AMD Now Backing AlmaLinux As This Increasingly Popular RHEL/CentOS Alternative

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Now Backing AlmaLinux As This Increasingly Popular RHEL/CentOS Alternative

AMD is now among the latest companies backing the AlmaLinux OS Foundation for that increasingly popular free build derived from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources now that CentOS 8 is end-of-life...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Joins-AlmaLinux

[kpedersen]

If you go to the Rocky Linux webpage, you will also see a section "Backed by" with many of the same companies. I guess many are just backing both until they can jump ship to the clear victor.

Admittedly I am more on the side of Rocky Linux. I believe the alternative is too close to a commercial company (CloudLinux Inc) which means they will start to think of sleazy ways to extract money sooner or later.

[RahulSundaram]

Admittedly I am more on the side of Rocky Linux. I believe the alternative is too close to a commercial company (CloudLinux Inc) which means they will start to think of sleazy ways to extract money sooner or later.

If you believe that association with a corporate entity is always bad, then any RHEL rebuild is always going to be tied to Red Hat which is a commercial organization. Having said that, it is worth nothing that Alma Linux is setup as a 501c6 non-profit while Rocky is setup as a public benefit corporation. If you are worried about bad actors, I am not sure one has a significant benefit over the other in preventing that.

[lowlands]

Admittedly I am more on the side of Rocky Linux. I believe the alternative is too close to a commercial company (CloudLinux Inc) which means they will start to think of sleazy ways to extract money sooner or later.

So was I until I figured out that RockyLinux is actually owned by a company while AlmaLinux is owned by the Community through the AlmaLinux OS Foundation which is a 501 (c) (6) non-profit. On the Board of Directors of that foundation there is one person from CloudLinux out of five seats. See https://wiki.almalinux.org/Transparency.html

Now compare that with RockyLinux. From their own site (bold by me): The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) formed in Delaware (file number 4429978). The RESF was founded and is owned by Gregory Kurtzer. See https://rockylinux.org/organizational-structure/

Would you rather have one person control your distro or a proper foundation with a proper Board of Directors with a proper Community member majority?

[kpedersen]

If you believe that association with a corporate entity is always bad, then any RHEL rebuild is always going to be tied to Red Hat which is a commercial organization.

To an extent, yes I do believe that their upstream being associated with Red Hat (and certainly IBM) is a little flaky. Don't get me wrong, fantastic progress but flaky in terms of openness and future community input.

However downstream aren't that tied to them. For example, if Red Hat disappeared tomorrow, both Alma and Rocky could carry on. The upstream vendor wouldn't be able to stop them (unless of course it bought AlmaLinux or Rocky out and broke it by turning it into a rolling release tech demo).

That said, CentOS was originally a community project and that didn't quite protect it so I suppose my bias is unfounded.

A board or a single man.... Hmm, what is better? I suppose a board tends to be more likely to dehumanise and chase money (similar to pack mentality in the wild). But a single man is not ideal either because they can suddenly decide to do crazy things rather than have to sway a majority.

Edit: And I suppose a meritocracy is no good either because a bunch of paid guys can be injected into a project by a commercial vendor with an agenda.
100% community vote is no good either because many don't quite understand the specific problems needing to be solved outside of default background wallpaper and superficial things like that.

[cjcox]

If you go to the Rocky Linux webpage, you will also see a section "Backed by" with many of the same companies. I guess many are just backing both until they can jump ship to the clear victor.

Admittedly I am more on the side of Rocky Linux. I believe the alternative is too close to a commercial company (CloudLinux Inc) which means they will start to think of sleazy ways to extract money sooner or later.

Or like CentOS (original), they are "cheap" and could be bought by someone "evil". Though I know Rocky Linux (this time) has tried to make that less achievable.

[RahulSundaram]

However downstream aren't that tied to them. For example, if Red Hat disappeared tomorrow, both Alma and Rocky could carry on. The upstream vendor wouldn't be able to stop them (unless of course it bought AlmaLinux or Rocky out and broke it by turning it into a rolling release tech demo).

If Red Hat disappears tomorrow, realistically the rebuilds wouldn't exist, rebuilding is work but is nowhere near the effort to produce the software in the first place. There is a lot of backporting work done by upstream developers here. CentOS stream isn't a rolling release tech demo either, it is used by large organizations in production capacity and there are SIGS with significant non Red Hat and volunteer participation.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

So was I until I figured out that RockyLinux is actually owned by a company while AlmaLinux is owned by the Community through the AlmaLinux OS Foundation which is a 501 (c) (6) non-profit. On the Board of Directors of that foundation there is one person from CloudLinux out of five seats. See https://wiki.almalinux.org/Transparency.html

Now compare that with RockyLinux. From their own site (bold by me): The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) formed in Delaware (file number 4429978). The RESF was founded and is owned by Gregory Kurtzer. See https://rockylinux.org/organizational-structure/

Would you rather have one person control your distro or a proper foundation with a proper Board of Directors with a proper Community member majority?

what about euro-linux ?

[lowlands]

what about euro-linux ?

I don't know euro-linux. On their website it says that it's a company.

[anarki2]

I ended up switching to Fedora Server. More frequent releases, but it's been a rock solid ride so far nevertheless.