SUSE Will Fork Red Hat Enterprise Linux (zdnet.com) 51
John.Banister writes: SUSE announced that they're spending $10 million on maintaining a fork of RHEL, with the source code of the fork to be freely available to all. I don't know that people who want to copy RHEL source will necessarily see copying the source of a fork as furthering their goals, but it could be that SUSE will build a nice alternative enterprise Linux to complement their current product. And, I reckon, better SUSE than Oracle, since I keep reading comments on people getting screwed by Oracle, but not so many on people getting screwed by SUSE. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes: This all started when Red Hat's VP of core platforms, Mike McGrath, declared, "CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal." That may not sound like much to you, but those were fighting words to many open-source and Linux distributors. According to Linux's fundamental license, the GPLv2, no restrictions can be placed on distributing the source code to those who've received the binaries. In the view of many in the open-source community, that's exactly what Red Hat has done.
Others see this as the latest step in the long dance between Red Hat's business licensing demands and open-source licensing. Red Hat has had conflicts with the RHEL clones since 2005, when Red Hat's trademarks were the issue of the day. Usually, these fights stayed confined to the RHEL and its immediate clone rivals. Not this time.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE CEO, said this: "For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open-source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values. This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today." What does that mean? While SUSE will continue to invest in and support its own Linux distributions, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE, SUSE plans on creating its own RHEL-compatible clone. Once completed, this new distro will be contributed to an open-source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
Others see this as the latest step in the long dance between Red Hat's business licensing demands and open-source licensing. Red Hat has had conflicts with the RHEL clones since 2005, when Red Hat's trademarks were the issue of the day. Usually, these fights stayed confined to the RHEL and its immediate clone rivals. Not this time.
Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, SUSE CEO, said this: "For decades, collaboration and shared success have been the building blocks of our open-source community. We have a responsibility to defend these values. This investment will preserve the flow of innovation for years to come and ensures that customers and community alike are not subjected to vendor lock-in and have genuine choice tomorrow as well as today." What does that mean? While SUSE will continue to invest in and support its own Linux distributions, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and openSUSE, SUSE plans on creating its own RHEL-compatible clone. Once completed, this new distro will be contributed to an open-source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
Did not have that on my bingo card (Score:5, Interesting)
Not clear how this helps SUSE but the community will be pleased
Re: Did not have that on my bingo card (Score:3)
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I expect so. And in particular, the core business of SuSE is still Linux/OSS. Red Hat effectively lost that when IBM bought them.
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The benefits to SuSE are clear:
1. They get a chance to turn CentOS users into FRHEL (Forked RHEL) customers that are then _their_ customers. It is not clear to me how good this business is, IBM seems to think not very good?
2. They get to sell FRHEL and CentOS support.
3. They can prove they understand (F)RHEL and demonstrate skills. This may give them new FRHEL and also new SLE customers
4. SuSE is a European company and that may make a real difference to some customers that are on RHEL at the moment and that
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Good to know.
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I think the question is will people move?
Creating an 'also ran version' of a competitors product that directly competes with your own flagship product is a well bizarre.
I would have to assume the hope is enterprise customers that move from RHEL/Centos will at some point say "Hey the SUSE folks have been a good partner let's start doing our new deployments on SLE"
The danger of course is they keep RHEL-a-likes viable for lots of organizations it otherwise would not be and turn it into more of a defacto standa
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The main problem with getting RHEL customers on SLE is that some people have really extensive qualification procedures and a lot is software engineering is still done badly enough that such a move will cause problems that need to be fixed. Having SuSE-RHEL instead eliminates a lot of that. In addition, this move allows SuSE to better understand the possible problems when moving from RHEL/CenOS to SLE. So they can offer customers a move to SLE now with a fallback-option to SuSE-RHEL in case there are too man
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"Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY!"
Why?
Fun! Fun! Good luck to them! (Score:3)
SUSE distributions and links (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone interested in trying SUSE Linux, there are several distributions:
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) [suse.com] = long term support stable release, analogous to RHEL, 10+ year support
openSUSE Leap [opensuse.org] = yearly releases corresponding to SLES service packs, sourced from SLES and Tumbleweed, 18 month support
openSUSE Tumbleweed [opensuse.org] = stable rolling release, most current software
openSUSE microOS [opensuse.org] = atomic updates on a read-only root filesystem, basis for future OS release development
Also useful:
https://software.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org] = search for openSUSE software
https://build.opensuse.org/ [opensuse.org] = openSUSE Build Service
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Oracle is a non-starter for almost every workplace I've been in (and certainly any workplace I have a say in), due to their business model essentially being "lure in a customer, then fist-fsck them with legal threats until a new golden yacht for larry pops out".
At this point, I'm pretty convinced any IT person who recomends Oracle is basically committing professional malpractice, no matter how good their database happens to be.
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At this point, I'm pretty convinced any IT person who recomends Oracle is basically committing professional malpractice, no matter how good their database happens to be.
I do not think there are many IT people around that will do that. They all hate Oracle and many have made really bad experiences with them. At least that was my observation in the banking industry. There may be business people that have not gotten the memo yet.
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I hate Oracle more than most. But it does have a foothold in many larger organizations.
One of my past employers was a large regional bank, and they were still using Oracle DB as of the mid-2010s. Often in places where frankly I never saw even the slightest business case for it.
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This was the best way forward but why SUSE? (Score:5, Interesting)
In an interview recently, Mike McGraw stated flat out that if people want to build an enterprise distribution to rival or compete with RHEL from CentOS Streem, that was okay and they should go ahead and knock themselves out. He said they can do the same hard work RedHat does. I'm not sure he expected anyone to actually do this, and whether it's successful remains to be seen. I was expecting this to be the path that AlmaLinux chose. By carefully examining the RHEL source RPMS and pulling patches (which cannot be restricted by RedHat without breaking licenses) and combining them with the CentOS 8 Stream SRPMS, this is quite feasible, if somewhat more costly than the way it was done before with RH doing all the work. I now expect AlmaLinux to join forces with SuSE on this endeavour, and eventually Rocky will be dragged kicking and screaming into it. This is indeed a positive development.
Obviously the biggest issue is that Stream leads RHEL by a ways. I expect Red Hat to begin to try to poison the well a tiny bit by pulling older versions of the SRPMS and spec files from CentOS Stream as new releases hit Stream. But SUSE, Alma and friends can keep archives themselves to build off of.
I'm baffled as to why SUSE would do this. SUSE is a good product and OpenSUSE is a good project. But maybe this will open doors to SUSE if they can make a product that can also meet the government standards and be compatible with RHEL-based software.
I have been pretty discouraged about this whole RHEL downstream build situation all week, but it's gratifying to see SUSE stepping up to restore some faith in the idea of businesses based on and believing in the principles and spirit of open source. And of course RHEL can and will benefit from this as Stream picks up a bit of extra eyes looking for bugs. This is how Open Source should work. Everyone can benefit. RH can no longer act like everyone is just free-loading.
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Excuse me I meant Mike McGrath.
Re:This was the best way forward but why SUSE? (Score:5, Interesting)
>"I'm baffled as to why SUSE would do this. SUSE is a good product and OpenSUSE is a good project. "
There is a *huge* installed base and mind-share in RHEL/CentOS/Alma/Rocky/Oracle. Far, far, far more than SUSE. This could be a way for SUSE to step in and make a bigger name for themselves....
But I would prefer SUSE just work with Alma/Rocky instead. Same with Oracle. There is a great opportunity here to cooperate and rip the enterprise linux standard right out pf the hands of IBM/RedHat. And I can't say I would shed any tears, I am *really* pissed at them right now. They could all then just focus on something they KNOW would always remain free, open, standard, solid, and predictable. Nobody would care about RHEL anymore.
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SuSE gets synergetic effects from having their own entreprise distro on the market. So this is probably not that expensive for them. They likely have people that closely monitor RHEL as well, and RHEL compatibility will be an item in their work anyways, again dues to SLE. So in effect, this may be a lot easier for SuSE to do than for anybody else. And it will generate business for them.
Re:This was the best way forward but why SUSE? (Score:4, Informative)
>I'm baffled as to why SUSE would do this. SUSE is a good product and OpenSUSE is a good project.
Easy. SuSe is already RPM based, and as you say they have an enterprise Linux. They make a clone of RHEL, and slowly integrate it into their Linux.
Then once integrated they can say you can buy support from them for cheaper than RHEL, and say they don't care if you ALSO run the free version, as long as you buy SOME support they are happy to help out - SLE machine or free machine... doesn't matter which one gets patched as long as you paid for the support call.
It's a Win / Win situation that can pull customers away from RHEL. The community goodwill and mindshare alone will be worth way more than the measly 10 mil they are spending. Better than any advertising commercials.
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Most server workloads should be containerized, so they are relatively insulated from changes between different versions of Linux, kernel aside. Not just different distros, but different versions of the same distro.
The desktop application story is more complex, but Snaps, Flatpaks, and AppImages are attempting to solve the same problem for end-user applications that are not already Web-based.
Join efforts (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, what I would like to see is a joint effort/collaboration by all four- Alma, Rocky, SuSE, and Oracle. If they pool their resources and work together, not only could they come out FAR ahead of RedHat, but instantly guarantee that a new, community-driven enterprise linux distro is supported by everyone (hardware giants like HP and Dell, and software giants as well).
It sounds like a strange group- but nothing unites people quite like a powerful threat.
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I think we'll ultimately see that. Certainly I expect Alma Linux to be onboard, although I have not read anything from them on this announcement just yet. Rocky will likely join too eventually. I think Rocky was the group that primarily drew Red Hat's ire from what I can tell. Anyway I'm definitely pleased to with SUSE's announcement and look forward to Alma and others getting onboard.
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>"Meaning, will the fork force Red Hat to draw more software under their distro license as they potentially have the backing?"
I think they more they fight back (the more "evil" they become), the more everyone else will rebel and the more existing RedHat users will abandon RHEL. IBM/RedHat has really cooked their goose by going too far this time. Even if they completely reversed course, at this point, it is probably too late.
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Yeah, I am happy to see this announcement from SuSE, too, and hope maybe they will work with Alma/Rocky. I would hate to see triple redundant work being done because of "not invented here", when it could be done so much better and faster if they cooperated to a common goal that suits all three.
I am not quite sure how or if Oracle could fit into it. Generally, I *detest* Oracle- so other than maybe some no-strings-attached monetary contribution, I wouldn't trust them much. I suppose they could also throw
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Personally, what I would like to see is a joint effort/collaboration by all four- Alma, Rocky, SuSE, and Oracle.
They could call it SOAR Linux - SuSE, Oracle, Alma, Rocky.
Re: Join efforts (Score:1)
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Personally, what I would like to see is a joint effort/collaboration by all four- Alma, Rocky, SuSE, and Oracle. If they pool their resources and work together, not only could they come out FAR ahead of RedHat, but instantly guarantee that a new, community-driven enterprise linux distro is supported by everyone (hardware giants like HP and Dell, and software giants as well).
It sounds like a strange group- but nothing unites people quite like a powerful threat.
Including Oracle is a show stopper for me. I will never have anything to do with Evil Corp. again.
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While we're at it, can we also add Amazon to the list of collaborators? Amazon Linux is based off of RHEL and Fedora packages and is mostly RHEL compatible.
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Yeah, I will try to remember to add them to the mix the next time the topic comes up. Good observation.
Re: Join efforts (Score:1)
Re: Join efforts (Score:1)
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Oh Yeah... (Score:1)
when will suse stop asking for root password wifi (Score:2)
when will suse stop asking for root password to join an wifi network in the GUI?
and why does not have gui sudo like the other distros
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That sounds like an intentional security decision. One that the system administrator likely can change. I would recommend looking at the documentation.
Had To Say... (Score:1)
That was fast :) (Score:2)
Awesome, more power to them. Also it would be best to stay far, far away from Oracle which is just a barrel of rapacious sharks. Maybe Rocky et al and SuSE can make beautiful music together without IBM or Oracle. My first linux was SuSE so I have a warm place in my heart for them.
New SUSE CEO is former Red Hat (Score:3, Informative)
So, he is a former Red Hat guy who probably does not like what IBM is doing to his old company.
Systemd, Gnome (Score:2)
why? (Score:2)
Is nice to see SUSE standing to IBM in this matter but:
1. won't this cannibalize their SUSe and SUSE support sales?
2. why give to yet another foundation and not start by contributing right away to either Alma or Rocky?