Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "Alma Linux Has A Very Rocky Red Hat Future" video.

  1. obviously you did not watch the video you are commenting on, where it clearly stated that alma actively support an architecture not supported by red hat
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  2. it is worse than that, statements from the eula and red hat employees make it clear that even if you have a valid reason for having a developer license, they reserve the right to decide that even using one of the machines as a print server as part of that purpose gives the authority to decide you do not qualify, and come in and audit you for how many licenses they think they deserve paying for. this makes the value of the dev license almost zero due to future liability risks.
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  3. the point is that you use fedora if you want red hat tooling in a non enterprise distro so you can use the same it staff to support both. the problem with red hat and their scorched earth policies towards existing classes of customers that they do not see the value of is that not only does it diminish the value of rhel, but also of non enterprise upstream.
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  4.  @LuluTheCorgi  because the reason oracle linux exists in the first place was that red hat did not want to support their needs, so just paying them does not get them support, and requires them to sign the dodgy eula which stops them from getting support any other way. in this case using the lawyers would actually cost less.
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  5.  @fuseteam  no, the distributors are not just just rebrands, they are supporting customers who red hat have decided they do not want to support, and thus are not costing red hat anything. it is the same broken argument that every customer not paying us for stuff that we do not do would just start paying us if only we could find a way of forcing them. also, when these companies produce a fix for a problem red hat does not support, it gets pushed upstream, either to stream, or the original project, or both.
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  6.  @fuseteam  you seem very set on the idea that every provider downstream of redhat is just a rebrand, which just is not true. there were whole classes of people who were only using redhat and their derivatives because redhat as part of their marketing said that if you need enterprise timescales, then use us as your stable base and do respins and derivatives based on us. that is what centos was. people are annoyed because redhat promissed 10 year support for centos 8, then ended it after only 1 year, while people were still migrating to it. even worse, they gave almost no warning. as to the derivatives, each exists for a specific reason, and supports customers redhat no longer wishes to support. clear linux is for an all intel hardware stack. rocky linux is for centos users where the move to rhel is not an option. scientific linux was a cantos derivative with extra software which was needed mainly in places like fermilab and cern. oracle linux needed specific optimisations which made running their databases better. others were used for embedded systems and infrastructure, or for alternative architectures. pretty much all of these use cases were at one time actively supported by redhat or centos, and are now prohibited under their dodgy eula. even the case where the city of Munich needed to create a respin specifically for their 15000 seat council rollout to include extra software only they needed is now banned. redhat used an opencore approach in order to grow, and a use us as upstream approach to enter markets that were not otherwise open to them. it had the added benefit of not fragmenting the enterprise linux market much. unfortunately for them, not everyone can suddenly switch to paying them lots of money on short notice, and even more cannot afford the rat on your boss tactic made disreputable by microsoft and their enforcement arm the business software alliance. when you run a business, you make a profit, and then decide how much of it to invest in research and innovation. the current management at redhat seems to think that it should work the other way around, where they decide what needs doing and how fast, and then tries to force people who never needed to pay with their blessing to make up the shortfall. the current fracturing of the enterprise market is a direct consequence of this attitude, as is the percentage of redhat customers looking for ways not to be held hostage by the next silly move they make. these people who have forked rhel had a total right to do so as redhat had encouraged them to do it. lots of them do testing for scenarios redhat does not support, and then pushes those changes both to stream, and to the primary upstream developers so that they do not have to keep large patchsets supported out of tree. these patches and extra bug finding are then made available to rhel from either upstream directly, through fedora, centos, or derectly as patches to redhat. this is fundamentally how open source works, someone finds a problem, develops a fix, and sends it upstream, and then the downstream users get to us it without necessarily having a need for support. when support is needed, then they find a company who is responsive to their support needs, which redhat increasingly is not. redhat has now become just another entitled proprietary software company who happens to use lots of open source software to try and keep the costs down, while the management has forgotten this fact and decided to stop playing well with others. this has already come back to bite them, and will continue to do so.
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  7. by definition you cannot be bug compatible with rhel when working from stream. that is the entire point about the problem. centos used rhel sources minus branding. stream is rhel-next, which might be up to 1.5 years from being ready.
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  8. the point is that in an enterprise setting, just moving away is not a question of just reinstalling one machine, it can be a multi year job covering thousands of machines. this is why rocky came into existence, to support centos 8 customers screwed over by red hat deciding to cut short the support period. be assured that a lot of rhel customers are saying internally that given the failures of trustworthiness and predictability, can we afford to use red hat for our next project rollout.
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  9.  @klafbang  what they are admitting is looking for ways to get the code without signing the eula, and this not breaching the rules of the eula. every business big enough to need a legal department looks for the cheapest way to do this sort of thing, and then looks for alternatives, and that is legal.
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  10.  @MarkusEicher70  people have different needs, which leads to different choices. red hat built it's business on the basis of always open, and base yourself on us. later the accountants started to complain, and instead of reducing the developer headcount through natural churn, they decided to go on a money hunt, closing source access to a lot of people who believed them, thus causing the current problems. rocky, alma, parts of suse, oracle linux and clear linux exist to provide support to people left high and dry after red hat decided not to support the needs of those customers. as red hat is an enterprise platform, the support needs can be up to 10 years if you get a problem at the right part of the cycle. third party software is often only tested against red hat, so you either have to pay them the money and sign up to their dodgy eula, or use one of the derivatives. the open source mentality views access restrictions as damage and looks for ways around it. moving to other non derived distributions comes with added costs, as not all the choices are the same and the software you need might not be tested against those choices, so you have to do a lot of testing to make sure it works, then either fix it if you can get the source, or find alternatives. this adds costs, hence people getting annoyed.
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  11. ibm have a history of dumb moves, and still have corporate memory of the debacle of giving the pc market to microsoft. however it is clear from statements from red hat employees that the decisions are coming from the current management whose every action and statement shows that despite being in the linux ecosystem for over a decade, they have no idea how it works, or what it means to be an enterprise distro. talk about failing upwards.
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