AlmaLinux No Longer Aims For 1:1 Compatibility With RHEL (phoronix.com) 39
Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone shares a report from Phoronix: With Red Hat now restricting access to the RHEL source repositories, AlmaLinux and other downstreams that have long provided "community" rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with 1:1 compatibility to upstream RHEL have been left sorting out what to do. Benny Vasquez, Chair of the Board for the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, wrote in a blog post yesterday: After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.
We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community's needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux.
For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of "bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream."
We will continue to aim to produce an enterprise-grade, long-term distribution of Linux that is aligned and ABI compatible with RHEL in response to our community's needs, to the extent it is possible to do, and such that software that runs on RHEL will run the same on AlmaLinux.
For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of "bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream."
Slackware (Score:2)
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Why does no one build distros with slackers anymore?
Correction: I meant slackware
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Because they're considered "too old" by the "not invented here therefore it's bad" crowd.
They don't use systemd
They don't use containers
They don't use the network manager of the week
They don't use grub as a bootloader
Pretty much the old school linux experience where you can still configure things via text files without googling.
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They use elilo instead. It works great on my EFI laptop. No need for grub.
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OK, I will play your silly games. Why not?
Re: Slackware (Score:2)
Because they remember the glacial pace in getting a 64-bit version officially released. Blue-White anyone?
They also remember Patrick's health issues that brought releases and anything official to a screening halt for way too long. Does the distro still revolve around a single individual? It has been a long time since I bothered to check.
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Slackware is alive and well along with Patrick. He was having financial difficulties because his merchandise store was blatantly ripping him off. After this people started donating to him directly and eventually set up a Patreon account. I still give them a $1 every month because they're the last sane distro. This thread has the details https://www.linuxquestions.org... [linuxquestions.org]
Redhat will be drinking the 1st round of champagne (Score:4, Interesting)
Do not get me wrong, I am not happy about what Redhat did. I understand why they did it, I think they could/can do worse, much worse.
But I also think that what they did is legal, and within their rights, do not hate me for that.
This is but the first casualty of RedHat's latest move. And proof that the move had the intended effect.
Let's see what RockyLinux does. Maybe Rocky and Alma shoult explore a posible merger/fusion/JV, so that they get enough Manpower to get back to 1:1 RHEL compatibility...
But anyhow, the situation is fluid, and anything that is not 1:1 RHEL compatibility is triumph for Redhat.
So, sad to hear Alma dropped the towel, let's see what Rocky does.
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This is but the first casualty of RedHat's latest move.
Um. Ever heard of CentOS?
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This is but the first casualty of RedHat's latest move.
Um. Ever heard of CentOS?
Do you know what "Latest Move" means?
the change from CentOS -> CentOS stream was in 2019, hardly a "Latest move" by any strecth of the imagination.
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Um. Ever heard of CentOS?
CentOS is walking dead. When CentOS 7 goes EOL, it will have no reason to exist. There is no CentOS 8, only CentOS Stream, for which I cannot perceive any purpose.
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Um. Ever heard of CentOS?
CentOS is walking dead. When CentOS 7 goes EOL, it will have no reason to exist. There is no CentOS 8, only CentOS Stream, for which I cannot perceive any purpose.
Meta, Twitter and Verizon seem to perceive a purpose in CentOS Stream. It may behoove you to look closer, perhaps you will perceive a purpose too...
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Your perception is remarkably narrow and short then.
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The Ask Noah Show podcast had an interview with Bradley Kuhn from Software Freedom Conservancy about this whole thing. What he said was fascinating and quite educational. I highly recommend his interview, or at least his blog post on the subject. Links here: https://podcast.asknoahshow.co... [asknoahshow.com]
Honestly RH's compliance is a grey area. And it's one where both copyright law and contract law meet and overlap. Whether or not Red Hat is in full compliance with the GPL is questionable when you examine the support
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>"I wonder if we'll see a GPLv4 in the near future that will include words indicating the license also affects the build instructions (the SRPMS) that lead to the binary."
I believe that is already covered in GPLv3.
The ace that RedHat holds (other than an entrenched position) is that considerable parts of the distro are not GPL. And those they can completely withhold the source and what was done to make it.
We need to obliterate RHEL as the enterprise Linux standard at this point. They have poisoned it.
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The inconsistent open source licenses are problems. Perl licenses, Apache licenses, BSD licenses, and MIT licenses have cluttered the landscape since the start of my career decades ago. This kind of abuse of "free software" licenses is precisely what the GPL sought to prevent. It's ironic that the reluctance of GPL software authors to move to the GPLv3 has emboldened a vendor like Red Hat who used to be quite good about this sort of thing.
I'm hoping there is enough left of the GPL to take on this one. The a
Re:Redhat will be drinking the 1st round of champa (Score:4, Interesting)
When CentOS first started (and Scientific Linux) they took the SRPMS, removed trademarks and branding, and rebuilt them. After Red Hat usurped CentOS, they started pushing the .spec files and other build scripts to git, and removed the branding, thus helping the downstream distros so they wouldn't have to do that themselves. Then of course Red Hat performed a 180 and decided not to do that anymore, which is fine. But the real issue is that Red Hat also does not want the SRPMS distributed, and they are willing to use their SLAs to enforce that. Thought they've always had that ability, and sometimes used it, now I think it's very clear they will not tolerate this. This is the real problem. Red Hat needs to back off of this position. They can't be expected to maintain the debranded git repo, but they can at least stop interfering with people exercising their rights under the various licenses to redistribute the SRPMS. Then at least Alma and Rocky can go back to what was the status quo, which worked alright.
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>"What Red Hat does not want is RHEL clones that are getting FIPS validation and potentially other governmanet and enterprise certifications, thus attacking Red Hat's line of business with essentially zero effort."
1) RedHat is only some fraction of fraction of a percent of the total "effort" that goes into the hundreds of millions of lines of code they are using from the FOSS community, most of whom are not compensated and don't pull this type of hostility.
2) CentOS existed for many years and RedHat did
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Yes, When RH first divided things between Fedora/RHEL, they would have knocked themselves into obscurity were it not for the clones. It's funny because RH could see several 'commercial-only' distributions utterly failing when they decided "yes, that looks like a good way to go".
Canonical would have probably gotten trivial mindshare, if it had not come around right in the middle of the 'RH is screwing with their distribution'.
RH is trying to double down on that, because so many of their leaders see the clone
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Red Hat used to publish their OS for free download and personal usage without burdensome personal registration or user agreements throughout their "redhat" releases, until they changed the OS name to RHEL. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] for the old releases. Those included free access to nearly all SRPM's, except a few with restrictive licenses.
CentOS, and other distros, replaced that free access version. Then Red Hat bought up CentOS's resources, hired them, and many of them have since _quit_ in var
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>"It's ironic that the reluctance of GPL software authors to move to the GPLv3 has emboldened a vendor like Red Hat who used to be quite good about this sort of thing."
It is ironic. And one of the first things I thought about when the news of this hostility arose. Those fighting the GPL3 in the name of freedom of code, actually now led to this particular situation of non-freedom of the code.
>"I'm hoping there is enough left of the GPL to take on this one."
As I pointed out, above, even if the GPL "wo
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There are some absolutely critical components under GPLv2, such as the Linux kernel, glibc, and gcc, make Losing GPL licensed access to these, on the grounds that they are violating the GPLv2 on any of these components, would be disastrous for Red Hat. Some tools, like glibc, are already under GPLv3.
I expect the kernel to be a critical part of this licensing issue. Kernels are a huge investment in time and effort to test and integrate, especially since the advent of systemd, systemd is one of the things m
Re:Redhat will be drinking the 1st round of champa (Score:4, Interesting)
Red Hat is trying to end-run its way around the GPL, partly to lock out vendors like AWS and Oracle who have commercially repackaged it. They have ruined CentOS, turning it into a "beta release" for new RHEL software rather than directly compatible rebuild.
https://devops.com/rhel-gpl-ri... [devops.com]
We've seen this kind of behavior, from Dan J. Bernstein, who had invented his open particular flavor of "open source license" that did not allow publishing any compiled binaries, but to make modifications you had modify the pristiine source locally and compile it yourself. It's what ruined his tools Qmail, djbdns, and daemontools, and prevented daemontools from providing the crtitical replacement for SysV init scripts years before the commercial "Linux lock-in" morass that is systemd.
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I suggest we call it "FreeBSD"
Re: Linux is turning into a bigger cluster fuck... (Score:1)
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FreeBSD had its chance. What made Linux more popular than FreeBSD was the license. We know this because major contributors have said that's why they contributed to Linux instead of FreeBSD. Another thing that made Linux more popular was ease of use. Slackware made installing Linux trivial. When I tried FreeBSD back in the day, there was not even any good installation documentation. It left a lot up to your imagination, and the FreeBSD community was deeply unfriendly. People like to talk about Linux user eli
Re: Linux is turning into a bigger cluster fuck... (Score:2)
I had heard about the issues with the FreeBSD community for years, which is one thing that kept me away from it. When I finally started tinkering with it, I found them to actually be one of the more friendly communities. They get a bad rap for often referring people to documentation, but they also put a lot more effort into documentation and so that is usually good advice.
I have found the Arch community to be the worst of any I interacted with.
Concerning the narrative about Linux triumphing over BSD, I have
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If I pay for FreeBSD support from a company, I know that they cannot make it closed source like Red Hat did to their OS. Red Hat has just demonstrated that the GPL was a paper tiger.
I don't think you get it. The GPL is a stronger license than the BSD license, not the other way around. What this says is that if they can do it to the GPL, they can definitely do it to BSD. If there were IBM BSD (which there sort of has been in the past; heck, there was even an official IBM BSD-4.3 for the IBM RT PC, called AOS, A for "Alternative") then IBM could do exactly the same thing with the sources. Whoops, they actually didn't give you the AOS sources, because it wasn't based on -lite. Later there
Re: Linux is turning into a bigger cluster fuck.. (Score:2)
My point was not that BSD is a stronger license. My point is that we thought we could trust a corporation as a steward of enterprise Linux because the power of GPL was vastly overrated. If Red Hat had used BSD from the start then no one would have trusted them with the level of control we have.
BSD is a better license because it is easy to understand. Everyone knows what they are getting into without the assistance of lawyers. Just look at this cluster fuck with Red Hat. No one can even agree whether they ar
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My point was not that BSD is a stronger license. My point is that we thought we could trust a corporation as a steward of enterprise Linux because the power of GPL was vastly overrated.
Who's we? I always knew that IBM would act in bad faith. So did many others. We warned you at the time, and suggested you move away from their software and services.
BSD is a better license because it is easy to understand.
It's easy to see that anyone can take advantage of you.
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GPLv[23] should be just fine if it is enforced.
Under the GPL you are not allowed to place additional restrictions on redistribution. It is hard to see "if you do we'll terminate your license" as anything other than exactly such a restriction.
This needs to be tested in court, and I think it will be, and I am by no means certain that IBM/Deadhat will get away with this.
But if they do, then yes, that means we will need GPLv4.
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Can someone build OneGoddamnDistro and call it a day.
Of course, you could even do it yourself. And then we have yet another distro [xkcd.com].
How should Alma users react? (Score:2)
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I'm not clear whether this is vendor software that you use, or software you produce yourself.
In the first case you need to talk to the vendor.
In the second, I guess I'd tend to suggest porting to a containerized environment if you can, to make yourself less dependent on the details of whatever OS and OS version you are running.