CloudLinux To Invest More Than a Million Dollars a Year Into CentOS Clone (zdnet.com) 85
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When Red Hat, CentOS's Linux parent company, announced it was "shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release," it lost a lot of friends. CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, immediately announced he'd create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement: Rocky Linux. He wasn't the only one. CloudLinux also proclaimed it would create a new CentOS clone Lenix. And, CloudLinux will be putting over a million dollars a year behind it.
Why? Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO and founder, explained, "Red Hat's announcement has left users looking for an alternative with all that CentOS provides and without the disruption of having to move to alternative distributions. We promise to dedicate the resources required to Project Lenix that will ensure impartiality and a not-for-profit community initiative. CloudLinux already has the assets, infrastructure, and experience to carry out the mission, and we promise to be open about the process of developing Project Lenix." [...] Project Lenix will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything. The company even claims you'll be able to port entire CentOS server fleets with a single command with no reinstallation or reboots required. That's a bold claim. But CloudLinux already does that trick with its commercial Linux distribution. If the company says it can do it, I think it can. Lenix is only a placeholder name, notes ZDNet. "[A] yet to be formed governing board will decide on a permanent name for the distribution. If all goes well, the first software release will appear in the first quarter of 2021."
Why? Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO and founder, explained, "Red Hat's announcement has left users looking for an alternative with all that CentOS provides and without the disruption of having to move to alternative distributions. We promise to dedicate the resources required to Project Lenix that will ensure impartiality and a not-for-profit community initiative. CloudLinux already has the assets, infrastructure, and experience to carry out the mission, and we promise to be open about the process of developing Project Lenix." [...] Project Lenix will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything. The company even claims you'll be able to port entire CentOS server fleets with a single command with no reinstallation or reboots required. That's a bold claim. But CloudLinux already does that trick with its commercial Linux distribution. If the company says it can do it, I think it can. Lenix is only a placeholder name, notes ZDNet. "[A] yet to be formed governing board will decide on a permanent name for the distribution. If all goes well, the first software release will appear in the first quarter of 2021."
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The GOP hate anything that even hints at socialism. Take Obamacare as an example.
Their hatred of Bernie Sanders and his ideas is another. Yet in many parts of the world, his ideas would be regarded as right wing.
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They only hate socialism when it comes to the average person. They are more than willing to hand out welfare checks to the large corporations when the "free market" fails to keep them in a profitable situation.
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You have to judge someone overall and in the historical context, things are not as simple as pointing to a paragraph about the darkest hour of a revolution. He is no saint definitely and you can attribute many deaths to his policies, but he was more ethical than, say, some US presidents I could name. And he did say the next leader should be anyone but Stalin, so he gets points for that.
That said, Lenix is a lousy name, but they do say it is temporary.
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If establishing an ideology that offed 180 million folks (if you add Lenin+Stalin+Mao+Pol Pot+...) is "more ethical" than even the worst of US presidents, disagreement about a distro's name is the least of our worries.
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Lenin was helluva lot more pragmatic than Stalin or Mao. When the Russian economy tanked at the end of the Civil War, Lenin adopted some limited free market measures to stabilize the economy. Stalin took a much harder line approach, leading to catastrophic results in the 1930s. Lenin was as much a showman as anything else.
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The true enemy of any government, no matter what ideology they ascribe to, is corruption and greed. Marxism recognized the effect it has on market-driven economies, with the huge accumulation of wealth to small, ambitious segments of society, but failed to recognize the effect it would have on the economic system driven by Socialist principals, more in line with what we see in the traditional Soviet-style Communism, where the privileged bureaucracy and the arms of the State apparatus received the lion-share
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To be fair to Lenin, he would have known nothing about Mao, and Stalin was not his choice as successor. He didn't want Stalin in the top spot, it was supposed to be Trotsky. Not that Trotsky was a nice guy, and it's not clear that the Soviet Union would have been any different with Trotsky in charge.
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No doubt. And Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army (not that Stalin and his successors would ever admit it), oversaw a good many horrors during the Russian Civil War. But Lenin and Trotsky were what I'd call the "theorists" of the Russian Revolution. They essentially founded the Bolsheviks. And it's not like the government they were fighting was anything to write home about. A lot has been written about the Romanovs in that way we sometimes tend to talk about toppled dynasties, but Nicholas II, for lack of
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A lot has been written about the Romanovs in that way we sometimes tend to talk about toppled dynasties, but Nicholas II, for lack of a better word, was an idiot, and worst of all, an idiot that didn't seem very aware of just how stupid he was. Coupled with the Czarist government's notorious secret police, they basically made revolution inevitable.
That is the standard view of the Romanovs so I'm sort of curious about what you were referring to as "that way we sometimes tend to talk about toppled dynasties". Is there any significant number of people portraying Nicholas as anything other than an over-privileged elite idiot that adroitly avoided every chance to save his regime?
Re: Name (Score:2)
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it was supposed to be Trotsky
'A mountain climber's axe. A MOUNTAIN CLIMBER'S AXE! Can't I get that through your skull?!'
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If establishing an ideology that offed 180 million folks (if you add Lenin+Stalin+Mao+Pol Pot+...) is "more ethical" than even the worst of US presidents, disagreement about a distro's name is the least of our worries.
"If".
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I guess they could name it PhobOS, but then people would be afraid to download it.
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If they went for PoundOS, the entire porn industry would switch instantly.
Proper Pronunciaton (Score:2)
Proper Pronunciation:
Linux = Li - nucks
Lenix = Len - ix
Not sure these are far enough apart.
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Are you saying I had to scroll through 3 pages of TDS for nothing?
Re: Name (Score:2)
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Culture War (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the RHEL changes signify who won the culture wars when IBM bought Red Hat. It looks like Red Hat lost. Bummer.
Re:Culture War (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you have a rather rosy assessment of the type of company Red Hat really is/was. (Full disclosure: Worked, briefly, for Red Hat.)
Re:Culture War (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember that back in 2004, RedHat discontinued their common distribution for paid and community users and moved them to two different tracks, with the community being dev and test for the paid users. When their generally friendly to paying customer strategy of 'treat everything as if it were GPL' and provided source rpms and community driven clones started, RedHat went after them hard anytime they alluded to 'RedHat', as while RedHat could not block the cloning, they did own the brand and used it to intimidate the clones such that they didn't publicly make clear what everyone knew: that they were rebuilds from RedHat source and therefore equivalent from a technology standpoint.
In 2014, they seemingly did a *partial* reversal, probably amidst recognized mounting pressure from Ubuntu, where there weren't all these complicated brand games going on between paid and free users, and publicly endorsed CentOS project and took it over so they had a clearer story.
Over the years, that has probably not yielded the result they wanted, to displace Ubuntu's share. What they failed to understand was that RedHat's blessing wasn't particularly valuable, and/or presumed the CentOS *brand name* inherently had value, and maintained a confused branding status quo where two technically equivalent clones were subtly different and without a clear upsell path to paid support.
It seems the lesson they took from this instead was 'Ok, that didn't grab share from Ubuntu, let's force that sweet ~20% CentOS share to all buy RHEL, that will fix it'. Of course, that apparent strategy will in all likelihood increase Ubuntu's share (I already know companies that were reluctant about investing resources in formal Ubuntu support turning around and investing rapidly due to the CentOS situation).
What they could pull off is to replace the whole concept of RHEL 'clones' with plain old RHEL. If RHEL was made available in the same way Oracle makes Oracle Linux available, then they win. Well, they at least mitigate the scenario of a mass migration to Ubuntu. Then they won't look as bad in the Canonical sales decks that show RHEL as having practically no share, which is *technically* correct so long as they keep that CentOS brand in there. And Canonical ignores CentOS in those decks by saying 'share of distributions that offer paid support'.
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Remember that back in 2004, RedHat discontinued their common distribution for paid and community users and moved them to two different tracks, with the community being dev and test for the paid users. When their generally friendly to paying customer strategy of 'treat everything as if it were GPL' and provided source rpms and community driven clones started, RedHat went after them hard anytime they alluded to 'RedHat', as while RedHat could not block the cloning, they did own the brand and used it to intimidate the clones such that they didn't publicly make clear what everyone knew: that they were rebuilds from RedHat source and therefore equivalent from a technology standpoint.
In 2014, they seemingly did a *partial* reversal, probably amidst recognized mounting pressure from Ubuntu, where there weren't all these complicated brand games going on between paid and free users, and publicly endorsed CentOS project and took it over so they had a clearer story.
Over the years, that has probably not yielded the result they wanted, to displace Ubuntu's share. What they failed to understand was that RedHat's blessing wasn't particularly valuable, and/or presumed the CentOS *brand name* inherently had value, and maintained a confused branding status quo where two technically equivalent clones were subtly different and without a clear upsell path to paid support.
It seems the lesson they took from this instead was 'Ok, that didn't grab share from Ubuntu, let's force that sweet ~20% CentOS share to all buy RHEL, that will fix it'. Of course, that apparent strategy will in all likelihood increase Ubuntu's share (I already know companies that were reluctant about investing resources in formal Ubuntu support turning around and investing rapidly due to the CentOS situation).
What they could pull off is to replace the whole concept of RHEL 'clones' with plain old RHEL. If RHEL was made available in the same way Oracle makes Oracle Linux available, then they win. Well, they at least mitigate the scenario of a mass migration to Ubuntu. Then they won't look as bad in the Canonical sales decks that show RHEL as having practically no share, which is *technically* correct so long as they keep that CentOS brand in there. And Canonical ignores CentOS in those decks by saying 'share of distributions that offer paid support'.
Would you pay $USA100, for a 5 year no support version of Centos. The version would include security updates (as it is today). RedHat owns Centos, spends money on Centos, and gets zero in return. And you do know that there are many 100+ server parks running on Centos.
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Well, the RHEL changes signify who won the culture wars when IBM bought Red Hat. It looks like Red Hat lost. Bummer.
Not really. It reflects the way that all major Linux vendors are moving: To the cloud, to an always up-to-date system. That is just the reality of the entire industry and has little to do with IBM. If anything it's a direct following move from one of their biggest competitors: Ubuntu's focus on the cloud.
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Windows works (sometimes) more by luck than judgement. Windows 10 is IMHO, the worst version of Windows that has ever existed. Before W10, you controlled it. Since W10, Microsoft is in control (corporate versions apart). They control when your system applies updates and you get no say in the matter. Lost work? Tough. Not our problem say MS.
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The RHEL re-org is just a shakeout of the free-loaders
Note that metrics have shown RHEL at having less than 2% share, and CentOS having about 18% share and Ubuntu having 33% share. So yes, the vast majority of participants in the ecosystem are freeloaders.
However, if RHEL has 2% market share and only 2%, it becomes a question of how readily available people are with familiarity with it or 'something like it'. If everyone runs Ubuntu, and Ubuntu offers paid support, then most would be inclined to just stick with the familiar Ubuntu.
RH is running a big risk doub
Only US$ 1 million? (Score:3, Insightful)
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--That's roughly 20 workers making $50k a year, minus benefits... so even if ~15 people are working on the project full-time I'd still consider it a major win
Re: Only US$ 1 million? (Score:1)
Had this discussion yesterday (Score:5, Interesting)
"Red Hat's announcement has left users looking for an alternative with all that CentOS provides and without the disruption of having to move to alternative distributions."
I had this discussion yesterday with my coworker, who manages a couple CentOS Linux servers. Our solution was to shift to Oracle Linux [oracle.com]. Ran this script over on GitHub [github.com], and it was done. Most painless Linux disto migration I've ever seen performed.
Re:Had this discussion yesterday (Score:5, Informative)
But now you have opened yourself up to the risk of an Oracle extortion demand and/or lawsuit. I would never do that willingly, nor advise others to do so.
Both this, and Rocky Linux, should be viable alternatives, by the time the CentOS 8 support window has ended.
Oracle Linux is not Oracle Database (Score:3)
Oracle understands GPL quite well, and within their Linux distribution, they perform as expected.
If you use Oracle Database, then you are expected to pay for it. For the Enterprise edition, that is $47,500 per CPU core.
The Linux product is a rounding error on the database revenue, produced to achieve and maintain control of the entire software stack.
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Maybe. I hope you're right.
But, given its highly litigious nature, even toward its own paying customers, do you really want to take that chance, if you don't have to?
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Oracle has guaranteed indemnification [immagic.com]. This is focused on SCO-type lawsuits, but also applies to itself.
Re:Oracle Linux is not Oracle Database (Score:4, Informative)
Looks much better on the surface than it is, because:
I wouldn't touch that "indemnification" with someone else's ten-foot pole.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer; not your lawyer; don't play one on TV, this isn't legal advice, etc.
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I think they won't be able to go after an unpaying user of Oracle Linux that they download today and update today. They have made the terms utterly clear on all fronts.
However, 6 months from now you might unknowingly update and surprisingly end up bound to *new* terms that may not be so favorable.
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That would be a very typical Oracle ploy.
They got some of us here, including even me, by making their allegedly open-source VirtualBox product almost unusable without their very much NOT open-source "VirtualBox Extensions," encouraging us to download them, then charging us up the wazoo for them, for licenses we'd never have used in the first place had we known how ridiculously expensive they are. (We now use a completely different virtualization product, not open source, but cheaper than VirtualBox+extensi
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And it is worth noting that RHEL as a distribution is not GPL. A lot of it is GPL, but many packages are BSD-style. So without even adding anything Oracle can 'close up' key packages.
That's not to mention if Oracle Linux injected a trap with, say, their proprietary JRE as a 'convenient' install.
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The key point is "if a third party makes a claim against you". There is nothing in that statement that Oracle can't sue you directly.
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What, you hold Oracle stock or work for Oracle? Fucking shill.
Centos (and many other distros) can be used free of charge and has updates. This article is about alternatives to CentOS. Oracle and its partners can sue your ass off under that "indemnification" and Oracle does attack and sue its own customers, and park auditors at customer sites for months trying to force them to license structures they don't need, making customer either roll over or pay money for consultants and lawyers.
So, fuck off. Get y
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IMHO, Oracle have just been waiting for sufficient customer volume before changing their T's&C's to make getting patches cost you money. They'll still make the source code available if you want to build it yourself but if you want them built for you then it will cost you loadsamoney.
Larry will not want to carry the cost for much longer. He needs a bigger Yacht.
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Let's look at the sales page [oracle.com], down at the bottom, buy support.
Basic Linux Support: "All Oracle Linux software is provided for free and can be downloaded from Oracle Software Delivery Cloud... There is no license cost associated with Oracle Linux. Pricing reflects $0 for license, and all charges are related to services."
Premier support: ditto.
Customers will notice if this policy changes.
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Given that this is Oracle, this is one of the times where a Star Wars quote is appropriate.
I am altering the deal. Pray I do not alter it any further.
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Having been bitten by their (Oracle's) arcane licensing I don't believe a word they say either verbally or online.
We were audited by them for three years and given the ok wrt our license payments. The 4th year came and we got a shock. Apparently we'd been paying only 30% of what we should have been.
Another auditor revised that 30% to 80%. They wanted retrospective payments but our legal people soon put a stop to that. An audit doc signed by Oracle was not going to work in their favour in court.
We paid for o
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Hence why he said they would alter the T&Cs. The current situation is fantastic, but Oracle is notoriously bad for changing T&Cs, either waiting for the unwary user to update to a version bound by the T&Cs with a trap, or in some cases trying to retroactively bill for things that weren't even bought.
Oracle has some good tech people, but their business leadership is more like the mafia than a respectable business.
Oracle is financially floundering (Score:2)
1. Moving headquarters to Austin to escape expensive Silicon Valley.
2. Recently began charging for Java.
3. Launched its own public cloud offering
Because so much of enterprise software is moving to cloud-hosted solutions that were smartly architected not to use exorb
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The only way they ever turn a profit is by acquiring something. Once they kill all innovation, they no longer seem to be able to keep making revenue off of it. Maybe they should think of making something. Anything, really.
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Based on what I've seen, I think the Oracle Linux team is doing a great job.
However, Oracle has a bad habit of going after their end-users to extort them more money for what had formerly been free stuff. For example they have used an Oracle relationship to launch an audit of customer network and invoiced them for JREs they didn't even install, because some equipment offered .jsp files they inferred that systems are probably running Oracle JRE commercially and invoiced and said non-payment will result in leg
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But now you have opened yourself up to the risk of an Oracle extortion demand and/or lawsuit.
Why would Oracle sue their own customer, and one that wasn't even rich enough to run RHEL and instead focus on a free alternative? Oracle only goes after big targets.
Also Rocky Linux and this aren't the only alternatives. There are a couple of distros which upstreamed RHEL. But as others have rightly pointed out, if you're the kind of person who migrated minor versions of CentOS when they were released then just move to CentOS Stream and call it a day.
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1. They sue their own customers all the time.
2. People used CentOS rather than RHEL for many reasons other than not being "rich enough to run RHEL."
3. Oracle will go after anyone they think might be able to cough up a settlement. I've PERSONALLY received threatening communications from Oracle at times when I was not, personally nor professionally, using even a single one of their products, open-source or otherwise. If a court were to rule against me in the amount of a hundred bucks plus a half-eaten ham s
Re: Had this discussion yesterday (Score:3)
Yeah, but now you're dealing with stuff from Oracle, you'll soon find out what pain really means...
Red Hat = Microsoft of the Linux world (Score:2)
Incredible (Score:5, Interesting)
I find this quite incredible - in many ways.
Firstly, for those of us who upgraded to Centos 8, you're now facing an end of support in 12 months. When this hits the streets, you'll change a couple of repo configs and whoosh! your support runs to 2029. That's an almost perfect upgrade path - and CloudLinux can expect to scoop up vast swathes of the Centos 8 market with this.
For those on Centos 7 (or less), I'd imagine some will go this route, and some will switch to Ubuntu. Both essentially offer the same thing - a free tier, and pay-if-you-want for specific servers you like the look of. For those sticking with the RHEL derivatives, I'm left wondering if IBM don't like this sort of thing happening and are starting to close up shop a bit. I doubt anything will change for the next couple of years, but I'd question the really long-term viability of RHEL for any new shops.
The incredibles here are:
- The upgrade to CloudLinux is so simple - and so fabulously effective
- Almost no one would have upgraded from Centos to CloudLinux (or Ubuntu or others) until the end of Centos was announced
- That IBM/Redhat didn't see all of this coming
- That Ubuntu and CloudLinux have a pathway from free to pay-for which is both attractive for new customers and older ones alike - and Redhat/IBM don't, and have in fact made their pathway pretty much non-existent
- Whilst a lot of Centos users would never have paid even a dollar for it, breaking the pathway just guarantees that is true
Seems to me IBM bought Redhat for "reasons" and have now decided to get out of the OS market for all but maybe their biggest, most locked-in customers.
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I'm starting to wonder if IBM/RedHat DID see this coming, and decided that it just would be better to get someone else to pay for the support and infrastructure costs of the free RHEL clones.
In their mind, they might think that it's more profitable to focus on the paying customers, and let the free tier clients fend for themselves. It's not what I would do personally, but then I'm not the CEO of a multi-billion dollar software company.
OSS at its best (Score:5, Insightful)
RMS should be proud, this is exactly the way open source software is supposed to work.
I, for one, am thankful, not only for the years that CentOS tracked RHEL and the effort that requires, but for the resources RedHat poured into supporting and developing an OS that, for the most part, has beaten the pants off the alternatives for stability, transparency, security, and longetivity. And I'm ecstatic that another organization is stepping up to provide the service that CentOS will no longer offer. Personally, it means the handful of machines I administrate as an amateur SA will continue to be low-impact on my daily life, while providing top-tier performance. We should be celebrating this moment, instead of throwing daggers.
lower cost less access RHEL palatable? (Score:1)
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While a lower price may help *some*, I think there's a huge hurdle between 'I have to track some sort of entitlement' versus 'I don't even have to *think* about entitlement.
If they don't want Ubuntu or RHEL clones not from RH to be the typical user experience in the ecosystem, they have to have registration free edition, with yum repositories that are readily accessible instead of locked into subscription management.
Rather than 'older', the easier thing would be to just do the 'base' platform. In effect, Ce
It's cool there's a couple of alternatives (Score:2)
But why not put both groups' resources in one project instead of 2 separate projects? (rocky & lenix)
Surely they'd accomplish more and lower maintenance overheads?
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But why not put both groups' resources in one project instead of 2 separate projects? (rocky & lenix)
Yes, that's my question too, why start Lenix when Rocky is already going? Then again, this seems to be the Linux way: fragmentation ... sigh.
don't like RH (Score:2)
Back in '97 I bought 4.2 and realised I didn't like RH, tried it many times since, not changed my opinion.
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Back in '97 I bought 4.2 and realised I didn't like RH, tried it many times since, not changed my opinion.
I remember that distro. You probably remember RPM Hell. We have Yum and now dnf that take care of that. It's easy to install software. Whatever you're using, chances are a large part of it came from RHEL. Such as your networking. Your wifi. All those advances and they contributed it to the linux community for free so the likes of Debian and others could also enjoy it.
Really depends on what you're looking for. If you want something stable and a real product, use RHEL or Centos. If you want more bleeding edge