Mastodawn

Jul 2, 2023

redhat has benefitted from centos and the other clones immensely by the fact that an entire generation of SREs trained on their distro. entire businesses (like my old one) were built around partnering with redhat and providing support and consulting for RHEL and the clones.

the redhat partner network was bootstrapped on the back of the clones. you lab with the clones and then start working with the real thing.

and yes, sometimes users who wanted support went with consultancies like mine and not upgrading to RHEL, it’s true. but that does not matter because when consultancies like mine were working on large contracts with large commitments we would suggest that RHEL be used instead of clones so that there was a point of accountability.

and really, that is and remains the only reason to buy a commercial Linux system: the contracted accountability in the form of the SLA. if a deployment does not require an SLA, then withholding the product just creates a situation where they will use a different one.

that results in a brain drain: the users who would have stayed in your ecosystem (via a clone), will now go learn a different ecosystem. and this causes you to lose your partner network as consultants retire.

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Ariadne Conill 🐰

Jul 2, 2023

you will be able to watch this shift by observing the evolution of middleware.

for example, lets talk about, say, cPanel. yes, really: cPanel is still around, and people still use it.

or lets talk about SolusVM. yes, really: that exists too, and for better or worse, it is the backbone of the traditional VPS industry.

today, these are built and deployed on RHEL or, more commonly, the clones.

tomorrow? they will be refactored and deployed on alternatives.

if i were to make a bet, i could see OpenSUSE capturing that entire segment of the RHEL/clone userbase within 2 years. later, those products will likely move more heavily in the direction of containerization, but OpenSUSE gives them a landing pad for the short term.

and when that happens? there goes the bulk of the SREs who got their first taste of SRE work by managing a hosting provider. that remains a *huge* segment of the redhat trained SRE footprint.

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Ariadne Conill 🐰

Jul 2, 2023

mike's post on LinkedIn, where he says that redhat defines "freeloaders" as people who only buy a minimum amount of RHEL licenses while using the clones heavily is spin.

RH have always hated the existence of the clones. they have used various legal chicanery, arguably in violation of the GPL, to attempt to force customers into moving all of their machines to RHEL, and away from clones.

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jollyrogue Jul 2, 2023

@ariadne The problem is Oracle. It’s my understanding RH helped the clones quite a bit, but this all started due to Oracle Linux.

actually, from what I have heard, the problem is Rocky in this case 🙃

yes, for a while, RH embraced the "community" clones. but that was because there really was not any choice.

but, now, they would rather those users become perpetual beta testers for the next RHEL release instead.

as for Oracle and the other commercial clones: yes, there has been a lot of friction there, but Oracle fought back and as far as I understand, there has just been a quiet truce in recent years

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Ariadne Conill 🐰

@jollyrogue i can point to interviews with RH executives back in the 2000s when CentOS 3/4 were still the latest versions, where they were complaining that CentOS was a thing 🙃