AlmaLinux Leader Says Red Hat's Code Crackdown Isn't a Threat

Yes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux changed its licensing last month — but how will that affect AlmaLinux? The chair of the nonprofit AlmaLinux OS Foundation, benny Vasquez, tells SiliconANGLE that "For typical users, there's very, very little difference. Overall, we're still exactly the same way we were, except for kernel updates." Updates may no longer be available the day a new version of RHEL comes out, but developers still have access to Red Hat's planned enhancements and bug fixes via CentOS Stream, a version of RHEL that Red Hat uses as essentially a test bed for new features that might later be incorporated into its flagship product. From a practical perspective, that's nearly as good as having access to the production source code, Vasquez said. "While there is a generally accepted understanding that not everything in CentOS Stream will end up in RHEL, that's not how it works in practice," she said. "I can't think of anything they have shipped in RHEL that wasn't in Stream first."

That's still no guarantee, but the workarounds AlmaLinux has put in place over the past month should address all but the most outlier cases, Vasquez said. The strategy has shifted from bug-for-bug compatibility to being application binary interface-compatible... ABI compatibility doesn't guarantee that problems will never occur, but glitches should be rare and can usually be resolved by recompiling the source code. "It is sufficient for us to be ABI-compatible with RHEL," Vasquez said. "The most important thing is that this allows our community to feel stability."

In fact, Red Hat's change of direction has been a blessing in disguise for AlmaLinux, she said... "We view this as a release from our bonds of being one-to-one." Patches can be applied without waiting for a cue from Red Hat and "we get to engage with our community in a completely new and exciting way." AlmaLinux has also seen a modest financial windfall from Red Hat's decision. "The outpouring of support has been pretty impressive," Vasquez said. "People have shown up for event staffing and website maintenance and infrastructure management and we've gotten more financial backing from corporations."
Vasquez also told the site that "the number of everyday people throwing in $5 has more than quadrupled."

This is a good thing

[PAjamian]

Alma Linux has switched to a slightly different strategy from the bug-for-bug compatibility one. Rocky Linux is staying bug-for-bug for now. This is good for Enterprise Linux as a whole and for both distros as having the two distros with different strategies adds robustness to EL as a whole.

I also tend to agree with the article and summary. The vast majority of people won't even be able to tell the difference.

RHEL is more than RedHat support

[herberttlbd]

Third-party software that targets RHEL may not be certified to run on functional clones like Alma but there is a reasonable expectation that any issues will be replicable on RHEL. It may not be common but striving to minimize the "works on our systems" syndrome is a decision people will consider.

Re: RHEL is more than RedHat support

[guruevi]

Ubuntu is largely ABI compatible with RHEL too, on the other hand build instructions for RHEL never worked word for word on Alma/Rocky either because trademark and licensing issues. Eg. Install the CodeReady-RHEL-LTS repository, or any of the many partner private repositories for closed source software they have, Alma/Rocky has always been CentOS in that matter, Ansible scripts are just a hair different so for commercial entities where repeatability matters this isnâ(TM)t a feasible option.

Re:

[Burdell]

Some of the places replacing RHEL with CentOS just to save a buck were weird - they'd do that, then load commercial stuff like Matlab that they were paying in some cases $100K+ a year in seat and toolbox licensing. If it's that important to you, you should probably get your OS support in order while you're at it (that's probably the kind of RHEL replacement that pissed Red Hat off).

Re:

[Pentium100]

Why is this weird? It's completely normal. The company has to use Matlab for whatever reason and need to pay a big pile of money for it. Why would it also want to pay a big pile of money for the OS if the free alternative works?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in these environments, issues somehow never occur on the "free alternatives" -- they always seem to happen on the one or two RHEL systems for which they've purchased support. Weird...

nope, it's not a threat

[FudRucker]

its just a bad attitude towards the rest of the FOSS community, what if the rest of the upstream developers started charging subscription pricing to commercial interests to access their source then IBM/Redhat would have to pay for every time they wanted to download new versions of anything like the Linux kernel or GCC & etc ...

Glad they weren't too effected.

[motang]

I am glade AlamLinux is not too effected by this. Having choices is good, and I also see RedHat's point. They were giving everything away, without having any of the clones do any work, now those said clones will just have to do a bit more work to make their clones.

RHEL 9.2 will be a major inflection point.

[upuv]

RHEL 9.2 marks the spot on the RHEL tree where real branches sprout from. A number of distros were riding in parallel. IBM has made it abundantly clear they don't like these parasite distro's that are eating away at it's revenue stream.

There have been several announcements in recent times by these parallel distros about how they will maintain compatibility. All with the goal of grabbing market share away from IBM.

We all know that one of two thing will cause hard fork. First is compatibility. IBM will mak