Given what Red Hat and the CentOS project did to CentOS 8 I have no desire to use RHEL ever again. Right now it's just Ubuntu LTS and Debian for my needs. Working on eliminating RHEL at work as well, wherever I can.
Yep. We got burned out on the lies RHEL8 pushed to serious orgs (utilities, gov agencies, etc.) around podman readiness & replaceability over docker. I'm glad people are getting their bonuses and good for docker to have competition, but don't abuse your trusted advisor & monopoly position to mess with societal infrastructure and the admins keeping it going. Before we promoted other OS's for our AI users as a matter of general GPU readiness but were game for supporting RHEL, but now we actively recommend against it as too untrustworthy going forward.
What is a few clickthroughs for the owner of a home box or regular co box can be weeks for teams or even a deal breaker in critical envs that are locked down. The money people know where the money comes from when making strategic decisions of what to make easy vs hard.
They made docker hard for regulated environments while making their broken competitor built-in and then marketed theirs as a replacement. This incurs all sorts of costs in schedule + $$$ + reliability where teams are pushed to figuring out if podman works in their case ("why wouldn't it?") + when not, start over with an unnecessarily complicated round of change management steps for enabling docker from centos7.
RHEL/IBM are allowed to use their trusted OS position to be anti-competitive and overall non-neutral for above-OS layers, and to the clear harm of customer. But I am also allowed to say we shouldn't trust & tolerate such a provider for vendor-neutral infra in regulated environments. Secure infra is important and podman is pushing docker on important areas here, so it's been disappointing to see the one-step-forward two-steps-back.
I spent a fair bit of time trying to move to the podman ecosystem and rootless containers before deciding it wasn't ready for production in RHEL 8. I was used to RHEL being more, well, stable and wasn't expecting them to be pushing premature software (that is Fedora's job), so I was disappointed at the state. I would probably have been more upset if RedHat's misleading marketing had convinced higher-ups like the CTO, and I had to push back against directions from above, but investigating it and rejecting it was solely my decision so it wasn't a big deal.
At least Debian cannot and will never be bought, will always be there, has an army of contributors (some of them kernel developers), and is basically the only enterprise grade free distribution.
Now just add some RHEL/CentOS containers on top where needed and forget about the RH lock-in.
So if a non-IP-lawyer reads the redistribution terms of the RH Universal Base Images, there are some very dubious implications in there, such as #22 and #42.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/ubi-faq#
Has anyone done a third party analysis of their EULA? My org, an ISV, may need some legal cycles to avoid stepping in this trap.
I'd be just fine avoiding UBI because of that, but there are some orgs whose security posture demands only UBI images are allowed in their domain so ISV's may be forced to pay to play.
#22 and #42 is how they try to prevent people from adding RPMs from mainstream RHEL. I have seen GitHub repos owned by RH employees that have containers files that require you to attach entitlement cert and the Red Hat cdn repo to install additional packages. It doesn’t violate EULA because they aren’t distributing the image.
RH knows people will try to abuse the free UBI image and install RPMs they shouldn’t be.
I work with Red Hat Partners so I know these rules well.
Yeah, they are base images devoid of copyright/trademark assets like artwork or whatever, and so it goes... just a platform to layer around. Like you wrote the first thing many people want or need, is to layer other RHEL packages, or if the software lacks many dependencies then the ISV just integrates their own software over top, then packages that layer themselves...
> I'd be just fine avoiding UBI because of that, but there are some orgs whose security posture demands only UBI images are allowed in their domain so ISV's may be forced to pay to play.
That seems fine IMO; use free OSs wherever possible, but if customers want RHEL just pass the cost through and let them deal with it.
It would be quite nice to see Debian adopt a longer term release model. In a lot of environments that was the deciding factor for RHEL/CentOS. A stable OS with security support for a decade.
The current Debian release cycle is closer to 2 years which means a big increase in testing and OS upgrade cycles.
Oh, I see. Yes, that's true, although it would take a rather lot of resources; for a decade of support, you basically need devs who can support each package in the distro independently of upstream. Still, if you're willing to pay for it I expect there are companies who will offer that support.
That, or, package maintainers could decide to maintain their packages for 10+ years. That at least distributes the workload among the package maintainers. Unfortunately, most package maintainers don't like spending time backporting bug fixes etc. and would rather be making shiny new releases (and can you blame them?)
Exactly; almost nobody wants to maintain old versions like that. For most people, the fun part is writing new stuff, and maintaining old stuff without breaking backwards compatibility is particularly annoying to put up with. I certainly couldn't blame anyone, particularly who was just publishing software for free, for not wanting to deal with all that.
CentOS 8 was supposed to be supported into 2029. Approximately a year or so after being released that was changed and would only be supported into 2021.
Many people in the CentOS community, even RHEL employees, tried to play it off like they never meant to support it so long, but some time after the announcement they confirmed they did indeed strip away 8 years of the planned support.
This burned a lot of people that had already started deploying systems using CentOS 8 into Production. A lot of time and money has been spent by many people, organizations, and companies rectifying this situation.
Additionally, CentOS has become "CentOS Stream" and no longer is 1:1 with RHEL and considered stable. It's an in-between Fedora (bleeding edge) and RHEL (boring and stable), which means things might change or break, etc... which is sort of the opposite of what your typical CentOS user wanted. Really a missed mark from IBM/RH.
This led to several CentOS replacement distros, including Rocky Linux (made by many original CentOS people), AlmaLinux and others. Both Rocky and Alma are supporting 8.x for 10 years, prompting many CentOS users to switch over.
As I understand it, this is an incorrect representation of what Stream is. Unfortunately I rarely see this misconception corrected.
Stream is only "between" fedora and RedHat until RHEL X.0 is released.
For instance, once RHEL 9.0 development branched from fedora 34,
Stream 9 became the upstream and just ahead of all further RHEL 9.X releases, and doesn't depend on fedora anymore.
Furthermore all Stream rpms undergo the exact same RHEL testing and quality validation chain than proper RHEL packages.
As such by using Stream 9, you are arguably receiving the bug fixes that are eventually going into RHEL 9 proper, just in advance a bit.
RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.
Yeah, Red Hat is actually moving the black box of releasing-engineering out in the wide open, for anybody to replicate, and see how the sausage is made.
CentOS Stream would be a perfectly suitable alternative to RHEL9, and in many ways more desirable. And, in a strange way all those people who were being super conservative... more attracted to centos being behind RHEL, as if that made CentOS more stable by being slightly behind... well, that's RHEL now. So.. uh.. maybe just use RHEL instead, since it's now even more conservative? Also, it's important to recognize during all the drama, Red Hat changed their licensing to be pretty much free for small to medium sized operations. So the argument of being cheap, or whatever free value of CentOS is now entirely gone... Red Hat only cares to license from the medium to large.
> RedHat engineers have argued that keeping up to date would amount to effectively running a faster fixed (less buggy overall) OS than RHEL.
Wow, what a remarkable offering; they give free users even better service than their paying customers! It's so benevolent of them to give such amazing service away and definitely not use this totally-better product as a beta to ship updates before it gets to the stable users.
/s
Edit: Seriously, though; if a company has 2 almost-identical products and claims that the free product is equal or better than the free product, they're either lying to the free users or defrauding the paying users.
The people who pay for RHEL want the stability. So a faster-updating OS is technically superior but requires more regular testing & development work from the customer side.
The people using CentOS also wanted the stability. And if RH had added Stream as an option, that would have been totally reasonable and a great move. It was the way they killed the stable version while proclaiming that Stream was totally a good replacement that was disingenuous, because it was not a replacement for "as stable as RHEL without cost".
One thing that hasn't been clear to me about CentOS Stream is if it is possible to determine that the repos at this instant are identical to a given RHEL minor release (and possibly stay there temporarily). For example, if I have a non-production system running CentOS Stream 8 so I can test out changes to RHEL earlier, can I be confident that testing on a certain date will be applicable to the next RHEL release when it comes out, or do I still need to test on RHEL separately when it is released?
My understanding is the the stream repo sorta rolls forward but leaves behind a trail of X.Y.Z checkpoint repos representing major.minor.batch-number, so that would be like rhel-9.1.0 for the zero-day batch of updates on rhel-9.1
CentOS Streams is the next X-Release of RHEL. I work with RH Partners and we use Streams as a test platform before we move to QE on Beta and RC builds.
This has been refuted by RH many times. You want to be upset they took away CentOS, that is your choice but spreading incorrect information about Streams is simply misleading.
For the few systems I upgraded to CentOS 8 back before it was killed, I switched them to Rocky Linux (Alma's also a good choice).
I'm still waiting a bit longer to see whether I'll keep my toes in the RHEL-ecosystem-waters, or if I finish moving everything to Ubuntu LTS and Debian.
My understanding is that CentOS as we once knew it (the freely-distributable rebuild of EL 7 and earlier) withered away because its creator and primary maintainer was hired by Red Hat. There was a clear conflict of interest at that point, and Red Hat probably wasn't going to keep paying him to maintain a project in perpetuity that ate into their bottom line.
So it's not so much that RHEL tried to strong-arm third-party rebuilders of Enterprise Linux - and I don't think it's in their culture to try - but people involved in these projects are always at risk of being bought out. Volunteering for open source can be a lot of work.
How is it so different?
It's still less bleeding edge than Fedora.
It always makes me feel people are making such a big fuss about it being slightly ahead of RHEL than slightly behind which has the benefit of having fixes earlier than RHEL.
If you got a problem, you could always pay for RHEL.
Giving up completely on technical competence and using a properly maintained distro? Debian/Ubuntu may be useful for harmless hobby users, but certainly not for anything serious.
IMHO Debian and Ubuntu are more harmful than Redhat
The word "Microsoft" appears 12 times in this press release.
I always thought Microsoft would end up acquiring Red Hat, but IBM did it instead. Now I think they'll acquire Canonical. I think it's only a matter of time before we'll have a Microsoft Linux.
Microsoft's linux platforms presently run mostly on Ubuntu. You're right that one way out of that dependency would be to buy Canonical. They chose to make their own top level Linux distro instead.
I half suspect Microsoft was bidding for Red Hat, and potentially that provoked IBM into action. It's just a theory, but Red Hat for many years was setup to avoid hostile takeovers from the likes of IBM with so called poison pill stocks or whatever.
to be fair and try to dismiss your comment, it does seem the word Microsoft has been associated a lot with opensource companies and technologies lately.
To give MS credit, they are _much_ more friendly to open source than I ever believed they could be. I think the popularity of Linux and Mac for web/cloud development (which is almost entirely based around open source code) more or less forced their hand.
It’s a shock to me as well. I do think this direction leads to more revenue for them long term though. Clearly the Windows desktop isn’t quite enough for their future plans so they’ve got to play nice with emerging platforms, or something. (Sounds more like 2013 logic but you get the idea…)
I thought 8 was relatively recent, I only started moving on to it. I am out of the loop, I do not know what I am missing out on in the latest 9 update and kernel. I moved on to mac/brew on the desktop 5 years ago. I use it as UNIX with supported hardware.
Redhat is my favorite Linux distro for my workstation. It just works and is rock solid. I wish they had a node locked license option like windows pro workstation,https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-10-pro-for-worksta..., for $300-500 for a major version instead of always having to manage subscriptions.
When RedHat officially supported a piece of hardware, and your large enterprise software officially supported RedHat, it was a pretty good setup.
Lots of things which are otherwise a mess in Linux just weren't.
Of course much of my experience on this was with things like $10k per seat software on a $5k workstation or similar.
One of the reasons containerization is so popular is poorly supported software (on ubuntu mostly) just being broken and hard to work with combined with a pretty bad way to write and manage packages (apt).
Yes, have done DEB and RPM and Docker and Makefiles with `make install` and IMO the differences for a packager are pretty minimal and not worth having a holy war over.
Anyone smart enough to manage one format can probably manage any of them.
I have a legitimate question. How big is "desktop" Linux to RHEL (or Ubuntu, etc.) bottom line?
I ran RHEL 7 and 8 workstation when I used to work in engineering / science (not development or comp sci.) and used specialty simulation software and did a lot of Windows emulation via Virtualbox and programming in Octave and Mathematica. I really did enjoy RHEL workstation, and GNOME was a good daily driver. Lot of packages for RHEL (especially with rpm fusion + fusion tainted), although some can be very old. I used it for my 9-5, and even ran a laptop with CentOS. Without the need for specialty simulators, I've converted to the Apple world, though.
Server subscriptions pays the bills for RHEL (governments, banks, large companies, etc.). Is there a real market for "workstation?" Do they development a graphical OS as a community project? Anyone know the future of it? Are there enough paying customers at Universities and defense contractors using workstation that justify development of GNOME, Evolution, graphical programs, etc.?
I have no insider info, this is just what I think.
The Linux desktop is Red Hat's complement in the sense of commoditizing their complement. They don't actually care about it as such, but it needs to exist and they want it to be dirt cheap and highly available so it will drive customers to the products they do care about. Without it, they're just selling a grab bag of server/CLI/web-based tools that require a fleet of Windows or Mac desktops to manage, a very different value proposition to being a complete IT solution.
One thing RHEL's GUI does is make RHEL more real in the minds of prospective purchasers of RHEL server licenses.
Windows has a big advantage: the prospect has probably personally used the product. Although Red Hat's attempt to replicate that advantage has failed (i.e., the vast majority of IT executives still run Windows on their personal computers), it remains the case that it is advantageous if the RHEL salesman can pull out a laptop running RHEL and show it to the prospect. "Show, don't tell," I believe is a saying among salesmen.
Also, if the salesman's laptop is running RHEL, that is an costly signal to the prospect that Red Hat believes in its product enough to use it to support the IT needs of its salesmen. It is more persuasive than having the saleman tell the prospect, "Yes, my laptop runs Windows, admittedly, but it is communicating with a RHEL server, where all the data I need for my job is actually kept."
CentOS 8 is already dead, thanks to their latest changes.
Red Hat gets paid for RHEL 8, they can pay someone to port stuff to Python 2 for their customers if they want it, but I believe the default python there is 3.6, with just an option to install 2.7 if you want it.
I always thought Rocky (and the old CentOS) would be simply an exactly copy of RHEL with the trademarked text and images removed, but "we also continue to work on Rocky 9", contradicts that.
Are there release notes available? What I’d really like to know is what has changed from 8? There’s usually a few major changes with the major version bump, so that’s what I was hoping to find here (or really linked from the press release, but I couldn’t find it).
