where it's debatable who is feeding on who).

People who charge for support, pocket the money, and then expect someone else to actually provide the support can only be described as parasites. They are seriously damaging to the host.

Freeloaders aren't really a problem, because what's wrong with taking what's freely offered? As above, it's when people are given an inch, and take a mile, that we have a problem.

Cheers,
Wol

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 11, 2023 7:40 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

I wonder if, longer term, these kinds of issues mean that RH (and other companies with RH-esque business models) will have to figure out some other way to charge for their services than per-OS-instance licensing. Not only because it's easy to circumvent (in the sense of just having one RHEL licensed host that you use to reproduce issues you need help with, as described in the parent comment), but also because the additional hassle of registering hosts etc. is more trouble than just spinning up a rebuild instance with no such requirement.

What such a licensing scheme would be, I have no idea. Per-user licensing suffers from the same issue, in that you can have just one common account that all your thousands of engineers managing your server fleet uses.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 11, 2023 7:46 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

I would think that working on some better licensing model would be much better reaction to the development of last ten or so years than jerky reactions which seems to be the standard of absolutely everybody involved in this.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 18:06 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

One should remember that Oracle main selling point in the database business at one point was "at least we are not IBM".

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 11, 2023 5:35 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The way I see it, that's an instance of "two types of software, the type everyone complains about and the type nobody uses".

People are angry at RedHat/IBM because the course of action it's taken seems out of character and self-destructive in the long run. I don't think anybody here is sincerely rooting for it to fail, not after picking a fight with SCO & MS on our behalf.

They aren't talking about Oracle because the consensus on it has been persona non grata for a *long* time. Oracle does not make any software people want to use; it sits on the wrong side of a dozen prominent forks and makes a legal nuisance of itself. The only interesting thing out of that company in recent memory is a gratis VPS offering, and even then "interesting" is a pejorative - it's just another spam/abuse haven.

(Having wrote all that I'm not sure how Canonical fits into the binary. Their desktop offering is a net good but their enterprise side and its obsession with control reminds me of a robodialler insurance scam. This LXD situation in particular stands out as a huge red flag.)

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 8, 2023 13:09 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

Wow, very presumptuous that you think you can speak on behalf of... you cat. :)

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 9, 2023 10:24 UTC (Wed) by weberm (guest, #131630) [Link]

yeah that went from wild to wildest pretty quickly ^^

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 9, 2023 13:50 UTC (Wed) by ATLief (subscriber, #166135) [Link]

I can also speak for my cat: she’s an open source activist; she attacks my Mac but leaves my Linux box alone.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 16:40 UTC (Mon) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (2 responses)

Will the LinuxContainers.org site stop using the Canonical-owned visual styling? For the uninformed, it makes it look like Canonical is the sponsor and supporter of the project.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 17:34 UTC (Mon) by highvoltage (subscriber, #57465) [Link] (1 responses)

There was a similar question to this on the linuxcontainers irc channel today, and they did state that they'll move to a more default bootstrap theme later on.

Introducing Incus

Posted Aug 7, 2023 18:13 UTC (Mon) by stgraber (subscriber, #57367) [Link]

Indeed we used to be using a pretty trivial Bootstrap setup (I'm not a web dev ;)) but then a few years ago, the Canonical Web team contributed some PRs to move things over to Vanilla (Canonical's web framework).

So that's why despite not being branded as something belonging to Canonical or Ubuntu, it still has that feel.

I'd be very happy to see a PR that changes things back to regular Bootstrap though, and I've had some interactions on Mattermost with someone who's planning on contributing exactly that, so hopefully soon!