[RndTbl] RHEL pulls source code

[Adam Thompson]

Not wrong, but there are a LOT of users who can't even tolerate modest occasional "you're on the bleeding edge" pain.  In fact I'd say nearly 100% of corporate Linux instances can't tolerate that - all the SMBs who can are merely a rounding error... for better or worse.

Most of my clients (EDU) cannot tolerate one second more of downtime than absolutely necessary... during the school day, anyway.  And those pain points don't come at predictable dates :-).  If I started using a distro (no, not a dildo, WTF autocorrect?!?!?) that I *knew* would cause even one hour more per year of service outage or degradation, I'd get lynched.  (At my previous employers, I'd simply get fired.)

IMHO, corporate Fedora users are unicorns, or, "it's nice work, if you can get it".

We're now waiting to see if we get the exciting joy of migrating ~100 CentOS/Alma VMs to another distro, which would easily be a year-long project or more.  Oh, or we could just buy RH's Enterprise license that provides blanket licensing for<Infinity> VMs for only US$2500 per CPU socket... that's a really big ouch on a VMware cluster our size!

Bah, humbug.  Post CentOS "acquisition", we all suspected this day would come, but hoped it wouldn't.

Unhappily,
-Adam

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________________________________
From: Trevor Cordes <trevor at tecnopolis.ca>
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2023 10:03:37 PM
To: Alberto Abrao <alberto at abrao.net>
Cc: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable at muug.ca>; Adam Thompson <athompso at athompso.net>
Subject: Re: [RndTbl] RHEL pulls source code

On 2023-06-23 Alberto Abrao wrote:
> I am always amazed by how far we've come, and yet we often manage to
> screw it up because we're unable to see the bigger picture.
>
> Oh well.. it was a good run. Hope Debian sticks around. That's where
> I'll be most likely going for the long-term. I am more of an RPM guy,
> but between RH's shenanigans and having to battle snaps on every
> release of a **server** distribution, that's where it's at.

Well, RH making dumb mistakes (ever since creating RHEL and making RH
non-free) always causes a big upheaval in the Linux world.  (Well, blame
IBM this time.)  This usually turns out for the better.  Often it
forces RH to backtrack.

It took about a year after RH's dumb RH->RHEL mistake to force them to
create Fedora.  Then the clones were created.  CentOS being screwed up
created Rocky, etc.

So I don't see this as all that bad at the moment.  (Well, partly
because it doesn't affect me, my boxes or my clients in the slightest.)
I know something good will come out of it.  Maybe a consolidated
RHEL-replacement (RPM-based of course) created by the mega-corps might
that Adam listed that are about to be hosed.

They can out-RHEL RHEL, one-upping them and getting all the users.
Think Maria vs MySQL (who's that?).  Of course, such a thing would take
months and that means major pain or short-term RHEL subscriptions for
all the RHEL-clone users.

(Heck, it gets me itching to do my big PHP fork idea again, as PHP goes
down the path of insanity, too.)

As always it makes me reiterate my support for Fedora (until they screw
that up...) which is still 100% free, has great easy upgrade paths, and
if you play your cards right has only modest occasional "you're the
bleeding edge now" pain.

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