RHEL has made a new announcement to control the distribution of its source code.

Nope. No longer needed.

Nothing is going to change. Unless Red Hat manages to successfully conclude a lawsuit against Rocky.
Citing: obtaining the source and reusing the source in question.

 

Haha.. This looks almost like an advertorial
Mentioning AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux as competitors, but not a single word about their own Oracle Linux product as a competitor (probably the most significant). Or that Oracle is actually the originator, of the fact that Red Hat - is shielding its sources (pre IBM). Red Hat has used this tactic ever since EL6. They just limit it, step by step. A little more each time.

 

Nice catch on SUSE Liberty on the free wagon news.
SUSE Liberty is already available since 2022, on request and on a paid subscription.
The only thing that seems to be about to change now is that it will apparently become freely available.
But I can't find a repo yet.

SUSE's new CEO is ex Red Hat. I suspect SUSE's strategy will be to migrate ex Red Hat customers on their Liberty platform. Eventually as a goal that they move to SUSE Enterprise Linux.

 

They mainly see the large customers as users, as adding value.
Oracle, Rocky, Alma, SUSE, they all want them.

I'm not too excited about it otherwise and wouldn't be too happy about it either, if I were you.
No longer 1:1 means or could mean extra work to keep Centminmod working properly on all forks. It could just be that AlmaLinux is going to use Oracle Linux sources. Because Oracle is already adding own code. And openly applied to use their sources the other day.

 

grafana/grafana.spec at a9 - grafana - AlmaLinux OS Git server

After quickly evaluating the AlmaLinux source, it looks contrary to what I first thought. AlmaLinux, uses CentOS Stream sources, rather than Oracle. This (if it continues) is not good news in my opinion.
As we get a kind of CentOS Stream stable or lite.

In my opinion, there is no reason to use Stream or Stream related beta software on your server.
Again if this Stream trend continues.
We will see, the future will tell.

 

You are using Github for this tests?
Btw as written by me in the CentOS end of life topic.
I recommend to not use AlmaLinux anymore until further notice.

As the source above shows, AlmaLinux has recently started using CentOS Stream source code and that is something I, or really anyone should not want on an enterprise server in a production environment.

 

Let's discuss and move toward AlmaLinux, or any other alternatives to CentOS. In the topic, for which it is intended. Otherwise, it becomes cluttered. Thanks.

 

I disagree with parts of the content of the article on both Suse' and the AlmaLinux's section.
There is, of course, a reason that Red Hat software is copied so massively. Simple because it is rock solid and with a support cycle of 10 years as default and up to around 3 year extra with extended support. 13 years you almost don't see back at the competitors.

Disagree. AlmaLinux added Stream beta code as described above and released an update, very quickly. Is this what they mean by better?
Hurry and haste is not always good. Case in point. Ubuntu comes out with upstream (often via Debian sources) update's almost the same day. Whereas Red Hat regularly, takes plenty of time and sometimes releases the same update weeks later. This is not without reason. Testing, testing and testing. In most enterprise environments, you are not interested in speed, but stability: Better safe than sorry, principle.

I didn't find this sentence in the relevant official SUSE article, nor blogpost. But on what basis would the clone of SUSE be better than the original. The original where the creator knows all the ins and outs?

If the SUSE distribution is already so good, why do they fork the competitor at all?

 

True and here is already a job/generational gap between developers, managers and end customer.
Make sure it just work and can be deployed as soon as possible. In case of failure, scale up, etc.

That's why I have very little with Ubuntu and SUSE. They change way too much code, even when the product has been on the market for a while. If it works, it just work. You don't need to adjust anything if it works well.

Because any new software version update can undo your own software. That's why I welcome Red Hat's backport strategy. Where code is changed only if really necessary. And I don't understand how Ubuntu and SUSE keep changing critical elements. For example, a whole new kernel with every service pack.

This is partly why I don't understand why most programmers are on Ubuntu. You don't have to have the latest of the latest. It just needs to work.

Take Node.js with its package manager npm, for example. Trendy which most programmers absolutely love, where all the dependencies are in the cloud, and are not included all in your own software project. Just start a Node.js project from a backup a few years later. Then you will see that many dependencies are no longer downloadable. And there you are with your non-working application.

In my opinion, it is quite simple. There is no need to create AlmaLinux Stream lite if Stream already exists. AlmaLinux and Rocky have been founded to make a 1:1 RHEL copy because there was a demand for it after the demise of CentOS. AlmaLinux no longer has a use case.

I do not believe that the developers' contribution to CentOS Stream will decrease. As seen at gitlab.com/redhat, only Red Hat staff members who contribute there on Stream. Nothing will change there.

Should there be reduced contributions from OSS developers, I think it will be more likely to be seen at Fedora. Where most developers voluntarily package OSS software into Fedora. Supplemented by some Red Hat employees put on the Fedora project (the Fedora team leader, Fedora release manager etc). That same Fedora which is later repackaged by Red Hat (paid) developers into RHEL, via gitlab.com/redhat. Which in fact Stream is either Fedora + or RHEL beta. Just how you phrase it.

 

Sorry, I don't agree, to a positive view of AlmaLinux's direction to AlamaLinux Stream used source code or friendly fork marketing, "The friendly fork" facy pants.

Back to the specific database case. Since it is an employee of Percona, who wrote this specific blog and Percona along with MariaDB, completely coincidentally have also renounced their upstream source MySQL. Exactly like AlmaLinux is now relinquishing its upstream source 1:1 RHEL, which is a similar use case.

You even recommend not going beyond MariaDB 10.3/4 until further notice, because after 10.3, they (Maria) have no 1:1 guaranteed compatibility with MySQL upstream.

Let me reiterate that I respect everyone (and everyone's choice or decision) and this is not a personal reproach. I just want to point out the AlmaLinux news and or blog post could be or/are colored. Should not believe one on one.

Like Red Hat employees before and/or around the CentOS EOL current thing (2020-) (Continuous Delivery and Always Ready RHEL), it now seems AlmaLinux employees, or affiliates, are posting excessively positive blogs and comments, entirely coincidentally just after the news that AlmaLinux announced that it no longer guarantees 1:1 compatibility. And the latter especially, should be seen as very positive. Which of course I dispute, them as written the above responses by myself.