Here is the actual article title:
CIQ, Oracle and SUSE Create Open Enterprise Linux Association for a Collaborative and Open Future
- New trade association brings together open source Enterprise Linux community
- It will provide an open process to access source code that organizations can use to build distributions compatible with RHEL
I’ve worked with SuSE on a collaborative enterprise linux before.
It was an unmitigated nightmare, and I’m convinced they killed Conectiva and Turbo.
What I just read: “Companies coming together to develop a new better Enterprise Linux solution with standards, etc.” which seems like a good thing.
What I also just read: “A bunch of companies that couldn’t create or maintain a Linux distribution on their own are joining forces to attempt to create a clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux offering.” which isn’t a good thing.
Serious question: Why would I get support from any of these companies? Don’t get me wrong, Oracle and Suse have very talented and valuable employees (I don’t know enough about CIQ but I’m sure they have smart people over there too!) that contribute to open source communities. But the message I just read is “Our current offerings are all inferior to RHEL”.
That is not a message to be celebrated.
Why is anyone celebrating this? If I were employed at any of these companies I would be worried about the future of my job. Am I missing something obvious?
I think you’re missing the point. Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don’t need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business. I don’t know why you think SUSE is unable to “create or maintain a Linux distribution,” they’re one of the oldest distros out there. SLES and SLED are extremely well regarded, and SUSE is doing further work/research into immutable server distros for the future. They certainly can “create a Linux distribution”. Oracle has a mixed history but certainly anyone could view them as successful overall.
No, what they’re actually doing is creating a clone for the downstream packagers so they aren’t suddenly cutoff by Red Hat’s (IBM’s) decision. They’re trying to give the community back what was lost. A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests. They’re not really doing anything other than restoring things to the way they were. Anyone who was using a distro that was downstream of RHEL wasn’t looking for enterprise-level support in the first place so I don’t really understand your complaint there.
I mean, really, the whole Linux ethos is community. These two companies coming together to give back what the community lost, for free, is what FOSS is all about. Somehow I feel like that has gone right over your head.
Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don’t need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business.
It seems like you don’t understand the actual motivations of the parties involved here.
-
Oracle’s goal with Oracle Linux is to undermine Red Hat profits to prevent Red Hat from competing with them on acquisitions. They also have a secondary goal of being able to offer their customers a “full stack” deployment (operating system plus application) of their core business products like Oracle Database.
-
SUSE’s goal is to attract new customers with a RHEL clone offering (tied in with their SUSE Manager product), which gives them a sales funnel to pitch their core business of SLES for those customers’ new deployments. They first did this with their “Expanded Support” offering, which was clone-style updates for existing RHEL and CentOS installs. They were working on converting this into a full distro offering named “Liberty Linux”, but abandoned the idea last minute. Instead they rebranded “Expanded Support” as “Liberty Linux”, causing much confusion for due to previous leaks about the full distro by the same name.
-
Kurtzer/CIQ/Rocky’s goal is selling a RHEL clone as a core business offering, at a price that undercuts Red Hat’s pricing. This is only financially viable because they’re not doing 99% of the engineering work to build the operating system.
The parties involved have very different goals, but they’re aligned enough to partner up until one of them decides to screw the others over (see “United Linux”).
They’re trying to give the community back what was lost.
Don’t be fooled by them using the word “community” eleven times in the announcement. They’re doing this for their own business reasons, as detailed above. That’s why OpenELA is a trade association.
A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests.
The entire point is to protect the participants’ commercial interests.
Anyone who was using a distro that was downstream of RHEL wasn’t looking for enterprise-level support in the first place so I don’t really understand your complaint there.
You must not talk to many enterprises. Many of them are looking for enterprise-level support of RHEL clones to cut costs. All the ones that I’ve directly heard about making a switch eventually switched back to Red Hat after realizing that the third party support was insufficient for their needs. These third parties can’t fix bugs or add features to a clone of another distro they do not control.
These two companies coming together to give back what the community lost, for free, is what FOSS is all about. Somehow I feel like that has gone right over your head.
The F in FOSS stands for free as in libre, not free as in gratis. If you think that the point of FOSS is getting things for free (gratis), then I’m afraid you’re the one with things going over your head.
-
What is your definition of FOSS?
This is an initiative to create a bug for bug copy of RHEL For the end users, the only value in that is getting something that normally costs money for free. Free as in beer, not as in freedom.
Why are these companies doing it?
Well, Oracle only has a “quite successful commercial offering” as you put it if they can copy Red Hat exactly. They have not created a distribution of their own. Their interests are commercial, not community.
SUSE does actually make an enterprise distribution of their own. It seems though that it is not commercially successful enough for it to be their only business. So they also resell support for Red Hat’s distribution. That is their Liberty Linux initiative. Except they cannot support “real” RHEL because only people subscribing to RHEL have that software. So, SUSE really sells support for RHEL clones. They cannot do that if the RHEL clones disappear. They need to create their own RHEL clone now so that they have something to support.
Where is the community people keep talking about? The distribution is not “community” created. They cannot even fix a bug in RHEL without destroying their value proposition. Is it the people that use the software? Again, by definition they cannot contribute. So this is a “community” that explicitly just wants something for free.
I think this is really smart of SUSE and I support them. This is all Red Hat really wanted in the end anyway. It is smart of SUSE to include Rocky and even Oracle in their foundation as it makes them the “official” source for unofficial RHEL. This is good for their support business. Oracle and Rocky just want to keep getting RHEL sources without doing all the work. So, win win all around.
So, this is a great move by the companies and good news for us freeloaders as well. Let’s just stop pretending this does anything to advance FOSS or “the community” though. Be serious.
I’ve heard plenty of stories of sysadmins whose managers would simply not be willing to pay for rhel, and the transition would be costly. So that’s why many companies actually list Rocky as the distro that they would liks to see supported by the new Linux Sysadmin they’re looking for. Of course, the job listinga are written by HR, so it’s all just buzzwords, but it shows that there are companies out there that just will not pay for rhel, and as a sysadmin, you will be the one to blame if you have to do a transition to Debian, for example, for no reason (from management’s POV). Or at least that’s what I hear.
Your talking about “restoring back what was lost” seems to be missing one key point: why was it lost, and why is it good to restore it? It was lost because it meant a company, the company, the one who was investing the most in improving the ecosystem, found out that this model let other companies compete with them by offering support while freeloading on their efforts. That’s stealing in my world. Stealing in a perfectly legal way. That was OK, but was not good. They found out that, with the Stream model (which, BTW, offers more support timeframe than what whatever its competitors did) let them keep having a free solution for some people that might need/want it, while still keeping some of their competitive advantage. And what’s more, they even accepted happily Alma’s decision to work with Stream as their upstream to build their own RHEL clone with the full 10 years of support and pushing for changes/patches that might be needed. Notice I’m not saying if it’s OK to restore it. I’m not, because it’s perfectly legal. But it’s certainly not good. The RHEL ecosystem is in much better shape now, and what Alma did was fantastic and, IMO, the way to go.
I understand what you’re saying and I don’t think you’re missing anything. SLES, CIQ, Oracle are trying to come out as winners here but they’re cutting off their noses to spite their own faces. I can’t understand why any of these companies thought that this was a good message to send to anyone.
Can you imagine being in SLES sales? “Yeah, we attempt to clone our competitor’s product and we promise you that we can support it better than they can.”
SUSE has sort of already been making that claim for some time with SUSE Liberty Linux. Supporting a clone isn’t a big stretch. I don’t think they plan on selling it though, they had already said it would be an independent project.
SLES sales: “You really trust IBM not to bend you over? Yes, we accept Visa or Mastercard.”
On the headline “Red Hat is going to have a tough time”.
So, at the end of the day,Red Hat will have the exact same competitors they had before: Oracle, Rocky, and Liberty Linux.
Only two things have changed:
1 - All of these competitors have come out to make a big deal to reenforce that the best and most important enterprise Linux is RHEL. They have declared that the best they can do is copy Red Hat even when that becomes less convenient
2 - That the offerings from these companies may not “really” be identical to RHEL anymore because Red Hat no longer supplies them directly
So, the same competitors but not as good as before as measured against their self-declared gold standard ( RHEL ).
Why is Red Hat going to have a tough time?
Because Redhat has IBM hands shoved up through it’s ass upto it’s brains so it’s days are numbered.
Don’t underestimate IBM honchos to fuck up a good thing. Recently heard Redhat dropping dev support for a bunch of packages in fedora or something.
The moment someone fucks up… open source always brings alternatives. See: open office vs. Libreoffice… the bunch of firefox derivatives.
This is one of those situations where the solution is so obvious I kind of hate that I didn’t get it beforehand. We have open standards for everything so it makes sense to build an open standard for “Linux in Business”.
They are not creating an “open standard” because the standard is “RHEL compatible”. Do you consider RHEL an open standard?
If they were making an open standard, this would be great. That is not what they are doing. What they are doing is collaborating on the task of exactly duplicating whatever RHEL is doing.
