Red Hat Now Limiting RHEL Sources To CentOS Stream

[RAINFIRE]

Rocky Linux (and relatives) should start ramping up some kind of paid support, come RHEL 10, there might be a market opening to snag up some customers.

They already do through their CIQ corporate sponsor and have the CIQ portal built already. Same for Canonical, also why I have no use for them or their "snack packs" or any other corporate "OWNED" Linux.

That's why I use Alma Linux & Debian & other free distro's only. These are just my opinions; no need to flame me if you LOVE #CORPORATE.

[Barley9432]

Also I wonder what the situation is with SUSE Linux Enterprise. I'm not aware of any free version of that, neither a free license for individuals, nor a free clone like Alma for RHEL.

openSUSE.

[Estranged1906]

openSUSE.

Not really a clone. Leap has a shorter support period and more packages. I'd say Leap is more comparable to CentOS.

[rene]

thank God we stlll have https://cleanlinux.com

[dragon321]

First they ended CentOS project (CentOS Stream is different thing) and now they are making providing alternative more difficult. I hope AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux will be able to continue their work. If not then I will need to move away from Red Hat family. I wonder how well openSUSE would be able to fill the gap?

[mirmirmir]

This does put smile on my face

[michaelo2]

Rocky Linux (and relatives) should start ramping up some kind of paid support, come RHEL 10, there might be a market opening to snag up some customers.

The problem with Rocky and relatives is that they need to be a 1:1 copy of RHEL, bug-to-bug. Red Hat invests, a lot, to produce and support RHEL and Rocky just repacks it but they've little room to innovate. It's true that with CentOS Stream they can contribute back to RHEL and thus to Rocky.

If that business would be around support, then again Rocky and the rest would be behind RHEL. No access to the engineers, partners and all the internal knowledge would make them to have a sub-par support service.

[Sonadow]

well... this is a bad move.

Bad because distributions like Oracle, Scientific, Rocky and Alma can no longer freeload off Red Hat's development efforts.

Now that's a fucking good thing to me.

The only people who are pissed off at this are those who wanted to freeload off RHEL without paying a cent.

[skeevy420]

what about GPL? https://access.redhat.com/articles/5112

Isn't GPL about publishing the sources and modifications of the software used?

If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

Basically, GPL'd sources can be behind a paywall. As long as the intended customers have access, that's good enough.

[Tsuroerusu]

Not really a clone. Leap has a shorter support period and more packages. I'd say Leap is more comparable to CentOS.

Leap literally uses the exact same binary packages from SLE (Not even just the sources, but the binaries even!). If you installed Leap and limited yourself to only using packages also in SLE, the only difference are the package containing the logo files etc. In addition to that, they roll in PackageHub (This is SUSE's EPEL equivalent) and some community packages, but you could just not use those if you wanted the true SLE experience just with a different logo. Point releases of Leap mirror the Service Packs for SLE, e.g. on the 6th of June, Leap 15.5 came out and yesterday, the 20th of June, SLE 15 SP5 came out. So in a sense, you are correct in that it is not a clone, it literally is SLE.