AlmaLinux also reaffirmed their commitment to being fully open-source and good open-source citizens.
Thank you, AlmaLinux team. It is truly an unfortunate sight to see so many corpo-apologists in a Linux sub. You’re doing a beautiful work.
If there’s anyone that hates what Red Hat has done here, it’s me, but what AlmaLinux is doing is exactly what Red Hat was aiming for according to their statement, which is that clones would use CentOS Stream as their upstream and develop and contribute their own patches instead of copying RHEL bug-for-bug. The other reason is of course to convert people that need that bug-for-bug clone to paying customers.
With SUSE having announced a RHEL compatible alternative, I’m hoping that some people/businesses will consider switching their environment over to them as a more OSS friendly competitor that also offers support. If that distribution gains some traction, I foresee that some of the clones might use that as their upstream and that OEMs will follow suit and test their drivers on those distributions. There are enough people/businesses that are reliant on a mixture of RHEL and Alma/Rocky and for those life got a bit harder because of RHEL’s actions.
This seems like a wise move for the time being. I am an Alma fan and supporter so I get that the foundation is trying to do everything it can to stay relevant.
What’s the point of AlmaLinux if not for 1:1 RHEL compatibility? Might as well use CoreOS Stream cause the compatibility is good enough. Time to switch to Rocky Linux I guess.
Good for Alma, I say. Why base your business model on RedHat not finding a way to kill it? RedHat is a de facto enterprise standard in part because of the existence of free source-rebuild distributions allowing for small FOSS developers to ensure compatibility. They said so themselves, they want users to either switch to another distribution or pay for RedHat. So let’s give them what they want and abandon RHEL compatibility.
I don’t think that “let’s all abandon RHEL so it becomes irrelevant” is the appropriate response here. It’s a matter of freedom and principles. If RHEL exists, a compatible, free and unencumbered alternative should be allowed to exist as well.
RedHat thinks they shouldn’t exist, and is trying to maneuver within legal limits to ensure they don’t exist. It’s not that I agree with RedHat that the compatible clones shouldn’t exist. It’s that I think RedHat’s actions are duplicitous enough that we should no longer see RHEL compatibility as a goal to care about. Much the same way Google has taken actions to distance itself from a dependence on Java after Oracle went all APIs-are-patentable rampage. Why engage with an entity who has a stated goal of ending your existence?
Also, Alma doesn’t have a business model in the same way that Debian doesn’t have a business model. The Alma Linux OS Foundation is a non-profit organization.
I knew there was a foundation behind Alma but hadn’t looked into them too much, as I was already thinking of continuing to target RHEL compatibility may have poor business continuity after they killed CentOS as a free RHEL clone.
Won’t Rocky have the same issue as Alma? RedHat has made RHEL closed source, so how can they maintain compatibility?
I suspect Rocky and other source rebuilds just haven’t made the announcement yet. Alma was merely the first to make an official statement.
Rocky has announced their plan to continue as a 1:1 source rebuild. They’re looking at using sources from RedHat’s Universal Base Image Docker images, and also using cloud instances with consumption based pricing. With the latter option you spin up an instance on AWS/Azure/DigitalOcean/etc and it has a license for that instance, so you get the sources for the package versions on that instance. But since the license was temporary, then there’s nothing for RHEL to terminate when you redistribute the sources.
RedHat says they don’t want clones of RHEL. I say give it to them, lets have a landscape where they’re no longer the de facto standard because there are no other distributions targeting RHEL compatibility.
Welp. In rocky we trust to keep it 1 to 1 I guess
They better be careful, Papa Red Hat is coming after them next. Expect legal issues to unfold in the upcoming months.
I wonder then how PCI compliance will be effected. Given CVEs can be patched by Alma now, however they’ll need to maintain their own list of CVE’s to track/fix
You should be fine for PCI compliance as long as you are on a current release (Been there already, a few times). Also AlmaLinux already has an Announce mailing list (announce@lists.almalinux.org) where they release update notifications (including Security releases) just like CentOS did.
