AlmaLinux 9.2 Released As Free Alternative To Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2

[RAINFIRE]

other viable options are RockyLinux or OracleLinux.

Ahem... To clarify a bit. AlmaLinux is organized under a non-profit where Rocky & Oracle are under corporate control. AlmaLinux is the only one for me in RHEL compatible distro's.

[RahulSundaram]

Ahem... To clarify a bit. AlmaLinux is organized under a non-profit where Rocky & Oracle are under corporate control. AlmaLinux is the only one for me in RHEL compatible distro's.

It is a lot more nuanced than that.

Rocky and Oracle are very different from each other. Rocky governance is describe here. Tldr: Rocky is a public benefit corporation which unlike traditional corporations do not have to maximize revenue and can pursue a social cause. Alma is also not a 501c(3), instead they are a 501c(6), in other words an industry consortium, not a typical non-profit foundation.

[RAINFIRE]

It is a lot more nuanced than that.

Rocky and Oracle are very different from each other. Rocky governance is describe here. Tldr: Rocky is a public benefit corporation which unlike traditional corporations do not have to maximize revenue and can pursue a social cause. Alma is also not a 501c(3), instead they are a 501c(6), in other words an industry consortium, not a typical non-profit foundation.

After all that, why leave out the links to Almalinux structure. Though corporate structure may be as you state. as per its incorporation, Almalinux is clearly a non-profit under its By-laws also here is their Transparency statement here. Oracle & Rocky are clearly not bound by non-profit rules.

A bunch of legalese b.s. which corrupts #FOSS. Alma is the non-profit. Just like Canonical lords over Ubuntu, so do Oracle & Rocky lord over their distributions and are not bound by non-profit rules and indeed CIQ (Rocky) & Oracle both offer support just like Redhat which is the whole purpose of avoiding RHEL in the first place.

I do not wish to argue Corporate vs Non-Profit further. Each my choose his own distribution.

[RahulSundaram]

After all that, why leave out the links to Almalinux structure. Though corporate structure may be as you state. as per its incorporation, Almalinux is clearly a non-profit under its By-laws . Oracle & Rocky are clearly not bound by non-profit rules.

If you care about governance, the specific type of non-profit or profit matters and your response doesn't address that. 501C(6) foundations like Almalinux or Linux foundation are setup to be an industry consortium that coordinate between primarily commercial organizations under a single structure. "Non-profit rules" are nice for understanding tax benefits, otherwise they don't automatically imply they are any better than say, a public benefit corporation.

[evert_mouw]

Oracle needs to support customers that rely on speedy security updates. So I used their RHEL clone for a few of my VMs.
However I'm moving to Alpine...

[Estranged1906]

My feeling is that Alma has "won" the "war of succession" after CentOS was killed? It seems more popular than other RHEL clones like Rocky, Oracle, EuroLinux and so on, right?

[stack]

Greetings,
Full disclosure, I'm the Testing Team lead for Rocky Linux. It's a good thing that Alma and Rocky are taking different approaches (in a variety of ways). Our end goal of being 1:1 compatible with upstream is great for end-users. And that we do take different paths to get there is a good thing.

While there are reason why a non-profit is a good thing, one doesn't have to look any further at the community outrage going on right now with OpenAI moving from non-profit to for-profit. A non-profit is no guarantee for long-term community interest and there are no "rules" that prevent non-profits from going "bad". I am NOT saying that will happen to Alma (I really REALLY hope it doesn't) - but one can't use that as a metric for long-term health of a project.

We took a LOT of feedback from a LOT of sources before trying a For Public Benefit route - which is a path not often taken. The RESF is hoping that this less taken path will be long-term good for FOSS. And we hope we can prove that by releasing EVERYTHING we absolutely can as Open Source. ANYONE can take our build tools and replicate everything we are doing (we have had community build Peridot just for exploration). We are also extremely active in contributing upstream the bugs and feedback we get.

The RESF will prove if this path works by our actions and by how well we support the community going forward.

It's a good thing Alma went the non-profit route. But I also think it's a good thing Rocky is taking a different path as well.

Lastly, I disagree that any EL distro has "won" and honestly I think that's a bad metric which would be bad for the EL community. However, the Enterprise Linux community has won because there are multiple distros. A lot of people were placed in a bad position when CentOS did what they did. The user base for Rocky, Alma, Clear, Springdale, Navy, Euro, VMLinux, Oracle (... and I think I'm missing a few ) proves that there are a lot of users who don't like CentOS' decision. However, now they have a choice. And if any of the mentioned EL projects are no longer viable, it's trivial to switch to whatever other EL projects are still going. The EL community has clearly "won" - which is a good thing.

But if you want stats, look at EPEL. It isn't perfect and it's not super accurate, but it's one of the best metrics for the health of the EL eco-system and those stats are made public. And those stats show that there are a number of healthy EL projects available.

https://rocky-stats.tiuxo.com/