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SUSE is forking RHEL

jarym 3y ago
Hmm RedHat might need a corporate make over - how about RedFaced? or they go straight to FAIL: Fully Asphyxiated and Impotent Linux
T3RMINATED 3y ago
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mariuolo 3y ago
Clever idea. They will gradually lure users their way.
- pipo234 3y ago
  For some reason SUSE hasn't received a lot of attention even though they have been waving their flag long before the Red-Hat — CentOS brouhaha.
  - gtirloni 3y ago
    Back in the old RH Linux days, I remember SUSE had as much market share as Red Hat. It was actually the distro that people suggested I should use because it was more polished. But SUSE was bought and sold a few times to shady companies, wasn't it? My memory is blurry but this might explain why people don't immediately think of it.
    - rascul 3y ago
      SUSE lost a lot of love back in the day when Novell (then owner of SUSE) did some stuff with MS. https://www.wired.com/2008/08/microsoft-novell-extend-controversial-partnership/ https://www.wired.com/2008/08/microsoft-novell-extend-contro...
- gigatexal 3y ago
  Lol no. This is a wholly disingeneous move. "[SuSe] ... announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions." How will they confirm that their fork is compatible? Probably using RedHat supplied UBI docker/container images. So they're just becoming another add-no-value clone. Wow, give whoever came up with this idea a nobel peace prize. Instead they could focus on their own offerings which add value/different value propositions than just being a clone of RHEL. I can't believe folks would be okay with companies coming in and undercutting your validation work -- even if you see RHEL as anachronistic and obsolete in teh world of containers and such it still has value for some folks for its RHEL-ness -- and then coming in and selling clones undercutting support and other licensing/revenue streams to pay for the QA/R&D/devel, etc.
  - piaste 3y ago
    Well, nobody's stopping IBM from retaliating by offering a SUSE clone :)
    - gigatexal 3y ago
      Funny but how does that help the community or businesses adopt Linux really?
      - diffeomorphism 3y ago
        Is that a trick question? Multiple suppliers of binary compatible releases; no fragmentation whatsoever, just more supply. How could that not help?
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    > How will they confirm that they're fork is compatible? The only thing they need to ensure right now is that their stable release remains compatible to existing RHEL. Everything needed for that is around. Going forward, maybe "RHEL v+1 compatible" doesn't even matter anymore (to quote that press release: "CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard.") RHEL became the defacto "Enterprise Linux" because everybody willingly handed them the control over the direction Enterprise Linux takes (including, but not limited to, by merely repackaging their work). As long as that new community system (Rocky intends to work with SUSE according to that article) remains RHEL9.2 compatible, they might be able to force IBM to adopt the community's idea of an Enterprise Linux for future RHEL releases. Keeping some "RHEL9.2 mode" around indefinitely (next to a further developed platform for contemporary workloads) is relatively simple with containers and the like. IBM might have just killed the one thing that kept RedHat dominant in that space: the goodwill of nearly everybody else to let RedHat lead and not rock the boat too much themselves.
silisili 3y ago
I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for because it was some RH specific patch. Between Debian, Nix, Arch, and others, I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. I'll go as far as to say that my Arch boxes have been far more predictable than my RHEL boxes.
- rwmj 3y ago
  I wrote this a few months ago explaining why Red Hat makes money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588297 (Still amazed that no one understands these basic points)
  - ZeroSolstice 3y ago
    I'm not totally surprised as most employee's don't know how they fit into their current organization as a whole or how their organization fits into their current market, never mind other companies and vendors. Its along the same lines as people evaluating company licensing and equipment costs as if its coming out of their pocket. Its almost as bad as people believing that Walmart, Target, etc are closing their stores because of "so much theft" as if shrink budgets weren't a thing. Having a loss prevention department is a misnomer, its a paperwork and accounting department so that the losses can be written off to the IRS. These places have KPI's for everything and probably know the locations where they have a store but a majority of people are ordering online. I'm sure their lease has some notion of financial hardship which "theft" falls into allowing them to exit the contract early.
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      > Its almost as bad as people believing that Walmart, Target, etc are closing their stores because of "so much theft" as if shrink budgets weren't a thing. I may not be understanding your point here, but having a shrink budget and closing due to theft aren't mutually exclusive. It is possible for theft to exceed the shrink budget and make a store too costly to operate.
saw-lau 3y ago
I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?
- xinayder 3y ago
  Red Hat announced that they are no longer providing updates to the downstream repo at git.centos.org and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back, essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code". To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the future. This move by RH is not proprietary per se but it does indicate that they are growing hostile towards open source as a whole because it is affecting their business model, and since they were acquired by IBM, now they only really care about the revenue RHEL generates.
  - saw-lau 3y ago
    Many thanks!
    - bonzini 3y ago
      Note that the last paragraph is a supposition that is not rooted in reality. Red Hat is still doing upstream first development and is still mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision).
      - nottorp 3y ago
        > mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision). Right, they only pressured them to make more money, didn't tell them how exactly.
        bonzini 3y ago
        Even if that was the intended meaning, it's quite an extrapolation that Red Hat is "growing hostile towards open source as a whole", especially since people say that of Red Hat roughly every two years.
xinayder 3y ago
I wonder how this will affect openSUSE, will they announce a new product based on this RHEL fork from SUSE?
- fredski42 3y ago
  +1. Will they compete with there own products?
  - fariszr 3y ago
    SUSE liberty linux already existed for a while now, so it's nothing new.
  - itomato 3y ago
    It’s a funnel, and a darned good one.
  - krylon 3y ago
    Whether you pay the for SLES or their fork of RHEL probably does not make much a difference to them. And for customers who run both SLES and RHEL (not sure if that is a common scenario, though), having a single vendor to a deal with is probably a plus.
- ddiss 3y ago
  From https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/ https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/ "It goes without saying that SUSE remains fully committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) solutions as well as the openSUSE Linux distributions." As a long term Leap and Tumbleweed user, I trust the openSUSE community to keep producing a nice distro.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Would a migration path be feasible, the fork getting some "stuff people coming from openSUSE would need" added/ported? Then it might effectively be as much a merge as a fork. Of course if that did happen, I'd expect the "people" in "stuff people need" to be specifically the subset who happen to be paying customers. Not sure if there are many users left outside that subset?
0dayz 3y ago
This is very positive news, I wonder though how far will compatible mean? My biggest problem with opensuse is the lack of cockpit support and integration that RHEL has. Also that they use apparmor instead of selinux as default, I wish that selinux would become the standard MAC, with really good tools (cli and gui alike) for handling selinux policies.
- interactinghash 3y ago
  SUSE is working on making SELinux the default - and it already is on SLE Micro for example
  - 0dayz 3y ago
    That I look forward to, if they can make SELinux and cockpit work flawlessly I'm finally going to have the perfect distro I ever wanted (although I'll admit I'm not sure if NetworkManager vs SUSE own network manager is better).
- jzb 3y ago
  I’m not sure it’s positive, they are very light on details. If this is a hard fork, is it really going to deviate from RHEL? Is a $10m investment enough to carry an enterprise distro for a decade? I’m a little skeptical about this right now, but we’ll see how it pans out.
nubinetwork 3y ago
I knew suse used rpm packages, but I always thought they were their own... good to know they are putting in the work to distance themselves from the IBM mess.
- mst 3y ago
  They are, their distro is their own - this is them announcing a RHEL fork as well as their in-house distro. You'll find SUSE Linux Enterprise in quite a few places in Europe but their penetration in the US has always been kinda pants, so providing a compatible alternative to RHEL will hopefully be a net win for them commercialy as well as a net win for the community.
- jzb 3y ago
  Yes, they used the RPM format with their own tool (Zypper instead of DNF/Yum), but packages weren’t (necessarily) compatible with Fedora/RHEL as far as dependencies and such. But SUSE isn’t just a package of Red Hat.
  - krylon 3y ago
    I have seen independent projects provide rpms that are supposed to work on both RedHat/Fedora and SLES/openSUSE, with some caveats as to what versions of each are supported/tested for.
    - jzb 3y ago
      Sure. Really depends on, well, the dependencies. The rpm command shipped with all those distributions should be compatible with the format of any recently created package. But you can run into snags if you have a dependency that doesn't exist on the target system or its repos, or if the packages are named differently, the pre- and post-install commands have assumptions about the system that aren't true on the target distro, etc. But if all the package exists for is to drop a few binaries on the system, it can be fine. Especially for things like proprietary software that's going to just dump a bunch of stuff into, say, /opt and will only break if the kernel or glibc are spectacularly old or too new, etc. Sometimes you can even get away with using "alien" or similar to convert Debs to RPMs if it's only packaged as a Debian package. Sometimes.
einpoklum 3y ago
1. If SUSE wants to preserve choice, it should offer a systemd-free distribution. 2. Agree with silisili's bafflement at how corporations are sticking to RHEL.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. Fuck it, let's make a cpu-free distribution whilst we're at it.
  - casparvitch 3y ago
    So sick of CPUs in Linux distros, the feature creep is insane!
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      And it's all a ploy by Big Silicon to subjugate software. As if software needs a CPU to run!
      - self_awareness 3y ago
        Everyone should be free to download a copy of the source code, and interpret it in their own heads.
        SanchoPanda 3y ago
        You would want special head gear in case of over heating, perhaps some kind of low soft felt hat with a curled brim and the crown creased lengthways.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. It's called FreeBSD. HTH. HAND. ;-) What? Well, it is! It's Linux-free, it has no systemd and no glibc, and no GPL code so it is de facto NU free. But it has a Linux emulator and can run Linux binaries. And there is Illumos, which can also run Linux binaries. If you don't need the Linux binaries part, there are also DragonflyBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. All FOSS, all current, all out there, working, with active communities.
jsiepkes 3y ago
> Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said, According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat. I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.
- nicce 3y ago
  Well. Now it sounds quite serious.
- kijin 3y ago
  Either that, or it could be the beginning of a very long and pointless lawsuit.
  - jacooper 3y ago
    For what?
    - tyingq 3y ago
      RHEL is designed to make forks difficult to do without infringing on trademarks.
      - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
        The community has a large amount of experience with debranding RHEL. CentOS did it for decades. If there is a left over of Red Hat branding, you'd have a hard time proving any kind of purposeful infringement.
        tyingq 3y ago
        I believe the idea is that RedHat will likely be more thorough with a commercial entity than they were with CentOS. Yes, I'm sure it's technically possible, but also possible they will get into some back-and-forth with RedHat.
skissane 3y ago
Could Alma, Rocky, SUSE and Oracle team up, coordinate with each other, pool their resources? (The announcement mentions Rocky and SUSE working together, but not Alma or Oracle.) I wonder how IBM / RedHat might react to that, were it to happen.
- fariszr 3y ago
  Oracle and almalinux would probably base on Stream with their own patches. The maintenance burden will be much smaller than a full fork, as red hat will still be the main contributor.
  - kijin 3y ago
    But if you base on Stream, you are no longer bug-for-bug compatible with the current stable release of RHEL. Not that I care personally, but this point seems to be very important for a lot of people.
    - fariszr 3y ago
      I doubt any of the new distros are going to be 1:1 compatible, aside from maybe Rocky and their workarounds to get RHEL source code. Oracles and Almalinuxes announcements both state clearly that they aim to be compatible so long its possible, so no 1:1 binary compatibility promises.
CrLf 3y ago
What is this supposed to be? SUSE responding to Red Hat obstructing RHEL clones by creating a new RHEL clone? Or are they forking RHEL into something that will try to remain compatible, while not being a clone? The latter is what Red Hat seems to want: a broader ecosystem that competes with Debian on community, while allowing Red Hat to sell RHEL with an "original recipe" sticker. SUSE coming out with an announcement that effectively cannibalizes its existing enterprise distribution kind of makes Red Hat's move look risky, but perhaps not dumb after all.
- fariszr 3y ago
  > The latter is what Red Hat seems to want: a broader ecosystem that competes with Debian on community, while allowing Red Hat to sell RHEL with an "original recipe" sticker. This depends if SUSE will use stream as a base or not. But Oracle and almalinux will probably base on it with their own patches / support. > SUSE coming out with an announcement that effectively cannibalizes its existing enterprise distribution kind of makes Red Hat's move look risky, but perhaps not dumb after all. They already have SUSE liberty linux, which includes support for RHEL and CentOS.
- dev_daftly 3y ago
  Yea, we are going to destroy RHEL by doing what they want us to. RH wants more people using and building distros off of centos stream instead of using RHEL clones. I don't think they see this as a negative, especially since it devalues suse in the process because they are basically admitting RHEL is more desirable.
t0m44c 3y ago
Did SUSE coordinate this announcement With Oracle? Because they also announced similar thing yesterday https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-open-and-free-2023-07-10/ https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-ope...
- binary_ninja 3y ago
  Is it me or there was a certain passive-agressivenes on that Oracle article?
  - B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
    Sheesh, that's not passive ... "Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden."
- kijin 3y ago
  Oracle talking about "open and free". Didn't think I would live to see that happening...
  - userbinator 3y ago
    Remember when MS changed from being heavily against Linux to "Microsoft loves open source"? Whatever benefits their bottom line.
  - AviationAtom 3y ago
    Oracle today is what Microsoft was 15 years ago. It would be shocking to see Oracle resemble what Microsoft is today to open source, but I'm not holding my breath for it.
tokai 3y ago
Now we just need to get them to fork Fedora.
- op00to 3y ago
  Why? Because “Red Hat bad”? Can you explain a valid reason other than “Red Hat bad”?
  - tokai 3y ago
    Calm down. Don't ascribe to me things you made up in your head. Also it would make communication with you easier if you didn't write like you're on 4chan, and wrote your question formulated like a proper normal question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630032
    - qwytw 3y ago
      So just use openSUSE? How would a SUSE Fedora fork would be any better? Presumably they wouldn't be able to use the branding...
gtirloni 3y ago
At this point in the RHEL novella, other distros would have to sell me on the idea of moving away from Debian.
thewrinklyninja 3y ago
You would think they would publish the srpms of SLES so there could be a RHEL type clone but based on SUSE and fill that void.
- fariszr 3y ago
  OpenSUSE Leap is just that, it uses binaries directly from SLES https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-bridges-the-gap-between-opensuse-leap-and-suse-linux-enterprise/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-bridges-the-gap-between-o...
  - Vogtinator 3y ago
    It's not just binary compatible - it uses the SLES binaries directly
    - fariszr 3y ago
      Thanks, updated.
- never_inline 3y ago
  I believe it's more like * Suse releases a new distro, Purple Weed, rebased last public code of RHEL. * With some reverse engineering effort or whatever, they provide migration path from RHEL to Suse Purple Weed ™. - for next few releases of RHEL. * They expect customers to migrate to Suse Purple Weed ™ from RHEL (or clones), within a few versions. Instead of RHELs proprietary-ish branch, they want their branch to take over and become defacto standard. I guess.
binary_ninja 3y ago
Don't get me wrong, I am very happy with this announcement, however it bothers me slightly when I see these kind of announcements with the tone of "we love open source and we want to give this to the community" when the rationale for this probably was "RHEL is going to lose a bunch of customers and we can profit off of that". If it was a non-profit they might convince me but as a Linux for enterprise-kind of company I am not fully convinced behind the motivations.
- whalesalad 3y ago
  Likewise it grinds my gears when people think that a company should just do things to do them. At the end of the day they need to make a profit to be sustainable, to pay employees, to perform R&D, keep the lights on, etc. Altruism isn't enough on its own. Why not both? Capitalizing on customers who need a solution while also helping the community? Not preparing for an influx of new business is a foolish business decision.
  - AviationAtom 3y ago
    That is the freemium model and more or less the model that I thought the open source community had long ago agreed was acceptable. Open source development for free is cool with what spare time you have, but at a certain point you have to pay your own bills to keep a roof over your head, food in your belly, maintain your health, and actually be able to enjoy your life. Value added features and support have long been the way open source companies have been able to do that.
  - binary_ninja 3y ago
    Not sure if the comment was addressed specifically to mine. If it was: I am OK with companies trying to make money, that's what they are for. It was more about how they phrase things. If you are a company that truly has open source as a driver, then make whatever claims you wish, however if your company's main driver is revenue (as SUSE likely is) don't make business announcements with "WE LOVE OPEN SOURCE" as your main rationale, just say "there's an opportunity for our business to grow" or any other corporate wording.
- 3y ago
evasb 3y ago
Isn't SUSE devaluing their own distro in entering this RHEL-clone debacle?
- aeyes 3y ago
  SUSE makes money by selling enterprise support. They don't care what they support, they have sold support for RHEL for a very long time. The SUSE distro exists so that they can sell support for it. And it will be the same for the SUSE supported RHEL clone.
- pinko 3y ago
  I'm sure they calculated that it's better they cannibalize their own product vs. letting others do it...
- sgift 3y ago
  Companies using RHEL or SUSE and paying for support usually don't switch. This is one of the rare moments where SUSE has a real chance to expand their market share in this space.
EGreg 3y ago
Is that legal?
- mxuribe 3y ago
  If not, then i'm sure IBM legal team will hop on this...But, i think its pretty legal. (Please note; i am not a lawyer.)
deng 3y ago
> 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. Wow, that's pretty rich from a company that has made good money from vendor lock-in. I'm still bitter when they drastically increased our SLES-prices for academic institutions, that was probably around 2010/11, and I've never touched SUSE since. That they now fork RHEL is pretty funny, since I vividly remember talking to a SUSE sales rep at that time, and I said we would now switch away from SLES to Scientific Linux, and he called it a "parasite project". Of course, you are allowed to make money off FLOSS software, but please, get off your high horse when others do the same.
- oblio 3y ago
  While I agree with you, you do realize that in 12+ years probably 95% of the personnel in the company, including the CEO, have been replaced? :-)
  - deng 3y ago
    Of course, but the business model has not.
- Levitating 3y ago
  https://www.suse.com/products/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/products/suse-liberty-linux/
znpy 3y ago
They should call the new distro Green Hat btw, i hope they do that
- mxuribe 3y ago
  I'm with you, that would be cute! But that might be too on the nose...However, green beret or olive cap might be cooler! Either way, yeah, they should name it something related to headwear with a green-ish color.
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  Red Headed Stepchild Linux
haytamoptika 3y ago
It is announced last year [1] called SUSE Liberty Linux . I think priciple converting current RHEL/CentOS repository to own inhouse repository like Oracle did [2] or MS did [3], and get the money from providing subscription for support and security. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699 2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linux/switch-oracle-linux1.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linu... 3. https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner
deleted 3y ago
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whalesalad 3y ago
I've always had a fondness for SuSE. My first experience with Linux was a boxed set of SuSE 7.3 (released in 2001 with Kernel 2.4!) purchased at a Borders book store in Glendale, CA. My dad taught me how to quit vim, use make to install software, etc. I haven't used it since then - Debian convert thru and thru - but I keep meaning to take Tumbleweed for a spin as I hear great things about it.
- unmole 3y ago
  I switched to Tumbleweed last weekend. Coming from Fedora, the installer was a bit confusing and the distro on the whole does seem to lack a bit of polish. But overall it was quite painless.
pepa65 3y ago
I always assumed that SUSE was rolling their own rpms, but were they? Maybe they were somehow dependent on RH to the extent that this move now makes sense also for the rest of their business?
- interactinghash 3y ago
  They do maintain their own RPMs - but they also offer support for CentOS / RHEL for customers who use SUSE and RHEL. Their hand me be somewhat forced, as they have to continue to fulfill these contracts.
cloin 3y ago
Setting aside the implications of the move Red Hat made for a moment, can we all just appreciate what a perfect storm of terrible messaging they've settled into with this one? From what it sounds like, the announcement surprised a lot internal associates not working on RHEL that are now falling into this trap that Red Hat created.
themerone 3y ago
Did SUSE ever publicly address the claims of antisemitism within the company?
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Unsubstantiated claims from a single ex-employee. If the claims had merit he should have taken his evidence to the German government instead of a blog rant.
  - themerone 3y ago
    Did they ever issue a release saying, that they were baseless claims by an ex employee? It's a bad look to say absolutely nothing.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Ignoring it is the correct move. They aren't serious allegations, otherwise they would have been made in a serious manner. The guy claims that he was wrongfully terminated for antisemitism in Germany of all places. Do you really think the German government wouldn't take that seriously and investigate? But all he decided to do was blow hot air on his blog, because his allegations are nothing more than a cynical lie meant to hurt his ex-employer.
      - themerone 3y ago
        Not filing a complaint doesn't mean anything. A lot of people want to wash their hands of their old employers and move on, even when they have actionable claims.
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        He didn't wash his hands and move on, he took to his blog and tried to spread the story around the net. If he were serious he would go to the authorities.
nunez 3y ago
Honestly, this is a brilliant move. Fork RHEL and pay to keep the open source community around it alive (Rocky, Alma). It's like EEE in reverse. Between this and Rancher (which is gaining a lot of popularity within the enterprise), SUSE is really stepping it up.
rootbear 3y ago
"SUSE forking RHEL" sure sounds like a double entendre in this context.
- interactinghash 3y ago
  why? SLES does not use any RHEL sources, they are all build in-house
high_5 3y ago
This is just a weak PR statement. Alma and Rocky already revealed that these things are not trivial to maintain and I fail to see beyond pure fork how on earth would SUSE maintain RHEL compatibility and avoid litigation from IBM at the same time. And then SUSE might be sold off again to some predatory company similar to IBM. What's even the point then of not using pure community distros like Debian?
- stbenjam 3y ago
  Red Hatter here, but just my personal opinion. I don't think there would be any litigation. We can terminate accounts for people downloading SRPM's to redistribute them but we can't stop the redistribution itself. There is nothing illegal about making a RHEL clone minus our trademarks.
  - ROTMetro 3y ago
    Correction, you're legal team thinks you can terminate accounts that choose to exercise their rights. That theory has yet to be put to an actual legal challenge. Will be interesting to see the ultimate outcome.
- danjoredd 3y ago
  Support and long term stability. You can hire a sysadmin to do everything manually, but it is worth the money to a lot of big businesses to have somewhere to call when things get screwey. Also having a server that doesn't need to be turned off for ~10 years is a huge W for businesses as well.
weare138 3y ago
I had a feeling SUSE would smell blood in the water when Red Hat shot itself in the foot. I don't know what Red Hat was thinking. They grievously misread their position in the market and are far more vulnerable than they seem to have realized.
Decabytes 3y ago
I can't understand how IBM & Red Hat can see this article and the statements from Oracle and not think. "Are we the bad guys?"
- diffeomorphism 3y ago
  If oracle is on the opposite side, you are probably fine.
- dralley 3y ago
  Disclosure: I work for Red Hat. It was only a year ago that Oracle was attempting to argue in front of the Supreme Court of the United States that adopting any kind of preexisting API was copyright infringement, and also shouldn't fall under fair use. To hear them talking about "freedom" and "openness" only makes me chuckle at their incredible hubris. If they believed in these words they wouldn't have closed off Solaris (to everyone, including their customers), kept ZFS in licensing purgatory for their own benefit, or attempted to victimize all of FOSS in pursuit of shaking down Google for loose change. I'm not exactly thrilled with the recent series of events, but I somehow do not find Oracle's attempt at shaming very convincing.
- bsder 3y ago
  I would argue the reverse. Anybody on the same side as Oracle should be asking really hard questions. I suspect that RedHat's moves were specifically aimed straight at Oracle with AWS a distant second.
PAPPPmAc 3y ago
I've been saying RHEL is only relevant because it's an agreed-upon standard with an adequately slow rate of change. Entities want to be able to easily use code and documentation from elsewhere, and easily hire experts to support it (1). Some of that is inertia driven, but nothing else about it really matters. Thinking they can generate their own network effects is a really classic IBM blunder (2). Much of RH's historical relevance was basically "RedHat exists to launder Linux for the National Labs" and that basis is not a terribly deep moat - hell the big physics centers maintained their Scientific Linux fork for 16 years before fully shifting onto CentOS then getting rug-pulled... which is not the kind of relationship maintenance you want to do with the customers whose network effects create your value proposition. The death condition for RH is if the Alma/Rocky CentOS community successors and the Oracle type commercial clones all agreed to a different reference point for "Standard Enterprise Linux"(3), and the big producers of code people want to use (your large Physics centers and and NIH scientific compute projects, and/or the shared infrastructure like OpenHPC) tracked that other reference point, suddenly RH brand EL is mostly irrelevant. SuSE running their own EL fork is interesting because there was not an obvious successor reference point to coordinate the non-RH ELs and/or major users if they have trouble tracking RHEL, and now there kind of is - it'll be really interesting to see what happens if there is any divergence. (1) The support point is "why not Debian," they've never had the commercial support partners, certs, etc. Having that was a huge part Ubuntu/Canonical's proposition, but they never really got the enterprise/scientific compute/HPC penetration that RH has. (2) Ya'll remember PS/2 and MCA (Micro Channel Architecture)? IBM was gonna take back control of the PC industry by setting an new (much more license controlled) standard and... the PC cloner industry set up outside coordination points and end-ran them with EISA/VLB and eventually PCI. (3) It might not get called SEL for SuSE or Standard because that would be confusing/trademark problems with the adjacent-industry Schneider Electric. I half jokingly translate the "Enterprise Linux" terminology into "Srs Bsns Linux" some of the time anyway, so the name game will surely be funny.
themgt 3y ago
I still don't forgive SUSE for buying Rancher and then unceremoniously killing k3os. They just left the website up and everything, made no announcement, made no attempt to help the community take over, just left the Github repo to rot: https://k3os.io/ https://k3os.io/ Hard to have confidence in SUSE's commitment to another open source operating system side project after that. SUSE's announcement at the time: Like SUSE, Rancher is 100% open source and equally as passionate as SUSE about true open source innovation, community empowerment, and customer success. SUSE and Rancher share the same goal – happy and satisfied customers. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/
fuero 3y ago
Name one distro apart from the EL clones that offer MAC policies for the software in the core repos. SELinux in Debian is a joke, so are the AppArmor policies.
- leetnewb 3y ago
  The tangle of suse/opensuse is confusing to me, but I know that the opinionated rolling versions like MicroOS, Aeon, and Kalpa standardized on SELinux. And I know that there are policies for both AA and SELinux for at least some software in the repo.
hendrasg 3y ago
[dead]

Hmm RedHat might need a corporate make over - how about RedFaced? or they go straight to FAIL: Fully Asphyxiated and Impotent Linux

T3RMINATED 3y ago

[dead]

mariuolo 3y ago

Clever idea. They will gradually lure users their way.

pipo234 3y ago
For some reason SUSE hasn't received a lot of attention even though they have been waving their flag long before the Red-Hat — CentOS brouhaha.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Back in the old RH Linux days, I remember SUSE had as much market share as Red Hat. It was actually the distro that people suggested I should use because it was more polished. But SUSE was bought and sold a few times to shady companies, wasn't it? My memory is blurry but this might explain why people don't immediately think of it.
  - rascul 3y ago
    SUSE lost a lot of love back in the day when Novell (then owner of SUSE) did some stuff with MS. https://www.wired.com/2008/08/microsoft-novell-extend-controversial-partnership/ https://www.wired.com/2008/08/microsoft-novell-extend-contro...
gigatexal 3y ago
Lol no. This is a wholly disingeneous move. "[SuSe] ... announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions." How will they confirm that their fork is compatible? Probably using RedHat supplied UBI docker/container images. So they're just becoming another add-no-value clone. Wow, give whoever came up with this idea a nobel peace prize. Instead they could focus on their own offerings which add value/different value propositions than just being a clone of RHEL. I can't believe folks would be okay with companies coming in and undercutting your validation work -- even if you see RHEL as anachronistic and obsolete in teh world of containers and such it still has value for some folks for its RHEL-ness -- and then coming in and selling clones undercutting support and other licensing/revenue streams to pay for the QA/R&D/devel, etc.
- piaste 3y ago
  Well, nobody's stopping IBM from retaliating by offering a SUSE clone :)
  - gigatexal 3y ago
    Funny but how does that help the community or businesses adopt Linux really?
    - diffeomorphism 3y ago
      Is that a trick question? Multiple suppliers of binary compatible releases; no fragmentation whatsoever, just more supply. How could that not help?
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  > How will they confirm that they're fork is compatible? The only thing they need to ensure right now is that their stable release remains compatible to existing RHEL. Everything needed for that is around. Going forward, maybe "RHEL v+1 compatible" doesn't even matter anymore (to quote that press release: "CIQ is thrilled to collaborate with SUSE on advancing an open enterprise Linux standard.") RHEL became the defacto "Enterprise Linux" because everybody willingly handed them the control over the direction Enterprise Linux takes (including, but not limited to, by merely repackaging their work). As long as that new community system (Rocky intends to work with SUSE according to that article) remains RHEL9.2 compatible, they might be able to force IBM to adopt the community's idea of an Enterprise Linux for future RHEL releases. Keeping some "RHEL9.2 mode" around indefinitely (next to a further developed platform for contemporary workloads) is relatively simple with containers and the like. IBM might have just killed the one thing that kept RedHat dominant in that space: the goodwill of nearly everybody else to let RedHat lead and not rock the boat too much themselves.

silisili 3y ago

I'm continually baffled that so many companies follow RHEL compatibility to this day. I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years. Admining as a profession for at least a quarter of that. 20 years ago, it made a ton of sense. Today, less so. The 'stable version but we backport patches' mantra doesn't make any sense today. I can't even describe how many things that have broken that you can't even find an answer for because it was some RH specific patch. Between Debian, Nix, Arch, and others, I can't figure out why RHEL compat is so desirable. I'll go as far as to say that my Arch boxes have been far more predictable than my RHEL boxes.

rwmj 3y ago
I wrote this a few months ago explaining why Red Hat makes money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35588297 (Still amazed that no one understands these basic points)
- ZeroSolstice 3y ago
  I'm not totally surprised as most employee's don't know how they fit into their current organization as a whole or how their organization fits into their current market, never mind other companies and vendors. Its along the same lines as people evaluating company licensing and equipment costs as if its coming out of their pocket. Its almost as bad as people believing that Walmart, Target, etc are closing their stores because of "so much theft" as if shrink budgets weren't a thing. Having a loss prevention department is a misnomer, its a paperwork and accounting department so that the losses can be written off to the IRS. These places have KPI's for everything and probably know the locations where they have a store but a majority of people are ordering online. I'm sure their lease has some notion of financial hardship which "theft" falls into allowing them to exit the contract early.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    > Its almost as bad as people believing that Walmart, Target, etc are closing their stores because of "so much theft" as if shrink budgets weren't a thing. I may not be understanding your point here, but having a shrink budget and closing due to theft aren't mutually exclusive. It is possible for theft to exceed the shrink budget and make a store too costly to operate.

saw-lau 3y ago

I guess the unwritten part of that press release is the fact that Red Hat are taking RHEL in some sort of proprietary direction? Is anybody able to TL;DR me an explanation of what's going on?

xinayder 3y ago
Red Hat announced that they are no longer providing updates to the downstream repo at git.centos.org and blamed that a lot of people are taking the sources and not contributing back, essentially just rebuilding and rebranding "their code". To obtain access to the git repo you now need to subscribe to Red Hat Developer Portal, but there are other ways to obtain the package sources as Rocky Linux is going to do in the future. This move by RH is not proprietary per se but it does indicate that they are growing hostile towards open source as a whole because it is affecting their business model, and since they were acquired by IBM, now they only really care about the revenue RHEL generates.
- saw-lau 3y ago
  Many thanks!
  - bonzini 3y ago
    Note that the last paragraph is a supposition that is not rooted in reality. Red Hat is still doing upstream first development and is still mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision).
    - nottorp 3y ago
      > mostly independent from IBM (who didn't participate in this decision). Right, they only pressured them to make more money, didn't tell them how exactly.
      - bonzini 3y ago
        Even if that was the intended meaning, it's quite an extrapolation that Red Hat is "growing hostile towards open source as a whole", especially since people say that of Red Hat roughly every two years.

xinayder 3y ago

I wonder how this will affect openSUSE, will they announce a new product based on this RHEL fork from SUSE?

fredski42 3y ago
+1. Will they compete with there own products?
- fariszr 3y ago
  SUSE liberty linux already existed for a while now, so it's nothing new.
- itomato 3y ago
  It’s a funnel, and a darned good one.
- krylon 3y ago
  Whether you pay the for SLES or their fork of RHEL probably does not make much a difference to them. And for customers who run both SLES and RHEL (not sure if that is a common scenario, though), having a single vendor to a deal with is probably a plus.
ddiss 3y ago
From https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/ https://www.suse.com/c/at-suse-we-make-choice-happen/ "It goes without saying that SUSE remains fully committed to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP) solutions as well as the openSUSE Linux distributions." As a long term Leap and Tumbleweed user, I trust the openSUSE community to keep producing a nice distro.
usrusr 3y ago
Would a migration path be feasible, the fork getting some "stuff people coming from openSUSE would need" added/ported? Then it might effectively be as much a merge as a fork. Of course if that did happen, I'd expect the "people" in "stuff people need" to be specifically the subset who happen to be paying customers. Not sure if there are many users left outside that subset?

0dayz 3y ago

This is very positive news, I wonder though how far will compatible mean? My biggest problem with opensuse is the lack of cockpit support and integration that RHEL has. Also that they use apparmor instead of selinux as default, I wish that selinux would become the standard MAC, with really good tools (cli and gui alike) for handling selinux policies.

interactinghash 3y ago
SUSE is working on making SELinux the default - and it already is on SLE Micro for example
- 0dayz 3y ago
  That I look forward to, if they can make SELinux and cockpit work flawlessly I'm finally going to have the perfect distro I ever wanted (although I'll admit I'm not sure if NetworkManager vs SUSE own network manager is better).
jzb 3y ago
I’m not sure it’s positive, they are very light on details. If this is a hard fork, is it really going to deviate from RHEL? Is a $10m investment enough to carry an enterprise distro for a decade? I’m a little skeptical about this right now, but we’ll see how it pans out.

nubinetwork 3y ago

I knew suse used rpm packages, but I always thought they were their own... good to know they are putting in the work to distance themselves from the IBM mess.

mst 3y ago
They are, their distro is their own - this is them announcing a RHEL fork as well as their in-house distro. You'll find SUSE Linux Enterprise in quite a few places in Europe but their penetration in the US has always been kinda pants, so providing a compatible alternative to RHEL will hopefully be a net win for them commercialy as well as a net win for the community.
jzb 3y ago
Yes, they used the RPM format with their own tool (Zypper instead of DNF/Yum), but packages weren’t (necessarily) compatible with Fedora/RHEL as far as dependencies and such. But SUSE isn’t just a package of Red Hat.
- krylon 3y ago
  I have seen independent projects provide rpms that are supposed to work on both RedHat/Fedora and SLES/openSUSE, with some caveats as to what versions of each are supported/tested for.
  - jzb 3y ago
    Sure. Really depends on, well, the dependencies. The rpm command shipped with all those distributions should be compatible with the format of any recently created package. But you can run into snags if you have a dependency that doesn't exist on the target system or its repos, or if the packages are named differently, the pre- and post-install commands have assumptions about the system that aren't true on the target distro, etc. But if all the package exists for is to drop a few binaries on the system, it can be fine. Especially for things like proprietary software that's going to just dump a bunch of stuff into, say, /opt and will only break if the kernel or glibc are spectacularly old or too new, etc. Sometimes you can even get away with using "alien" or similar to convert Debs to RPMs if it's only packaged as a Debian package. Sometimes.

einpoklum 3y ago

1. If SUSE wants to preserve choice, it should offer a systemd-free distribution. 2. Agree with silisili's bafflement at how corporations are sticking to RHEL.

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. Fuck it, let's make a cpu-free distribution whilst we're at it.
- casparvitch 3y ago
  So sick of CPUs in Linux distros, the feature creep is insane!
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    And it's all a ploy by Big Silicon to subjugate software. As if software needs a CPU to run!
    - self_awareness 3y ago
      Everyone should be free to download a copy of the source code, and interpret it in their own heads.
      - SanchoPanda 3y ago
        You would want special head gear in case of over heating, perhaps some kind of low soft felt hat with a curled brim and the crown creased lengthways.
- lproven 3y ago
  > They should also offer a Linux-free distribution, and a GNU free distribution, and a glibc free distribution. It's called FreeBSD. HTH. HAND. ;-) What? Well, it is! It's Linux-free, it has no systemd and no glibc, and no GPL code so it is de facto NU free. But it has a Linux emulator and can run Linux binaries. And there is Illumos, which can also run Linux binaries. If you don't need the Linux binaries part, there are also DragonflyBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. All FOSS, all current, all out there, working, with active communities.

jsiepkes 3y ago

> Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, CEO of SUSE, said, According to LinkedIn Dirk-Peter started at Suse 3 months ago as CEO and worked for Red Hat for 18 years and was a Senior VP at Red Hat. I think this move of Suse could be a credible threat to IBM / Red Hat's RHEL.

nicce 3y ago
Well. Now it sounds quite serious.
kijin 3y ago
Either that, or it could be the beginning of a very long and pointless lawsuit.
- jacooper 3y ago
  For what?
  - tyingq 3y ago
    RHEL is designed to make forks difficult to do without infringing on trademarks.
    - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
      The community has a large amount of experience with debranding RHEL. CentOS did it for decades. If there is a left over of Red Hat branding, you'd have a hard time proving any kind of purposeful infringement.
      - tyingq 3y ago
        I believe the idea is that RedHat will likely be more thorough with a commercial entity than they were with CentOS. Yes, I'm sure it's technically possible, but also possible they will get into some back-and-forth with RedHat.

skissane 3y ago

Could Alma, Rocky, SUSE and Oracle team up, coordinate with each other, pool their resources? (The announcement mentions Rocky and SUSE working together, but not Alma or Oracle.) I wonder how IBM / RedHat might react to that, were it to happen.

fariszr 3y ago
Oracle and almalinux would probably base on Stream with their own patches. The maintenance burden will be much smaller than a full fork, as red hat will still be the main contributor.
- kijin 3y ago
  But if you base on Stream, you are no longer bug-for-bug compatible with the current stable release of RHEL. Not that I care personally, but this point seems to be very important for a lot of people.
  - fariszr 3y ago
    I doubt any of the new distros are going to be 1:1 compatible, aside from maybe Rocky and their workarounds to get RHEL source code. Oracles and Almalinuxes announcements both state clearly that they aim to be compatible so long its possible, so no 1:1 binary compatibility promises.

CrLf 3y ago

What is this supposed to be? SUSE responding to Red Hat obstructing RHEL clones by creating a new RHEL clone? Or are they forking RHEL into something that will try to remain compatible, while not being a clone? The latter is what Red Hat seems to want: a broader ecosystem that competes with Debian on community, while allowing Red Hat to sell RHEL with an "original recipe" sticker. SUSE coming out with an announcement that effectively cannibalizes its existing enterprise distribution kind of makes Red Hat's move look risky, but perhaps not dumb after all.

fariszr 3y ago
> The latter is what Red Hat seems to want: a broader ecosystem that competes with Debian on community, while allowing Red Hat to sell RHEL with an "original recipe" sticker. This depends if SUSE will use stream as a base or not. But Oracle and almalinux will probably base on it with their own patches / support. > SUSE coming out with an announcement that effectively cannibalizes its existing enterprise distribution kind of makes Red Hat's move look risky, but perhaps not dumb after all. They already have SUSE liberty linux, which includes support for RHEL and CentOS.
dev_daftly 3y ago
Yea, we are going to destroy RHEL by doing what they want us to. RH wants more people using and building distros off of centos stream instead of using RHEL clones. I don't think they see this as a negative, especially since it devalues suse in the process because they are basically admitting RHEL is more desirable.

t0m44c 3y ago

Did SUSE coordinate this announcement With Oracle? Because they also announced similar thing yesterday https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-open-and-free-2023-07-10/ https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/blog/keep-linux-ope...

binary_ninja 3y ago
Is it me or there was a certain passive-agressivenes on that Oracle article?
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
  Sheesh, that's not passive ... "Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden."
kijin 3y ago
Oracle talking about "open and free". Didn't think I would live to see that happening...
- userbinator 3y ago
  Remember when MS changed from being heavily against Linux to "Microsoft loves open source"? Whatever benefits their bottom line.
- AviationAtom 3y ago
  Oracle today is what Microsoft was 15 years ago. It would be shocking to see Oracle resemble what Microsoft is today to open source, but I'm not holding my breath for it.

tokai 3y ago

Now we just need to get them to fork Fedora.

op00to 3y ago
Why? Because “Red Hat bad”? Can you explain a valid reason other than “Red Hat bad”?
- tokai 3y ago
  Calm down. Don't ascribe to me things you made up in your head. Also it would make communication with you easier if you didn't write like you're on 4chan, and wrote your question formulated like a proper normal question. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630032
  - qwytw 3y ago
    So just use openSUSE? How would a SUSE Fedora fork would be any better? Presumably they wouldn't be able to use the branding...

gtirloni 3y ago

At this point in the RHEL novella, other distros would have to sell me on the idea of moving away from Debian.

thewrinklyninja 3y ago

You would think they would publish the srpms of SLES so there could be a RHEL type clone but based on SUSE and fill that void.

fariszr 3y ago
OpenSUSE Leap is just that, it uses binaries directly from SLES https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-bridges-the-gap-between-opensuse-leap-and-suse-linux-enterprise/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/suse-bridges-the-gap-between-o...
- Vogtinator 3y ago
  It's not just binary compatible - it uses the SLES binaries directly
  - fariszr 3y ago
    Thanks, updated.
never_inline 3y ago
I believe it's more like * Suse releases a new distro, Purple Weed, rebased last public code of RHEL. * With some reverse engineering effort or whatever, they provide migration path from RHEL to Suse Purple Weed ™. - for next few releases of RHEL. * They expect customers to migrate to Suse Purple Weed ™ from RHEL (or clones), within a few versions. Instead of RHELs proprietary-ish branch, they want their branch to take over and become defacto standard. I guess.

binary_ninja 3y ago

Don't get me wrong, I am very happy with this announcement, however it bothers me slightly when I see these kind of announcements with the tone of "we love open source and we want to give this to the community" when the rationale for this probably was "RHEL is going to lose a bunch of customers and we can profit off of that". If it was a non-profit they might convince me but as a Linux for enterprise-kind of company I am not fully convinced behind the motivations.

whalesalad 3y ago
Likewise it grinds my gears when people think that a company should just do things to do them. At the end of the day they need to make a profit to be sustainable, to pay employees, to perform R&D, keep the lights on, etc. Altruism isn't enough on its own. Why not both? Capitalizing on customers who need a solution while also helping the community? Not preparing for an influx of new business is a foolish business decision.
- AviationAtom 3y ago
  That is the freemium model and more or less the model that I thought the open source community had long ago agreed was acceptable. Open source development for free is cool with what spare time you have, but at a certain point you have to pay your own bills to keep a roof over your head, food in your belly, maintain your health, and actually be able to enjoy your life. Value added features and support have long been the way open source companies have been able to do that.
- binary_ninja 3y ago
  Not sure if the comment was addressed specifically to mine. If it was: I am OK with companies trying to make money, that's what they are for. It was more about how they phrase things. If you are a company that truly has open source as a driver, then make whatever claims you wish, however if your company's main driver is revenue (as SUSE likely is) don't make business announcements with "WE LOVE OPEN SOURCE" as your main rationale, just say "there's an opportunity for our business to grow" or any other corporate wording.
3y ago

evasb 3y ago

Isn't SUSE devaluing their own distro in entering this RHEL-clone debacle?

aeyes 3y ago
SUSE makes money by selling enterprise support. They don't care what they support, they have sold support for RHEL for a very long time. The SUSE distro exists so that they can sell support for it. And it will be the same for the SUSE supported RHEL clone.
pinko 3y ago
I'm sure they calculated that it's better they cannibalize their own product vs. letting others do it...
sgift 3y ago
Companies using RHEL or SUSE and paying for support usually don't switch. This is one of the rare moments where SUSE has a real chance to expand their market share in this space.

EGreg 3y ago

Is that legal?

mxuribe 3y ago
If not, then i'm sure IBM legal team will hop on this...But, i think its pretty legal. (Please note; i am not a lawyer.)

deng 3y ago

> 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. Wow, that's pretty rich from a company that has made good money from vendor lock-in. I'm still bitter when they drastically increased our SLES-prices for academic institutions, that was probably around 2010/11, and I've never touched SUSE since. That they now fork RHEL is pretty funny, since I vividly remember talking to a SUSE sales rep at that time, and I said we would now switch away from SLES to Scientific Linux, and he called it a "parasite project". Of course, you are allowed to make money off FLOSS software, but please, get off your high horse when others do the same.

oblio 3y ago
While I agree with you, you do realize that in 12+ years probably 95% of the personnel in the company, including the CEO, have been replaced? :-)
- deng 3y ago
  Of course, but the business model has not.
Levitating 3y ago
https://www.suse.com/products/suse-liberty-linux/ https://www.suse.com/products/suse-liberty-linux/

znpy 3y ago

They should call the new distro Green Hat btw, i hope they do that

mxuribe 3y ago
I'm with you, that would be cute! But that might be too on the nose...However, green beret or olive cap might be cooler! Either way, yeah, they should name it something related to headwear with a green-ish color.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
Red Headed Stepchild Linux

haytamoptika 3y ago

It is announced last year [1] called SUSE Liberty Linux . I think priciple converting current RHEL/CentOS repository to own inhouse repository like Oracle did [2] or MS did [3], and get the money from providing subscription for support and security. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30006699 2: https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linux/switch-oracle-linux1.html https://docs.oracle.com/en/solutions/migrate-centos-ora-linu... 3. https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner https://github.com/microsoft/CBL-Mariner

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 3y ago

I've always had a fondness for SuSE. My first experience with Linux was a boxed set of SuSE 7.3 (released in 2001 with Kernel 2.4!) purchased at a Borders book store in Glendale, CA. My dad taught me how to quit vim, use make to install software, etc. I haven't used it since then - Debian convert thru and thru - but I keep meaning to take Tumbleweed for a spin as I hear great things about it.

unmole 3y ago
I switched to Tumbleweed last weekend. Coming from Fedora, the installer was a bit confusing and the distro on the whole does seem to lack a bit of polish. But overall it was quite painless.

pepa65 3y ago

I always assumed that SUSE was rolling their own rpms, but were they? Maybe they were somehow dependent on RH to the extent that this move now makes sense also for the rest of their business?

interactinghash 3y ago
They do maintain their own RPMs - but they also offer support for CentOS / RHEL for customers who use SUSE and RHEL. Their hand me be somewhat forced, as they have to continue to fulfill these contracts.

cloin 3y ago

Setting aside the implications of the move Red Hat made for a moment, can we all just appreciate what a perfect storm of terrible messaging they've settled into with this one? From what it sounds like, the announcement surprised a lot internal associates not working on RHEL that are now falling into this trap that Red Hat created.

themerone 3y ago

Did SUSE ever publicly address the claims of antisemitism within the company?

mcpackieh 3y ago
Unsubstantiated claims from a single ex-employee. If the claims had merit he should have taken his evidence to the German government instead of a blog rant.
- themerone 3y ago
  Did they ever issue a release saying, that they were baseless claims by an ex employee? It's a bad look to say absolutely nothing.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Ignoring it is the correct move. They aren't serious allegations, otherwise they would have been made in a serious manner. The guy claims that he was wrongfully terminated for antisemitism in Germany of all places. Do you really think the German government wouldn't take that seriously and investigate? But all he decided to do was blow hot air on his blog, because his allegations are nothing more than a cynical lie meant to hurt his ex-employer.
    - themerone 3y ago
      Not filing a complaint doesn't mean anything. A lot of people want to wash their hands of their old employers and move on, even when they have actionable claims.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        He didn't wash his hands and move on, he took to his blog and tried to spread the story around the net. If he were serious he would go to the authorities.

nunez 3y ago

Honestly, this is a brilliant move. Fork RHEL and pay to keep the open source community around it alive (Rocky, Alma). It's like EEE in reverse. Between this and Rancher (which is gaining a lot of popularity within the enterprise), SUSE is really stepping it up.

rootbear 3y ago

"SUSE forking RHEL" sure sounds like a double entendre in this context.

interactinghash 3y ago
why? SLES does not use any RHEL sources, they are all build in-house

high_5 3y ago

This is just a weak PR statement. Alma and Rocky already revealed that these things are not trivial to maintain and I fail to see beyond pure fork how on earth would SUSE maintain RHEL compatibility and avoid litigation from IBM at the same time. And then SUSE might be sold off again to some predatory company similar to IBM. What's even the point then of not using pure community distros like Debian?

stbenjam 3y ago
Red Hatter here, but just my personal opinion. I don't think there would be any litigation. We can terminate accounts for people downloading SRPM's to redistribute them but we can't stop the redistribution itself. There is nothing illegal about making a RHEL clone minus our trademarks.
- ROTMetro 3y ago
  Correction, you're legal team thinks you can terminate accounts that choose to exercise their rights. That theory has yet to be put to an actual legal challenge. Will be interesting to see the ultimate outcome.
danjoredd 3y ago
Support and long term stability. You can hire a sysadmin to do everything manually, but it is worth the money to a lot of big businesses to have somewhere to call when things get screwey. Also having a server that doesn't need to be turned off for ~10 years is a huge W for businesses as well.

weare138 3y ago

I had a feeling SUSE would smell blood in the water when Red Hat shot itself in the foot. I don't know what Red Hat was thinking. They grievously misread their position in the market and are far more vulnerable than they seem to have realized.

Decabytes 3y ago

I can't understand how IBM & Red Hat can see this article and the statements from Oracle and not think. "Are we the bad guys?"

diffeomorphism 3y ago
If oracle is on the opposite side, you are probably fine.
dralley 3y ago
Disclosure: I work for Red Hat. It was only a year ago that Oracle was attempting to argue in front of the Supreme Court of the United States that adopting any kind of preexisting API was copyright infringement, and also shouldn't fall under fair use. To hear them talking about "freedom" and "openness" only makes me chuckle at their incredible hubris. If they believed in these words they wouldn't have closed off Solaris (to everyone, including their customers), kept ZFS in licensing purgatory for their own benefit, or attempted to victimize all of FOSS in pursuit of shaking down Google for loose change. I'm not exactly thrilled with the recent series of events, but I somehow do not find Oracle's attempt at shaming very convincing.
bsder 3y ago
I would argue the reverse. Anybody on the same side as Oracle should be asking really hard questions. I suspect that RedHat's moves were specifically aimed straight at Oracle with AWS a distant second.

PAPPPmAc 3y ago

I've been saying RHEL is only relevant because it's an agreed-upon standard with an adequately slow rate of change. Entities want to be able to easily use code and documentation from elsewhere, and easily hire experts to support it (1). Some of that is inertia driven, but nothing else about it really matters. Thinking they can generate their own network effects is a really classic IBM blunder (2). Much of RH's historical relevance was basically "RedHat exists to launder Linux for the National Labs" and that basis is not a terribly deep moat - hell the big physics centers maintained their Scientific Linux fork for 16 years before fully shifting onto CentOS then getting rug-pulled... which is not the kind of relationship maintenance you want to do with the customers whose network effects create your value proposition. The death condition for RH is if the Alma/Rocky CentOS community successors and the Oracle type commercial clones all agreed to a different reference point for "Standard Enterprise Linux"(3), and the big producers of code people want to use (your large Physics centers and and NIH scientific compute projects, and/or the shared infrastructure like OpenHPC) tracked that other reference point, suddenly RH brand EL is mostly irrelevant. SuSE running their own EL fork is interesting because there was not an obvious successor reference point to coordinate the non-RH ELs and/or major users if they have trouble tracking RHEL, and now there kind of is - it'll be really interesting to see what happens if there is any divergence. (1) The support point is "why not Debian," they've never had the commercial support partners, certs, etc. Having that was a huge part Ubuntu/Canonical's proposition, but they never really got the enterprise/scientific compute/HPC penetration that RH has. (2) Ya'll remember PS/2 and MCA (Micro Channel Architecture)? IBM was gonna take back control of the PC industry by setting an new (much more license controlled) standard and... the PC cloner industry set up outside coordination points and end-ran them with EISA/VLB and eventually PCI. (3) It might not get called SEL for SuSE or Standard because that would be confusing/trademark problems with the adjacent-industry Schneider Electric. I half jokingly translate the "Enterprise Linux" terminology into "Srs Bsns Linux" some of the time anyway, so the name game will surely be funny.

themgt 3y ago

I still don't forgive SUSE for buying Rancher and then unceremoniously killing k3os. They just left the website up and everything, made no announcement, made no attempt to help the community take over, just left the Github repo to rot: https://k3os.io/ https://k3os.io/ Hard to have confidence in SUSE's commitment to another open source operating system side project after that. SUSE's announcement at the time: Like SUSE, Rancher is 100% open source and equally as passionate as SUSE about true open source innovation, community empowerment, and customer success. SUSE and Rancher share the same goal – happy and satisfied customers. https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/ https://www.suse.com/c/suse-acquires-rancher/

fuero 3y ago

Name one distro apart from the EL clones that offer MAC policies for the software in the core repos. SELinux in Debian is a joke, so are the AppArmor policies.

leetnewb 3y ago
The tangle of suse/opensuse is confusing to me, but I know that the opinionated rolling versions like MicroOS, Aeon, and Kalpa standardized on SELinux. And I know that there are policies for both AA and SELinux for at least some software in the repo.

hendrasg 3y ago

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