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OpenELA's first code drop

The Open Enterprise Linux Association, a joint venture founded by CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE, has announced its first code release.

OpenELA is excited to announce that the source code for all packages necessary for anyone to build a derivative Enterprise Linux operating system is now available. The initial focus is on EL8 and EL9, and packages for EL7 are forthcoming. The project is committed to ensuring the continued availability of EL sources to the community indefinitely.

The organization has also announced a technical steering committee made up of "highly experienced individuals from the founding companies".


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OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 3, 2023 17:17 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (18 responses)

What is "enterprise linux"? I recall from previous LWN coverage that they are basically cloning RHEL but I don't see Red Hat mentioned anywhere. If they are cloning RHEL and not saying so, it's so unethical it's satirical (but so is Oracle claiming to be "open"...)

If there's some other sort of "enterprise Linux" definition, they should say.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 3, 2023 17:59 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I think it's understood that companies rarely mention their competitor by name: it's always "compatible with the leading brand" and other formulations to avoid any possible trademark problems. It makes sense to me that if you have Red Hat(tm) Enterprise Linux, then you can also have Other Brand Enterprise Linux and even generic Enterprise Linux.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 3, 2023 20:38 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link]

>What is "enterprise linux"?

RedHat and clones

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 4, 2023 0:06 UTC (Sat) by Schroeder (subscriber, #128168) [Link] (9 responses)

Isn't most of RHEL free and open source software developed by others that RH just bundles and sells, claiming that the package sold is also open source, but making it harder and harder for people to do with it what open source is supposed to let them do?

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 4, 2023 0:40 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Isn't most of RHEL free and open source software developed by others that RH just bundles and sells, claiming that the package sold is also open source, but making it harder and harder for people to do with it what open source is supposed to let them do?

"This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license." [1]

*nothing* in the GPL, or any other F/OSS license, obligates folks to provide a warranty, support, or access to future versions. Indeed, the GPL makes the opposite quite explicit, clearly stating that support and warranty is out of scope [2] and stating that a user exercising their source rights can be grounds for ceasing to provide updates and support. [3]

The only thing that gives you the right to obtain software through Red Hat's services is the RH subscription agreement, and they have *always* provided complete source code to every binary they distribute, via the same distribution mechanism, fully complying with the GPL's source requirements. However, if you are no longer (or never were) a customer, they provide a written offer for the complete source code for a given RHEL release [4], just to cover all the bases.

[1] https://www.redhat.com/licenses/Appendix-1-Global-English... (section 1.4)
[2] GPLv3 section 15, plus section 4, paragraph 2.
[3] GPLv3 section 6, paragraph 6.
[4] Mail them $5, and you'll get back a USB stick with everything.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 4, 2023 17:06 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> > Isn't most of RHEL free and open source software developed by others that RH just bundles and sells, claiming that the package sold is also open source, but making it harder and harder for people to do with it what open source is supposed to let them do?

> "This Agreement establishes the rights and obligations associated with Subscription Services and is not intended to limit your rights to software code under the terms of an open source license." [1]

I've just looked up the four freedoms ...

0. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.

How does the subscription service interfere with your ability to run the program? Isn't the whole point of the subscription to HELP you run it if you have problems?

1. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. ...

How does the subscription service interfere with your ability to study and change the program? Of course, if you change it, RH/SUSE/Canonical et al may refuse to support it (unless you pay them extra), but why should they work for you, for free?

2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.

And the subscription service interferes with ability to share copies, just how? Sure, the subscription may force you to *choose* between sharing, and helping your neighbour, but there's an easy fix to that. Just get them to take out a subscription service, too.

3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

And the subscription service interferes with your ability to do that, just how? You're no longer distributing someone else's supported product. If it goes wrong, it's YOU that will have to fix it, FOR FREE, according to your logic.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, others have said it too. If what RH/SUSE/Canonical et al are doing really is just lumping a load of free programs together, and their work has no value, why are people kicking up a stink because they refuse to give it away gratis? If it's worthless, why do you want it? Are you SURE it's worthless? And if it's actually worth something, why are you such a skinflint miser as to not want to pay the labourer his hire?

Cheers,
Wol

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 4, 2023 19:18 UTC (Sat) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (4 responses)

I wish people pushing this stupid and offensive line would take 10 minutes to look at what the Red Hat sponsored projects and engineering have designed and built for Linux, especially server-side. All those are free software. Or read one of corbet's posts about committers in a kernel release.

Can you give ONE example of them "making it harder and harder for people to do with it what open source is supposed to let them do"?

I would expect techy people to be able to use logic, not smears and innuendo.

(I don't or haven't worked at RH, but I have worked at another Linux company.)

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 4, 2023 19:58 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> I would expect techy people to be able to use logic, not smears and innuendo.

I doubt they're techy, and I doubt they're really linux people. Unfortunately, there are quite a few hooligans in the peanut gallery :-(

Cheers,
Wol

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 6, 2023 8:32 UTC (Mon) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (2 responses)

Anyone disagreeing with your very questionable interpretation of how no right gets violated is a hooligan?

According to wikipedia: A hooligan is a participant in hooliganism—unruly, destructive, or bullying behaviour.

Disagreeing and bullying/destroying aren't the same.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 6, 2023 10:43 UTC (Mon) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link] (1 responses)

Spreading misinformation is that though. And the fact is that Red Hat never stopped distributing source code of RHEL packages, for free.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 6, 2023 13:13 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And if LtWorf is naive enough to think that we don't have hooligans here, I have a bridge in brooklyn to sell him ...

One of the characteristics of hooligans, trolls, psychopaths, call them what you will, is that they LOOK for communities they can infiltrate and disrupt, just to give themselves kicks. Anyone who believes that can't happen here (and yes, Jon does make it much harder) has a touching faith in human nature which reality says doesn't exist.

(And I hate to say it, but it's obvious that a lot of people here, myself included, have strongly entrenched beliefs. These are EXTREMELY hard to tackle with logic. And it means we all can (and do) behave like hooligans sometimes. I just get the feeling though that some people aren't interested in logical and rational argument, they just want to enjoy an argument for the argument's sake.)

Cheers,
Wol

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 5, 2023 6:58 UTC (Sun) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

If it's "just" so simple, why don't you spin your own and make easy money?

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 5, 2023 16:22 UTC (Sun) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

The phrase "just bundles and sells" is omitting a lot and "developed by others" dismisses Red Hat's role in developing a lot of FOSS.

Red Hat doesn't develop everything or even a majority of the software it ships, true -- but there are very few, if any, organizations that contribute as much as Red Hat. Also very few that open source just about everything in their product line, even if Red Hat doesn't just throw open the gates and let non-customers download exact source to its products.

"Just bundles and sells" handwaves away all the work that goes into deciding what should be in a RHEL release, making sure that upstream projects developed separately co-exist together, legal research, translations, certification and testing work, carrying bugfixes back to RHEL when things are reported by customers, etc. It ignores things like supporting Python releases well past the EOL from upstream. It ignores all the additional components that Red Hat invests in like the Anaconda installer and ensuring that upgrades work from release to release (to whatever extent they do...)

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 4, 2023 15:54 UTC (Sat) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm not sure I agree that cloning Red Hat without saying "Red Hat" is unethical* or that Red Hat would even mind**.

Red Hat publishes code to CentOS Stream that roughly corresponds with RHEL, and invites people and organizations to work with that. It has taken steps to stop "bug for bug" compatible clones, or at least make that work harder. If that means OpenELA and any downstreams are touting "Enterprise Linux" code without direct claims of 1:1 compatibility with specific RHEL releases, that kind of seems like a win for Red Hat.

It means there's doubt around whether a OpenELA-derived release is actually "compatible" with the RHEL release. So if people are shopping for RHEL, and not just an "enterprise Linux" release, that makes it more likely they'll go to Red Hat. If you actually "need" RHEL, maybe you'll actually buy a subscription instead of using a clone. And if all you want/need is something that kind of looks like RHEL and you're happy to forego all the certifications and such -- take your chances with one of the OpenELA distros.

* As long as they're not stripping any copyright notices or things like that.
** I am a former Red Hat employee, but don't take anything I say as past or current official Red Hat stance on anything. Whether Red Hat as a company minds the omission of the words "Red Hat" is just speculation on my part.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 6, 2023 20:40 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (4 responses)

It was always my understanding that what Red Hat really wanted to stop was people buying a one-seat support contract, running CentOS (pre-Stream, nowadays Rocky or something) on a few hundred workstations, and then, whenever a workstation has a problem, you first reimage it with CentOS, and if it still doesn't work, you reimage it with your "one" copy of RHEL and ask for support. Then you reimage it back with CentOS and reapply the fix (which will probably still work, because CentOS was at the time more or less equivalent to RHEL).

Obviously, this is abusive of Red Hat's subscription, and they are well within their rights to prohibit it. The only real question, to my mind, is exactly what means they can or should use to enforce that prohibition, and exactly how it ought to be worded (technically, the customer only ever installs RHEL on one workstation at a time, so you can't just prohibit multiple installations...). I imagine there are probably other permutations of "install CentOS, buy RHEL support, and use the one for the other," but the above is probably the most tricky to outright ban. I imagine that CentOS might have been internally seen as an attractive nuisance for this sort of client misbehavior, and so they got rid of it.

(In case it's not obvious: A few hundred workstations will have problems at a higher rate than a single workstation. You are asking Red Hat to do more work, and refusing to pay for it, so that's abusive.)

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 7, 2023 3:26 UTC (Tue) by calumapplepie (guest, #143655) [Link] (3 responses)

That sounds like a lot of work. If you're willing to go to the effort of occasional re-imaging, then there's a decent chance you're also willing to go to the effort of just fixing broken things yourself.

To my knowledge, most Red Hat customers never use the support at all; they just paid for Red Hat so that they'd have the OS which their proprietary software vendor said was supported. If you can get a bug-for-bug identical OS without paying Red Hat at all, then why wouldn't you?

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 7, 2023 10:14 UTC (Tue) by zuki (subscriber, #41808) [Link] (1 responses)

> To my knowledge, most Red Hat customers never use the support at all; they just paid for Red Hat so that they'd have the OS which their proprietary software vendor said was supported.

80% of the value⁽¹⁾ of the service provided by Red Hat is timely updates with few regressions. So even if the customer never opens a ticket or makes a support call, they are using the support provided. If there never is a major bug worthy of a opening a ticket, then that's Red Hat QA working as expected.

Testing of RHEL packages with various proprietary (or not) software vendor's third party stuff is also part of the work done by Red Hat. And fixing regressions — if an update breaks 3rd party stuff, it will be fixed/reverted/redone. That is part of the "support" too.

⁽¹⁾ number made up ;)

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 9, 2023 3:18 UTC (Thu) by sionescu (subscriber, #59410) [Link]

It's common for vendors in certain "high-security" environments to only certify their software on a specific version (service pack) of RedHat. Their customers will necessarily buy RedHat licences, install the exact service pack stated in the vendor's docs, then explicitly block updates because they don't want to pay for an update to the software, and the current version will stop working if the host is updated to another service pack.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 7, 2023 10:40 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Re-imaging is trivial - it's literally "click the button, reboot the system and wait". The only hard part in the whole thing is being careful with your licensing, so that you've not got more copies of anything in use than you're paying for - but you're doing that anyway, because your proprietary software terms allow for audits, and have huge fees included if you fail an audit; e.g. one package I've encountered had a "list price" of over $100,000/month per user in a month, but you could easily negotiate down to under $10,000/year per concurrent user. Fail audit, and you would be expected to pay list price for that month; so, having had 10 concurrent users, and 30 engineers using it in a month, you'd go from under $100,000 in a year to $3,000,000 for the month in which you were audited and found to have more concurrent users than you'd paid for.

In this sort of situation, you've already built tooling and processes to guarantee that you comply with the licensing rules, because of the cost of failing to do so, but you'd still like to cut out the $9,000/year "overhead" you pay for RHEL with Standard Support for 30 engineers using RHEL workstations with the expensive proprietary software. Doing so by reimaging with real RHEL (bearing in mind that in the environment I saw this in, workstations are reimaged daily to stop engineers saving work locally instead of on the NetApp) whenever a bug needs reporting is cheap, especially since your bug-for-bug rebuild of RHEL is unlikely to have many bugs. And most of the cost is "fluffy" cost, in terms of engineers not doing their work but waiting to use the "real" RHEL system to reproduce a bug to be reported to the tool vendor or to RHEL support.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 18:16 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (29 responses)

What's the point of a technical steering committee of a project that blindly rebuilds whatever Red Hat does?

I mean, if they try to make any technical changes, by definition they're no longer "EL" compatible.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 19:13 UTC (Fri) by aklaver (guest, #62352) [Link] (11 responses)

https://openela.org/about/

Our Mission:

To establish and make accessible the sources, tooling, and assets to all members, collaborators, and the open source Enterprise Linux distribution developers to create and maintain 1:1 downstream derivatives of EL
To allow and encourage contributions and enhancements from the upstream community in the form of “extras”
To always act in the best interests of the open source community and all downstream derivatives
To create an inclusive community of organizations and individuals to ensure the longevity, stability, and management of this project

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 19:26 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (10 responses)

That mission statement is all fine and dandy, but the only aspect that a "technical steering committee" could have any influence over is the tooling, and even that will be 99% identical to CentOS's tooling. [1]

Sure, they _could_ scrap all of the existing CentOS tooling, but... why? It would be a ton of work, and all they would accomplish along the way would be to (greatly) increase the risk of divergence from upstream 1:1 binary+bug compatibility, which... again, is the entire point of OpenELA.

Again, there are no "technical steering" decisions to be made in a project whose sole mission is to be a (zero-cost) 1:1 downstream derivative of someone else's technical/engineering decisions.

[1] Essentially perform a 1:1 clone of the completely-open CentOS tooling, replace dist-git with their own, s/CentOS/OpenELA/g, hit rebuild.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 19:49 UTC (Fri) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (7 responses)

I thought they were OK with diverging from RHEL if necessary, creating their own Enterprise Linux standard? Seems like that is the way things will have to be with RH being increasingly closed with their sources.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 20:07 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (6 responses)

> Seems like that is the way things will have to be with RH being increasingly closed with their sources.

Red Hat is currently just as open with their sources as SuSE and Canonical, and all fully comply with the letter and spirit of the GPL. Why the selective outrage?

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 20:24 UTC (Fri) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (5 responses)

Do Canonical or SUSE use blackmail to work around the GPL ? Is it in the spirit of the licence ?

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 22:06 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

SuSE's current turms and conditions, section 5.4:

"... You may not: (a) use any Subscription Offering or SUSE Product for the benefit, directly or indirectly, of any third party, which includes making the Subscription Offering or SUSE Product available as part of any product or service that is sold, leased, rented or otherwise made available by You; (b) allow a third party to use or access, directly or indirectly, or otherwise benefit from, any of Your Subscription Offerings or SUSE Products; or (c) assign or transfer the Subscription Offering to any third party."

This is materially identical to the language in RHEL's agreement.

Canonical's agreements are a bit more tangled, but their "ubuntu pro personal agreement" section 3, includes this text:

"You must not use the software made available through the Service for more than the entitled number of physical or virtual Ubuntu systems except as otherwise agreed, nor resell or attempt to resell the Services"

The non-personal Pro terms include similar language to the above in section 5.1, but adds a lot more, incluidng section 12.3 -- "There are no intended third party beneficiaries to this Agreement. " and references a UK law that I can't be bothered to look up.

So there's arguably a bit of wiggle room such that you can technically give it all away gratis to third parties, but it appears to be the same sort of "you can only use the services on the number of systems licensed, and don't let third parties get the benefit of the subscription" spirit as SuSE and RHEL."

Meanwhile, neither Canonical or SuSE provide source code for their extended releases (ie >5yr after initial release) to non-subscribers (ie just like Red Hat) and all three reserve the right to terminate the agreement at any time, for any reason.

So, yeah. Why does everyone else get a free pass for essentially the same behavior, especially when they've been doing it for much longer?

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 4, 2023 12:35 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (3 responses)

Ah so you meant "Red Hat is currently just as closed with their sources as SuSE and Canonical".
Thanks for clearing that up.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 4, 2023 13:29 UTC (Sat) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link] (2 responses)

I can't see how you insist on conflating *source code access* with a *support contact*.

The two are - and rightly so - completely independent of each other.

And the GPL *expressly" separates them.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 4, 2023 15:47 UTC (Sat) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

We did already had this discussion, no need for a repeat here.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 4, 2023 17:29 UTC (Sat) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link]

And you still don't see the obvious difference?

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 3, 2023 21:07 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

I didn't see a kernel package there. Did I miss anything?

Neither the original one, nor any Oracle "Unbreakable" kernel one.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 4, 2023 16:40 UTC (Sat) by zuki (subscriber, #41808) [Link]

Also no "systemd".

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 4, 2023 16:01 UTC (Sat) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link] (16 responses)

It's unclear from public statements whether the OpenELA folks intend to diverge from RHEL or not. As a spectator, I would love to see them attempt to establish a community EL that they drive and compete with RHEL as a standard.

I feel like that would be more honest and actual competition, rather than leaving it to Red Hat to do all the work up to releasing the code and then rushing behind them to compile it and undercut Red Hat on pricing and little else.

IMO, it's not particularly good for the larger industry/ecosystem to undercut Red Hat's revenue and ability to develop software while not picking up the slack. If SUSE, Oracle, and CIQ are out there hiring all the folks who support the types of work Red Hat is doing (not only coding, but testing, product management, etc.) then great. If they're just siphoning the code and then making it harder for Red Hat to pay for the work that goes into RHEL... not so good.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 11:18 UTC (Mon) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445) [Link] (13 responses)

    I would love to see them attempt to establish a community EL that they drive and compete with RHEL as a standard.

There are already 2 community "EL" distros that compete with RHEL: (1) Debian LTS and (2) Ubuntu LTS, both of which ship a ton of code developed and/or checked by Red Hat (i.e. indirectly paid for by subscriptions to RHEL).

It can also be argued that CentOS Stream is a competitor of sorts to RHEL as well. Even though Red Hat killed the original CentOS project, OpenELA can and will use CentOS Stream sources against Red Hat.

CentOS Stream is ostensibly meant as an intermediary between Fedora and RHEL, as part of the pipeline for developing and stabilizing RHEL releases (major and minor). Unless OpenELA steps up and actually contributes something of meaningful value to CentOS Stream, I can't see how the current status quo with CentOS Stream will continue.

CentOS Stream has no value to Red Hat unless RH gets something out of it (say, at the very least, bug reports). To a large extent, Fedora already serves as a decent testing ground for RHEL. Red Hat (or IBM) execs will either withdraw support from CentOS Stream, or (most likely) change it to an internal Red Hat project, absorbing it into the internal RHEL development process. Only Fedora would remain as the publicly available upstream to RHEL.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 11:34 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd just note that CentOS Stream used to be an internal Red Hat project as part of the internal RHEL development process, and not something that was publicly exposed. Reversing that decision would cost Red Hat a lot more goodwill than cracking down on bug-for-bug clones of RHEL has done, since many consumers of CentOS Stream are people who transitioned away from bug-for-bug clones and who now contribute by providing useful bugs reports and/or code to CentOS Stream.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 11:45 UTC (Mon) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445) [Link] (1 responses)

<ul>
<i>
... many consumers of CentOS Stream are people who transitioned away from bug-for-bug clones and who now contribute by providing useful bugs reports and/or code to CentOS Stream.
</i>
</ul>
Is there actually evidence of this, and are these bug reports making a meaningful difference? (Genuine question -- I haven't checked CentOS Stream bug reports). If indeed it's true, CentOS Stream would be providing value to Red Hat, which would hopefully offset the damage caused by OpenELA.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 14:08 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Yes - I see contributions to CentOS Stream and to ELN (the upstream of CentOS Stream) coming from my former employer, and I've never worked for Red Hat. From what I can tell from the outside, these are genuinely useful contributions, too, not just "foo doesn't work" type of reports.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 14:02 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> CentOS Stream is ostensibly meant as an intermediary between Fedora and RHEL, as part of the pipeline for developing and stabilizing RHEL releases (major and minor)

Not quite. "EL Next" (ELN) is the intermediate step between Fedora and RHEL. CentOS Stream is a rolling release distro of what will the next RHEL point release, with each update going through RH's full QA pipeline.

ELN (public) -> Stream boostrap (internal) -> Stream + RHEL .0 release (public)

After the .0 release, subsequent .X releases are snapshotted/branched from the current state of Stream.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 15:04 UTC (Mon) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link] (2 responses)

I would not characterize Ubuntu as a community distribution. How many non-canonical employees decide the direction of the distro, what is packaged in each release, and perform QA?

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 6, 2023 15:11 UTC (Mon) by jhoblitt (subscriber, #77733) [Link]

I also would not consider centos steam a community project as it completely controlled by a for-profit enterprise. Fedora is kind of a hybrid in that several key positions are appointed by (and employees of) RedHat but there is significant technical decisions making driven by project members external to RedHat.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 11:35 UTC (Tue) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445) [Link]

    I would not characterize Ubuntu as a community distribution. How many non-canonical employees decide the direction of the distro, what is packaged in each release, and perform QA?

Each Ubuntu release is essentially a snapshot of Debian unstable at a particular point of time. Ubuntu may add a bit of sprinkling here and there, but much (if not the majority) of the direction setting and QA has already been "done" at the snapshot stage (via Debian processes and policies) by volunteers and organizations supporting Debian.

The additional QA for Ubuntu LTS releases is also mainly done by volunteers (i.e. the users). When LTS version (N).04.0 is released, users of LTS version (N-1).04.x are not automatically prompted to upgrade. Instead, Canonical waits until "enough" bugs have been reported and shaken out, then releases LTS version (N).04.1, and then finally allows upgrades from version (N-1).04.x. In other words, each Ubuntu (N).04.0 LTS release is in fact a public beta release, all while Canonical pretends it's not.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 3:34 UTC (Tue) by calumapplepie (guest, #143655) [Link] (5 responses)

> There are already 2 community "EL" distros that compete with RHEL: (1) Debian LTS and (2) Ubuntu LTS, both of which ship a ton of code developed and/or checked by Red Hat (i.e. indirectly paid for by subscriptions to RHEL).

I disagree with the implication that Ubuntu and Debian are Red Hat supported. Yes, Red Hat spends a ton of time and money on LTS for software. So does Canonical. So do Debian developers. Determining who spends the most would be really hard; Debian devs support obscure architectures that nobody else does, Canonical is a whole blown competitor to Red Hat, etc. Implying that either of those would not exist were it not for Red Hat is a bit silly.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 11:56 UTC (Tue) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445) [Link] (4 responses)

    I disagree with the implication that Ubuntu and Debian are Red Hat supported (...) Implying that either of those would not exist were it not for Red Hat is a bit silly.

Eh? No such implication was made. In the hypothetical scenario where Red Hat never existed, Debian and Ubuntu may still exist, but would almost certainly not be as good as they are now.

Debian and Ubuntu contain a truckload of software developed and/or checked by Red Hat, simply by the virtue of Red Hat widely participating in the open source / free software ecosystem (e.g. via Fedora and upstream contributions to many projects). Red Hat's participation is paid for by RHEL subscriptions (support contracts).

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 18:21 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (3 responses)

It also works the other way round - Red Hat probably wouldn't have run on anything other than i386 / amd64 were it not for Debian bootstrapping 32 bit and 64 bit ARM, for example, and Debian still
maintains ports for other machine types.

Debian is also the upstream for several projects. Numbers of packages is not necessarily a metric
but the Debian package universe comfortably dwarfs RHEL and EPEL together, I think.

[Full disclosure: I'm a Debian developer and have been a sysadmin for many years - there's a *reason*
my home machines and hosting all runs Debian :) ]

LWN no longer maintains the Distributions list but relative popularity of Debian-derived vs. Red Hat derived distributions is instructive.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 20:24 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Really? I cannot recollect any Debian developer defining how aarch64 should look like. But I remember few Red Hat developers, Jon Masters being the most prominent one.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 21:12 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> LWN no longer maintains the Distributions list but relative popularity of Debian-derived vs. Red Hat derived distributions is instructive.

And the ones that are neither ... ?

Slackware may not have the numbers, but it still has quite some mindshare. The Gentoo family ...

And of course there's SUSE which, while it now uses RPM, it predates Red Hat ...

Cheers,
Wol

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 7, 2023 21:39 UTC (Tue) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]

Gentoo and Arch derivatives (as ChromeOS and Steam Deck) seem to be more popular than any other s.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 14, 2023 13:25 UTC (Tue) by durikmel (subscriber, #162032) [Link] (1 responses)

OpenELA intends to be providing both, but is focusing on bug for bug compatibilty at the moment. See https://github.com/openela/governance/blob/main/contribut... for details.

"technical steering committee" for a project that does no engineering of their own

Posted Nov 14, 2023 14:02 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

That document seems to more or less say three things:

1) Pull patches from upstream EL (ie RHEL or CentOS Stream).
2) When that's not possible, contribute changes to upstream first (ie CentOS Stream)
3) Anything that's not already upstream will be handled in a TBD manner.

...In other words, they only intend to accept changes already vetted by Red Hat QA. (So much to providing their own QA resources...)

That said, they also have a "-contrib" repository for ABI-incompatible modifications to upstream packages or packages that don't exist upstream in RHEL/CentOS already. It remains to be seen what this repo (and their governance therof) will offer that existing EL add-on repos (eg EPEL, RPMFusion, etc) do not. Also noteworthy is that there's zero promises made about ABI (or any other form of) stability for -contrib stuff.

Lots of high-minded rhetoric here, but in the end, it's still just a 1:1 rebuild of RHEL, and still lacks any concrete details on how they're going to handle updates between the five-year delta between the EOL of CentOS Stream X and RHEL X. (For free. Since that's the _only_ thing its prospective users actually care about...)

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2023 10:03 UTC (Sat) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link] (6 responses)

CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE should at least donate a ton of money to Fedora, which is upstream of all this stuff, to have any respect in the community.

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 4, 2023 14:14 UTC (Sat) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE should at least donate a ton of money to Fedora, which is upstream of all this stuff, to have any respect in the community.

It's not "money" that's needed per se; instead what's needed is reliable developers that do the actual work.

I can only imagine the difference it would make if the dozen or so people on that "technical steering committee" were paid by these companies to work full-time on Fedora (or even CentOS Stream) instead.

That way they can have an actual technical influence on the development of RHEL (and thus "EL"), and would ironically far better support their own mission statement in the process, both in the core "EL" but also "extras", most of which currently come via Fedora!

Red Hat got where they are today (and stay there!) because *they pay people to do the work* to make it happen (publicly, in ELN, CentOS and Fedora) and *pay people to do the work* of supporting it for a decade afterwards.

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2023 23:06 UTC (Sun) by jccleaver (guest, #127418) [Link] (4 responses)

The Fedora project is part of the *problem* with what's happened to Enterprise Linux over the years, as a not-insignificant amount of instability has resulted from poor planning, the replacement of functioning code with dysfunctional systemd code, and an obliviousness to the longer term needs of downstream users.

Frankly, the entire RedHat ecosystem could have done with an inversion, to mirror how the Debian universe works, where the "core" stable system is community-driven and the faster-moving, more fragile, and desktop focused distros build off of that. Instead, in RH-land, server admins have to deal with dumb Fedora decisions for years that have trickled down from years prior and are far too late to undo. And even when Fedora *has* reverted to sanity (eg, Modularity), the nature of long-term releases means EL users are stuck with it.

I'd prefer to see something OpenELA take direct control over the steering of the Rawhide repository, while Fedora hangs off of that and does whatever its Workstation users think is necessary, and RHEL does its certification and special sauce downstream of either (or both)... But I'm glad to see OpenELA take these first steps.

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2023 6:50 UTC (Mon) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

> I'd prefer to see something OpenELA take direct control over the steering of the Rawhide repository,

Not going to happen; OpenELA doesn't want to actually make engineering choices.

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2023 11:40 UTC (Mon) by rolexhamster (guest, #158445) [Link]

    ... to mirror how the Debian universe works ...

Why should Red Hat do that? If you disagree with the directions taken by Red Hat, and prefer Debian (the OS) and/or how the Debian development process works, why not just simply use Debian (or Ubuntu) in the first place?

If you want super long term support in the Debian "universe", you can either pay Canonical (Ubuntu) for the service, or contribute to Debian LTS efforts. It's that simple.

Otherwise all your arguments end up sounding rather privileged.

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 6, 2023 13:32 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> And even when Fedora *has* reverted to sanity (eg, Modularity), the nature of long-term releases means EL users are stuck with it.

Modularity was a case of the tail wagging the dog, actually. RH pushed for it in Fedora (and did all of the work!) because they wanted it in an upcoming RHEL release, and Fedora is RHEL's upstream.

Missing donation to Fedora

Posted Nov 7, 2023 3:36 UTC (Tue) by calumapplepie (guest, #143655) [Link]

I have never heard "the tail wagging the dog", but I love it and will be adopting this dog. Thank you.

OpenELA's first code drop

Posted Nov 10, 2023 14:59 UTC (Fri) by carlosrodfern (subscriber, #166486) [Link]

That is unfortunate. With all, the AlmaLinux and Rocky user community is thriving, while the CentOS Stream is only in their small SIGs niche, and the general distro community doesn’t take off.


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